Nicene Creed

 The "Nicene Creed" is trending today, so I thought I'd blog about it, given its importance for medieval Christianity.

The word creed means something that one believes, coming from the Latin "credo," meaning "I believe."  The first words of the Nicene Creed are "I believe," so that makes sense, even though the Creed was originally written in Greek.  The whole creed is a list of things a Christian believes.  Although I've seen some discussions where people on-line are saying, "I don't need a creed! I have the Bible!" they are fundamentally misunderstanding it.  The Nicene Creed is the short version of what you need to believe in order to call yourself a Christian.

The Nicene Creed is named that because it came out of the 325 Council of Nicaea.  By the early fourth century the main wave of persecution of Christians was over, but that just meant that Christians were free to disagree with each other.  There had been a lot of debate and discussion in the first three centuries of Christianity about exactly what were the fundamental tenets of Christianity, especially what was the nature of the Trinity.  All the different people with different views naturally declared that everyone else was a heretic.

For example, was Jesus just a man, divinely-inspired but not divine himself?  Was he in fact God who just put on a facade of looking human in order to fool people?  Had he started as straight human but become divine at some point, either before or after the Crucifixion?  The Gospels had him calling himself both "son of Man" and "son of God" and even saying "I and the Father are one," so that didn't help.  And where did the Holy Spirit fit into this?  If you've got Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, does that mean three Gods?  Since the Christian Bible didn't settle on (more or less) the form it has now for another century or two, and was itself a topic of heated discussion, that wasn't going to help.

The emperor Constantine, who had recently decided to become a Christian, believed this arguing was unseemly.  (He was not baptized yet, but Christian women in his family were persuasive, as was a burning cross he saw in the sky over a battle field, which would certainly have gotten my attention.)  Roman emperors had always been the heads of Roman state paganism, so he found it appropriate to call a council to decide.  The council was presided over by the emperor, but he didn't make the decisions, rather encouraging all the assembled bishops, from all over the Empire, to resolve their differences and vote.

What they came up with is essentially the Nicene Creed of today, though some editing was done at the 381 Council of Constantinople, and the precise wording depends on the translation used.  It defined the Trinity as one God in three persons and Jesus as both wholly divine and wholly human.  There.  No multiple gods, no Jesus as just an ordinary human, no Jesus as a divine being in disguise as a human.  It was a compromise to which the majority of the attending bishops agreed.

Of course it didn't stop those people who left the Council convinced that all those bishops were heretics, or those who heard about the Council and disagreed with what they heard or thought they heard.  Heresies concerning the humanity of Jesus and the nature of the Trinity swirled around the Mediterranean for three more centuries, until the rise of Islam essentially ended them.

But mainstream Christianity had settled on a basic definition, supported by all the bishops of the major cities of the Empire.  It began, "I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth."  So far it could also be a statement of basic Judaism.  But then it immediately adds, "And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten son of God ... co-substantial with the Father."  There's the just-one-substance, more-than-one-person part.

The Creed continues to give a brief summary of Jesus coming to earth to save everyone, being crucified and rising again, ascending to Heaven from which He will come again to judge us all.  Then finally the Creed gets to the Holy Spirit, who always gets overlooked, "And in the Holy Spirit ... who proceeds from the Father."

Somewhere between the sixth and ninth century western (Latin) Christendom added what's known as "filioque" clause to "from the Father."  The term means, "and the son," so the Holy Spirit was said to proceed both from the Father and from the Son.  Greek orthodoxy declared this was a total heresy.  Eastern and Western versions of Christianity have still not resolved this one, twelve hundred years later.

The 381 Council of Constantinople added a final wrap-up to the Nicene Creed, adopted as part of it, saying that one believed in "one holy, catholic, and apostolic church" and in "one baptism for the remission of sins."  Here the stress was on the idea of a universal church, all Christians being one body (the word catholic means universal, though it's been adopted by one version of Latin Christendom as meaning specifically them).  Stress was also put on the church's origins with Jesus's apostles, not just some people somewhere having some ideas.  Christianity (like Judaism) has always emphasized historical continuity.

The wording seems to suggest that you only get one chance to wipe out sins with baptism, so for a while people would wait until they were dying to be baptized, once they were pretty sure they weren't going to sin any more.  Constantine himself was baptized on his death bed.  However, in another century or so infant baptism came in, as wiping away Original Sin, so that infants and children wouldn't go straight to Hell if they died.  This requires bonus actions to wipe away subsequent sins.  Original Sin assumes everyone since Adam and Eve is born already laden with sin, but Nicaea didn't worry about that, and that's a different story.

Today the Nicene Creed is taught to all Catholics and is sort-of part of the doctrine of most western Protestant churches (not the Unitarians obviously).  The Southern Baptists are currently trying to decide about it, worried over the word "catholic," and feeling that the purpose of baptism isn't stated correctly.  (Some have even questioned whether modern Catholics are even really Christians.  I'm not getting into that discussion.)

As a medieval historian, I'm always sort of bemused by how many modern Christians in the West don't realize that you can't jump straight from the first century to the twentieth or twenty-first.  All versions of western Christendom are the products of medieval Christianity, even if there were conscious efforts to reject big parts of it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval Christianity, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Saint Augustine

If you live in Florida, you think of Saint Augustine as a city in your state.  If you took Western Civ in college, you may have heard of the saint.  Wasn't he like an early Christian thinker or something? you say.  Yes he was, and the person after whom the city is named.  He's actually one of the most important Christian thinkers of the West.  The following gives you a few highlights that ought to jog your memory of Western Civ--or fill in a gap if you never took it.

