Roberto de Mattei
Corrispondenza Romana
April 25, 2018
The Church advances through history forever
victorious, in accordance with the marvelous plans of God. The first three
centuries reached their peak under Emperor Diocletian (284-305). All appeared
to be lost. Discouragement was a temptation for many Christians and among them
there were those who lost the faith. But those who persevered had the immense
joy, not many years later, of seeing the Cross of Christ blazing on the banners
of Constantine at the Battle of Saxa Rubra (312). This victory changed the
course of history. The Milan-Nicomedia Edict of 313, granting liberty to
Christians, overturned Nero’s senatus consultum, which had proclaimed
Christianity a “superstitio illicita”. The public Christianization of society had
its beginnings in a climate of enthusiasm and fervor.
In 325, The Council of Nicaea,
would seem to mark the doctrinal rebirth of the Church, with the condemnation
of Arius, who denied the Divinity of the Word. At Nicaea, thanks to the decisive
role of the Deacon, Athanasius ( 295-373), subsequently Bishop of Alexandria,
the doctrine of the “consubstantiality” of the nature among the Three Persons
of the Most Holy Trinity was defined.
In the years that followed,
between the orthodox position and the Arian heretics a “third party” made its
way in: that of the “Semi-Arians”, in
turn divided amongst themselves into various currents, which acknowledged a
certain analogy between the Father and the Son, but denied that He had been “begotten,
not made, of one Being with the Father” as was affirmed in the Nicene Creed. They substituted the word omousios, which means “of the same
substance” with the term omoiusios,
which means “of similar substance”.
The heretics, the Arians and the Semi-Arians, had
understood that their success would be dependent on two factors: the first was
to remain inside the Church; the second to obtain the support of the political
powers, hence of Constantine and afterwards his successors. And indeed it
happened so: a crisis, until then unprecedented, inside the Church which lasted
for more than sixty years.
Nobody has described it better than Cardinal Newman in his book The Arians of the
IV Century (1833), wherein he gathered all the doctrinal nuances of the
question. An Italian scholar, Professor Claudio Pierantoni has recently
outlined an enlightening parallel between the Arian controversy and the present
debate on the Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris laetitia. * However, even in 1973,
Monsignor Rudolf Graber (1903-1992), Bishop of Regensburg, when recalling the
figure of St. Athanasius, on the XVI centenary of his death, had compared the
crisis of the IV century to that following the Second Vatican Council (Athanasius und die Kirche unserer
Zeit: zu seinem 1600 Todestag, Kral
1973).
Athanasius was harshly persecuted even by his
confreres for his fidelity to orthodoxy, and between 336 and 366 was five times
forced to abandon the city in which he was Bishop, thus spending long years in
exile and strenuous combat in defense of the Faith. Two assemblies of bishops,
at Caesarea and Tyre (334-335) condemned him for rebellion and fanaticism.
Further, in 341, while a Council of fifty bishops in Rome had proclaimed
Athanasius innocent, the Council at Antioch, in which more than ninety bishops
took part, ratified the Acts of the Synods of Caesarea and Tyre and put an
Arian in the place of Athanasius as bishop.
The subsequent Council of Serdica,
in 343, ended with a scission: the Western Fathers declared the deposition of
Athanasius illegal and reconfirmed the Council of Nicaea: those from the East
condemned not only Athanasius, but also Pope Julius I, (afterwards canonized),
who had supported him. The Council of Sirmium in 351, sought a middle ground
between Catholic orthodoxy and Arianism. At the Council of Arles in 353, the
Fathers, including the legate representing Liberius, who had succeeded St.
Julius I as Pope, signed a new condemnation against Athanasius.
The bishops were forced to
choose between the condemnation of Athanasius and exile. St. Paulinus, Bishop of Trier, was almost the
only one in the battle for the Nicene Creed
and was exiled to Phrygia, where he died following mistreatment at the
hands of the Arians. Two years later, at the Council of Milan, (355), more than
three hundred bishops of the West, signed the condemnation of Athanasius and
another orthodox Father, St. Hilary of Poitiers, was banished to Phrygia for
his intransigent fidelity to orthodoxy.
In 357, Pope Liberius,
overcome by the sufferings of exile and at the insistence of his friends, but
also driven by “a love for peace”, signed the Semi-Arian formula of Sirmium and
broke communion with St. Athanasius, declaring him separated from the Roman Church,
for his use of the term “consubstantial” as is testified in four letters
transmitted to us by St. Hilary (Manlio
Simonetti, La crisi ariana del IV secolo,
Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, Roma 1975, pp. 235-236).
Under the pontificate of the
same Liberius, the Councils of Rimini (359) and Seleucia (359), which
constituted a Great Council, representative of the West and the East, abandoned
the term “consubstantial” of Nicaea and established an equivocal “middle way”
between the Arians and St. Athanasius. It seemed as if rampant heresy had conquered the Church.
The Councils of Seleucia and
Rimini are not numbered by the Church today in the eight ecumenical councils of
antiquity: there were, nonetheless, as many as 560 bishops present, almost the
totality of the Fathers of Christianity, who were defined as “ecumenical” by
their contemporaries. It was then that
St. Jerome coined the phrase wherein "the whole world groaned and woke astounded to find itself Arian” (Dialogus
adversus Luciferianos, n. 19, in PL, 23, col. 171).
What is important to underline
is that it wasn’t about a doctrinal dispute limited to some theologian, nor a
simple clash between bishops where the Pope had to act as an arbiter. It was a
religious war in which all Christians were involved, from the Pope down to the
last faithful. Nobody closed themselves up
in a spiritual bunker, nobody stood looking out the window, a mute spectator of
the drama. Everyone was down in the trenches fighting on both sides of the
battle-lines.
It wasn’t easy at that time to understand whether your own bishop was
orthodox or not, but the sensus fidei was the compass to orient oneself.
Cardinal Walter Brandmüller while speaking in
Rome on April 7th 2018, recalled how “the ‘sensus fidei’ acts as a
sort of spiritual immune system, through which the faithful instinctively recognize
or reject any error. Upon this ‘sensus fidei’ rests then – apart from the
Divine promise – also the passive infallibility of the Church, or the certainty
that the Church, in Her totality, shall never be able to incur a heresy.”
St. Hilary writes that during
the Arian crisis the ears of the faithful who interpreted in an orthodox sense
the ambiguous affirmations of the Semi-Arian theologians were holier than the
hearts of the priests. The Christians who for three centuries had resisted
emperors, were now resisting their own Shepherds, in some cases even the Pope,
guilty, if not of open heresy, but to say the least, of grave negligence.
Monsignor Graber refers to the words of Joseph von Görres (1776-1848), in his book Athanasius (1838)
written at the time of the arrest of the Archbishop of Cologne, but it is even
today of extraordinary veracity: “The earth is shaking under our feet. We can
foresee with certainty that the Church will emerge unscathed from such ruin,
but nobody can say and conjecture who and what will survive. We, then, in
advising, in recommending and raising our hands, would like to impede the evil
by showing its signs. Even the mules who carry the false prophets, bristle,
pull-back and with human language throw back the injustice in the face of those
striking them; those who do not see the
sword drawn (by God) which closes off the way to them (Numbers, XXII, 22-35). Work then while it is day, since at night nobody can. It serves
nothing to wait: waiting has done
nothing more than aggravate things.”
There are times when a
Catholic is obliged to choose between cowardice and heroism, between apostasy
and holiness. This is what happened in the IV century and it is what is
happening even today.
Translation: Contributor
Francesca Romana
[Source: Click here]
