The Son

   Who is this Jesus, anyway? By the early fourth century A.D, almost all the bishops in the Christian Church believed Jesus was God, that is, God's equal. And that the Holy Spirit was God present in the world today. These three persons were God in one person. "It's a mystery," the nuns used to tell us. "You'll understand when you get to heaven," they said.

   Just because the bishops had the Trinity figured out didn't mean the masses understood it rightly. Indeed there was a popular preacher in Egypt named Arius who taught that yes, Jesus was God, but that Jesus had been created and was therefore on a slightly lower level than the Father. The difference may seem slight to us, but back then people were ready to slit each other's throats over semantics  

  What's interesting is that no one had worried about these fine points a few years earlier when Christians were being fed to the lions. In 313 A.D., the Roman emperor Constantine declared toleration for Christianity. Constantine had just gone through a long and bloody struggle to bring the whole empire under his control and he was looking for some peace and quiet.

  To settle the trinitarian controversies that were causing such an uproar, Constantine called an ecumenical council, which opened on this day in 325. Constantine invited all 1,800 bishops in the empire to the council. Traveling expenses were paid by the government and each bishop was allowed to bring along a retinue of five priests and deacons. The council was held in the important city of Nicaea in northwestern Turkey. About 300 of the 1,800 bishops, mostly from the eastern part of the empire attended. 

  There's a juicy story about Arius being slapped by a bishop during the debates about the nature of the Trinity. But Arius would not have been present since he was not a bishop.  On June 19, the bishops came up with the Nicean Creed we're familiar with today, though the lines at the end cursing those who disagreed with the creed were dropped a dropped a few years later.

  As for Arius, his books were burned and he was excommunicated and exiled to the boondocks of Illyria, though he was later rehabilitated.  Constantine's mother St. Helena wanted him to become a Christian, but he had to placate both his pagan and his Christian subjects so he held off on baptism till he was on his deathbed. He was christened by an Arian bishop of all people. 

  The Council of Nicaea did not attempt to explain the mystery of the Trinity. The nuns at Holy Name School liked to point to St. Patrick's use of a shamrock to explain how a thing could be three in one. On last Trinity Sunday, Father John said the Father was like the sun, Jesus, like the sun's light, and the Holy Spirit was like it's warmth. That I can understand.

The Celts neatly knotted up the Trinity.