The Council of Nicaea – Jesus or Dionysus?

 — Jan. 9, 20259 janv. 2025

The Arians believed that Jesus was a created being and not fully divine; these ideas were condemned at Nicaea in 325, but continue to resurface. The hope of the former preacher to the papal household is that this seventeenth centenary year will see a reawakening of faith in the divinity of Christ and in the trinity of God.

The year 2025 marks the seventeenth centenary of the Ecumenical Council held in the city of Nicaea (now Iznik, Turkey) in the early months of 325. The creed sanctioned by that council unites Christians of the historic Churches – Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican – and the various denominations that go under the name of “Evangelical” and “Pentecostal”. This centenary provides us with a unique opportunity – one that only at this point in history are we able to grasp – to acknowledge and celebrate together the faith that unites all believers in Christ.

It also offers us another, no less important opportunity: to take a reconnaissance flight that looks at faith in Christ in the modern and post-modern world and compares where we stand today to the faith of Nicaea. In the aftermath of a local council held in Rimini in 359, dominated by opponents of Nicaea, St Jerome wrote: “The whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian.” We must ask ourselves whether, by chance, we have an even greater reason today to let out such a groan.

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The basic problem addressed at Nicaea 1,700 years ago was how to define the place that the Word of God – and therefore the person of Jesus Christ – occupies in the sphere of being. Arius reasoned with the Greek philosophical scheme of his time, which was that of “middle Platonism”. This was tripartite. It envisaged the existence of a Supreme Being, of an intermediate being (the second god, deuteros theos, corresponding to the Platonic Demiurge), and finally of the created being. Nicaea re-established a single horizontal line on the vertical of being: one that separated the Creator from the creatures. It placed the Word decisively on the side of the Creator.

What the Nicaean creed still demands today is that in every culture and in every language, Jesus Christ be proclaimed “God” in the strongest sense the word “God” has in that culture, without any gap, either ontological or chronological, between God and another God above God, between “the God” (with the article) and “God” (without the article), or between “God” and “the divine”. This is what the words “true God from true God” in the Nicene creed seek to express as clearly and decisively as possible.

The seventeenth centenary of Nicaea forces us to ask: what place does Jesus Christ occupy in our modern and post-modern culture? Leave aside the world of fiction and entertainment, where Jesus Christ continues to be a “Superstar”. Let’s look at the three most relevant dialogues currently taking place. First, the dialogue between religions. Jesus Christ is absent from this dialogue. It cannot be otherwise; in this context peace, poverty, the environment and, in some cases, ethical issues are on the agenda. Second, the dialogue between science and faith. Here, too, Jesus Christ is absent. Since the Big Bang theory’s revenge on scientists’ initial scepticism and the confirmation of the ongoing expansion of the universe, science is less allergic to the idea of God and of Creation. Nevertheless, Christ and the problem of salvation remain outside the conversation. And, third, the dialogue between faith and reason. Again, Jesus Christ is absent. This is a discussion about metaphysics, not historical and contingent realities such as the incarnate Christ.

In these three dialogues, Christianity enters as a “religion” – and we know what an easy victory “reason” and “science” attain when they compete with the category of “religion”. Voltaire, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud: they all emerged as “winners” in the confrontation of reason with religion – until someone came along who understood that this was a pyrrhic victory, or rather a victory in a battle against windmills, because the real enemy to be defeated is not religion, but Jesus Christ. This is what Friedrich Nietzsche set out to do. He deserves recognition for not having chosen to attack an easy target – “religion” – but of identifying the front on which the decisive battle between faith and atheism is being fought, that is, the person and teaching of Christ. He made this struggle the purpose of his life, proposing to replace the figure of Christ with that of the Greek god Dionysus.

