The Council of Nicaea: A Historical Explainer
This year is, among other things, the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Ecumenical commemorations have already begun, focusing for the most part on the dual institutions of the Papacy and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople--institutions both deeply entwined, though in different and somewhat ironic ways, with the event.
Later this year, two men will meet in Nicaea: Pope Leo XIV-- an American born in Chicago who spent his ministry in Peru, places that none of the bishops at Nicaea had ever heard of, but the latest sitter on what was already in the fourth century the ancient and venerable seat of the bishop of the Church of Rome, and Patriarch Bartholomew--an ethnic Greek whose see was, at the time of Nicaea, a minor suffragan of Heraclea, who today presides over a tiny, purely vestigial Christian flock in what was, in the 4th century, the population heartland of Christianity, but which now resides within the borders of an ethnic nation-state named after Central Asian nomads and populated by the largely secularized followers of Islam, a Christian offshoot that would emerge centuries later from a portion of the world that nearly all the bishops of Nicaea would have regarded as a minor scrap of territory stuck rather awkwardly between two great Empires. These two men will no doubt issue appropriate statements of fraternity and commemoration for what both traditions they represent regard as the first Ecumenical Council of the undivided Christian Church of the first millennium.
Accompanying these commemorations will come many, many explanations by the popular press the world around, designed to communicate to ordinary folks from America to Siberia to India and back again just what the Council of Nicaea is, anyway, and why it's important enough to make the Chicagoan Pope go all the way to Turkey. Alas, the popular press being what it is, the vast majority of these explanations will be wrong. This event will also be accompanied, no doubt, by many intelligent and intellectual explanations of just what the Council of Nicaea is, in podcasts, tweets, blueskys and the like: and as is frequently the case, these will be even more wrong.
Hence, to get out ahead of these takes, I wanted to issue, as a scholar who has published an academic volume among other things on Nicaea and its context and legacy, a brief explainer on the historical event of the Council of Nicaea. This will be a deliberately broad take, deliberately designed to skirt most controversial scholarly questions; but nevertheless unavoidably based on my own opinions and scholarly judgments.
As such, I am confident it will contain a great deal of information that will come as a surprise to most moderately-informed people, and an even higher percentage of information that both ordinary, good people and wicked take-having intellectuals have never heard of. I hope it will prove both informative and reasonably diverting.
