History of the First Council of Nice/Chapter 2

by Dean Dudley

CHAPTER II.

THE DATE, AND SOURCES OF ITS HISTORY.

This Council was convened at the city of Nicæa, in the Roman province Bithynia, a country of Asia, lying between the Propontis and Black Sea, in the six hundred and thirty-sixth year from the commencement of Alexander the Great's reign and A. D. 325, the twentieth year of the reign of Constantine the Great, and in the consulate of Paulinus and Julian of Rome. The transactions of the Council are related by the ancients in a partial, imperfect, and disjointed manner, as I will briefly show by quoting several of the varying statements of its precise date, although there is no discrepancy respecting the year. Socrates Scholasticus^[1] says, "It was convened on the twentieth day of May." But the Emperor had assigned the tenth day before the nones of June, that is, "the 25th May, as I glean from Baronius' Annals of the Church, tome iv, and Baronius says it terminated on the 25th August, A. D. 325. The date of the Formulary, or Confession of Faith, established by the Council, and found prefixed to that document, is the nineteenth day of June, A. D. 325.^[2] A letter from Hosius, and others of the Council, to Silvester, the Roman pope, bears date as I find in Baronius, thus: "viii. Kalen. Julias;" that is, the eighth day before the first of July. Finally, the very learned ecclesiastical historian, Dr. Augustus Neander, asserts that the assembling of the great Synod must have been as late as July. This last mentioned writer points out, in his following excellent observation, the plan I shall endeavor to pursue in this work, when he says,—"As no complete collection of the transactions of this Council [of Nice]^[3] has come down to us, the only means left, for obtaining a knowledge of the true course of its proceedings, is to take the accounts given by those reporters of the different parties, who were present at the deliberations, and form our conclusions from a comparison of them all." I shall also give some additional narratives of persons and important events connected with the history of the Nicene Council and its decrees; quoting the oldest and best authorities, and not always noting the omissions, which will be made for the sake of brevity.

I shall be cautious of judging the motives of the partisans in this Council, but let the reader form his own conclusions from facts and actual transactions and attendant circumstances. There is manifest partiality in all the original accounts, from which these facts and circumstances are to be gleaned. "The Arian history needs," says Dr. Murdock, in his translation of Mosheim, "a writer of integrity, and void alike of hatred and love."

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1. Socrates, surnamed Scholasticus, or the Advocate, that is, the Lawyer, while practising law at Constantinople, compiled a History of the Church, from the accession of Constantine, A. D. 305, to the thirty-eighth year of Theodosius II., including a period of about 140 years. I quote from Bohn's edition, translated from the Greek. This author was born at Constantinople about A. D. 379, and received his education in that city. [See the notice of Hermias Sozomen, in another note.] He was a favorer of the Novatian Sect, which was Trinitarian, but slightly heretical, as he admits, although the heresy consisted in a matter of discipline; the Novatians (so called from Novatus, a Roman presbyter, who had separated himself from the church) contending that those who, in times of persecution, had lapsed from the faith, should not be allowed a place for restoration.—See Lardner's Cabinet Cyc., I., 133.
2. It is the same in the Greek collection of the canons.
3. The words interpolated by me will always be thus included in brackets.