Nietzsche’s attempt did not fall on deaf ears. Someone decided to put Dionysus in place of Jesus in a scene appearing to represent the Last Supper during the opening ceremony at last year’s Paris Olympics. The criticisms levelled from all sides focused on the symbols of “Queer theory” present. No account was taken of the artistic director’s explanation, namely that the central character, lying down enthroned in the foreground, was not Jesus but the pagan god Dionysus. The intention was to restore the Olympics to their original character as a pagan celebration.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s extreme attempt to get rid of Christ hides a strongly positive element. It destroys every speculative alibi; it unmasks the kind of skirmishes that are waged in war to distract the enemy from the main front. It shows that the central question, today as at Nicaea, indeed as at the time of Jesus himself, is not, “Who do you say God is?”, but “Who do you say I am?” (Matthew 16:16). You can say whatever you want about who God is, but not so about Jesus Christ. He is not an idea that can be manipulated; he is a reality “in flesh and blood”. He dared to say (whether with his own mouth while he was alive, or resurrected through the mouth of his Spirit): “No one has ever seen God: only the Son, who is God and is in the bosom of the Father, has revealed him” (John 1:18). Christ does not take the place of the “God of religion”; he simply definitively reveals its true face.

The year just ended also marked the fourth centenary of the birth of Immanuel Kant, the philosopher of “pure reason” and “practical reason”. Kant argues that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated by pure reason and assigns this task to “practical reason”. We can agree with him, provided that we consider the person of Jesus Christ and not the “moral imperative” the true and strongest “practical reason” (that is, not just a speculative one) for belief in God. Christian faith is born from the discovery of gift, not from the awareness of duty. (And not, incidentally, from the “awareness of sin”, as Kierkegaard believed.) The moral conscience is certainly an argument in favour of the reasonableness of faith in God; however, it is not the beginning of it. The voice of conscience within himself (together with the starry sky above him) filled the soul of Kant himself with “ever new and growing admiration and veneration”. But not yet with faith.

Called to define the ontological status of Christ and his place in the faith of the Church, the Council of Nicaea ended up achieving a result that is, if possible, even more important and decisive: that of defining the very idea of the Christian God. Nicaea marks the transition from the rigid monotheism of the First Testament to the Trinitarian monotheism of the New Testament. It does not mark the moment of birth of that faith: the baptismal formula of Matthew 28 and the very apostolic symbol anterior to the council contained it. It is rather the moment of its awareness and its dogmatic formulation. It wasn’t necessary to convene another council to define the dogma of the Trinity: the Council of Nicaea had done it already, the divinity of the Holy Spirit only being made more explicit by the Council of Constantinople in 381.

The divinity of Christ and the Trinity of God are two inseparable mysteries, two doors that open, or close, together. If Christ is not God, by whom is the Trinity constituted? Recent experience is proof of this. As soon as the divinity of Christ is put in brackets, the Trinitarian horizon also falls. Rudolph Bultmann has written: “The formula ‘Christ is God’ is false in every sense, when ‘God’ is considered as a being that may be objectivised, whether you interpret that formula according to Arius or Nicaea, in an orthodox or a liberal sense. It is correct if ‘God’ is meant as the event of divine actualisation.” In less veiled words: Christ is not God, but in Christ there is (or is at work) God.

Continuing along the path of demythologisation traced by Bultmann, Hans Küng has written: “We can no longer accept the mythical ideas of that age about a being descended from God, existing in a heavenly state; a ‘story of Gods’ in which two (or even three) divine beings are involved, is not for us.” And again: “The monotheistic faith, taken over from Israel and held in common with Islam, must never be abandoned in any doctrine of the Trinity. There is no god but God!” (On Being a Christian, 1974). Küng’s intention – to promote inter­religious dialogue – was good, but the means was terribly wrong. By getting rid of an intermediary being between God and Creation, Nicaea was itself a true Christian demyth­ologisation. Thinking that Christianity can be made more acceptable by parenthesising the Trinity is like thinking that an athlete can run faster by having the backbone removed from his body.