Before beginning, let's clarify, that there are two saints named Augustine.  The first one is the one we're talking about today (lived 354-430).  He was a bishop in North Africa when North Africa was still part of the Christian Roman Empire, pre-Islam.  I pronounce his name AW-gust-teen, like the Florida city.  The other one was sent from Rome to Anglo-Saxon England around the year 600 to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings to Christianity, at which he was fairly successful.  I pronounce his name Aw-GUST-tin, to keep him separate from the first one.  (Note that pronunciation of these names is fairly mix-and-match, depending on who you ask.)  (The name Austin is a variation of Augustine.  Thought you should know.)

Let's talk about the bishop.  He wasn't a bishop at first, of course.  He grew up in Roman North Africa, son of a Christian mother, Monica, and a father who didn't seem to worry much about religion one way or the other.  (Monica is also a saint now.  You go, girl.)  Young Augustine's father told him to enjoy his youth, sow some wild oats, and Augustine took him up on it.  We know all of this because Augustine was one of the first people to write an autobiography, a story of his own life, which he called "Confessions."  But among all the wine, women, and song, he started thinking about philosophical issues.

His big question (and a question that's continued to be big for all philosophers) was, Why is there evil in the world?  First he decided Dualism was the answer.  This is the philosophy that the universe is caught in an eternal struggle between Good and Evil.  They are equally balanced, and neither will ever win.  (This is also called Manichaeism.  It's officially a heresy.  It's also related to the religion of Zoroastrianism.)

Augustine ended up rejecting Dualism, however, after reading the pagan Greek philosopher Plato (lived in fifth century BC).  Plato argued for archetypes, absolutes, that we all reflect dimly, saying that there is such a thing as Absolute Good (this was against other Greek philosophers, who said everything was relative).  However, there was no Absolute Evil, only an absence of good.

(Think about light versus dark.  Dark isn't an absolute.  It's just the absence of light.  When you go to bed you don't reach for the switch and "turn on the dark.")

Young Augustine really studied Plato and other early Greeks (in translation into Latin, his own native language) and went off to Milan, where there was a famous school of philosophy at the time.  Here he encountered Ambrose, who was both bishop of Milan and a noted philosopher in his own right.  (Ambrose is also now a saint.  The cathedral of Milan is dedicated to Santo Ambrogio.  That's him.)  Ambrose converted Augustine to Christianity, and Augustine soon went home to North Africa to become bishop of the city of Hippo Regius (which was not a city of hippopotamuses, it's just its name‚ a city now in Algeria and called Annaba).

Here he started writing, so many books, in fact, that when he died it was said that no one could possibly read them all.  And these weren't just any books.  These became the most important works defining theology for the Middle Ages--and for that matter, he was also very influential on Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Augustine settled on original sin and the will to explain evil.  Humans, he said, ever since Adam and Eve had wanted to have their own way, rather than do what was right and good.  There was no "childhood innocence" for him, but everyone was born a sinner.  He pointed out that if a woman were nursing two babies (either twins, or one of hers and another she was fostering) the two would fight over who had the Lucky Breast.  Without baptism that wiped out original sin (the sin of our origins, from Adam and Eve), everyone would go straight to hell.  Not surprisingly, this idea pushed baptism  from something you might undergo in old age back to infancy.

But, as he knew perfectly well, everybody kept on sinning away even after baptism.  Augustine stressed that no one can make their own salvation, no one can always be good and pure and earn their way into heaven.  (The idea that all it takes is to choose to do good to be saved is another heresy, Pelagianism.)  Since everyone's a sinner, we all need grace, he said, God undeservedly choosing to save at least some of us--a possibility because of Christ's sacrifice, grace given to humans via the sacraments.

Because Augustine rejected Dualism (though Christianity still has a lot of dualism in it), he rejected the idea that the body was naturally bad.  After all, Genesis is clear that God had created the physical world, including human bodies, and God doesn't create bad things, even if we mess them up.  Our problem is a will that tells the body to go for it.

Sex, like the body, was not naturally bad.  After all, Adam and Eve were supposed to multiply.  (And we're not talking here about the times-tables.)  Sex in marriage, for the purpose of having children, was just fine for Augustine.  But willfully deciding to have sex just for fun, especially if outside of marriage, was clearly sinful.  This is still the official Catholic position.  (But one was allowed to enjoy procreation.  Whew.)

Perhaps his most famous work is "The City of God," in which he argued that humans cannot create heaven on earth, but that the perfect city will be found only after death, in heaven.  This was written partially in response to the Visigoths sacking Rome in 410, which caused some to complain that things had been better in the olden, pagan days, when Rome wasn't sacked a bit, and others to blame God for allowing perfectly good Christians to have their city sacked.  You're missing the point, Augustine said.  The Vandals (like the Visigoths, a Germanic tribe) sacked his own city of Hippo as he was dying in 430, but they left his cathedral and library untouched.

Click here for more on figuring out philosophically why there is evil in the world.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval philosophy and religion, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.