The concept that allowed faith in the divinity of Christ to be reconciled with the austere monotheism of the Bible was not the philosophical term “consubstantial” (homoousios). This was only affirmed in a second moment of the conciliar debate. Athanasius would make very discreet use of it, though, due to its precision, it soon became the “card” of Nicene orthodoxy. No, this result was obtained above all by leveraging the fact that Christ is, yes, the Word “through whom all things were made” (John 1:3), but he is first and foremost the “Son of God”, and as such, “generated, not created” (genitum non factum). Arriving at this distinction between being generated (gennetos) and being created (genetos: just one letter of difference in Greek) was the most difficult and most decisive achievement of the Christian faith on the level of being. Contrary to what Adolf von Harnack thought, Nicaea is not the hellenisation of Christianity in its most acute phase, but rather its crisis and its overcoming.

From this point of view, Athanasius and the orthodox party had to fight on two fronts: not only against Arius and his followers, but also against the emperor. Anyone who knows the historical events that preceded, accompanied and followed the council knows how much resistance Constantine and his personal theologian Eusebius of Caesarea put up against the abandonment of the rigid Ancient Testament monotheism. Some of Athanasius’ five periods of exile were for this very reason. The underlying motive was not only theological, but also political: that old version of monotheism provided a much stronger model and justification for the absolute power of the emperor.

Christianity professes the unity of God. Not a numerical unity, but something infinitely more beautiful. It is usually defined as a “unity of substance” but its true name is “unity of love”, because God “is” love (1 John 4:8). It is the only unity that can serve as a model for the unity, not only of the Church, but of every human community, starting with that between man and woman in marriage. All these unities will always and necessarily be unities in diversity, as it is, precisely, the unity of the Trinity. It is therefore not true, to quote Kant again, that “the doctrine of the Trinity, taken literally, has no practical relevance at all” (Conflict of the Faculties). It is very practically relevant. The metaphysical poet John Donne was right: the blessed Trinity is “bones to philosophy, but milk to faith”.

All the countless historical, theological, and ecumenical initiatives that will take place on the occasion of the centenary of Nicaea will be, for God and for the Church, almost useless, if they do not serve the purpose that Nicaea served, that is, to confirm and, if necessary, to reawaken in Christians the faith in the divinity of Christ and in the trinity of God. Seventeen centuries ago, the body of the Church made a supreme effort, rising in faith above all human systems and all resistance of reason. The tide rose to its highest level and left its mark on the rock. We need the high tide to be renewed; the tidemark is not enough. It is no longer sufficient to repeat the Nicene Creed; we need to renew the outburst of faith in the divinity of Christ, the likes of which has not been seen since.

All this has important consequences for Christian ecumenism. For there are, in fact, two kinds of ecumenism: one of faith and one of unbelief; one uniting all who believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and another uniting all who confine themselves to “interpreting” these things. An ecumenism in which everyone believes in the same things because no one really believes in anything, if we intend “believing” in the proper sense of the word. As far as faith is concerned, the fundamental distinction is no longer between Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants, but between those who believe that Jesus Christ is “the Son of the living God” and those who believe that he is just “one of the prophets”.

There was a time when this faith “resisted” – one might say – in the heart of a single man, Athanasius of Alexandria; but that was enough for it to survive and to resume its victorious journey. Even today, a few believers, willing to risk their intellectual life on faith in the divinity of Jesus, can do much to reverse the current tendency to speak about God “etsi Christus non daretur” (as if Jesus Christ didn’t matter) – or to clumsily trying to replace Jesus with Dionysus …

Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Cap taught the history of Christian origins at the Catholic University of Milan and served on the International Theological Commission. He was preacher to the papal household between 1980 and 2024. He was created a cardinal in 2020.

Posted: Jan. 9, 2025 • Permanent link: ecumenism.net/?p=14479
Categories: TabletIn this article: Catholic, dialogue, Evangelical, Nicaea, Orthodox, Raniero Cantalamessa
Transmis : 9 janv. 2025 • Lien permanente : ecumenism.net/?p=14479
Catégorie : TabletDans cet article : Catholic, dialogue, Evangelical, Nicaea, Orthodox, Raniero Cantalamessa


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