Problems of Historical Context

It has been sufficiently established that the Nicene Creed had little hearing among the majority of western churches prior to the mid-350s.Footnote ⁴ When Hilary of Poitiers sent his anthology and explanation on eastern councils to the Gallic bishops in 358, he commented that his reason for doing so was that they had “been ignorant of written creeds.”Footnote ⁵ After the acceptance of a Homoian creed at the Council of Ariminum in 359 as the West's officially acknowledged confession,Footnote ⁶ however, a new chapter opened concerning the general involvement of the western bishops in what was thought to be eastern theological problems. In sum, a pro-Nicene reaction was aroused against this new form of imperially-coerced orthodoxy.Footnote ⁷ Thereafter, we encounter a host of polemical writings designed to prove the sole veracity of the Nicene Creed and its doctrinal implications.Footnote ⁸

The Commentarius is thought to have originated in North Italy during this same period.Footnote ⁹ As a literary unit, it is best described as an extended theological gloss on the Nicene Creed, commenting on each clause of the creed—in some cases, extensively—with the purpose of affirming the biblical veracity of the creed. The author's goal is announced from the beginning of the text:

Every clause is supported by quoting in whole or in part several scriptural proof-texts from Old and New Testament, lest there be any doubt that the Nicene Creed was dependent on biblical terminology.Footnote ¹⁰ A few consecutive examples from the text will exhibit the author's approach.

From these three passages we may observe that the exposition of the Commentarius has a chiefly didactic function. Nowhere is it stated that Scripture is being cited to counter particular heretical claims, though some heretical views are confuted in passing. Biblical proof-texts appear at the very outset of the work, functioning as explanations rather than refutations, and the Commentator occasionally indicates the “perverse doctrines of the Arians,” who assert that the Son is “made” or a “creature” (based on a reading of Prov 8:22) or who deny that the Son is in the Father. Not unlike western writers of the 340s and 350s, the Commentator warns his readers about anyone who weakens or diminishes the Son of God on account of his incarnation:

The reason for the heretics' error is that “they compare the earthly to the heavenly, frail things to the eternal, the immortal and divine to the perishable and mortal” (ch. 1). Several such warnings are given to the reader; nevertheless, they function in secondary roles as parts of the overall instruction.

We have only vague internal indicators when it comes to identifying the authorship or the provenance of the Commentarius. Turner suggested that it was directed against Urbanus of Parma, since at one point the work is directed against one who propagated the “Arian” heresy “with sophistication” (urbanitate, ch. 16.16; see urbane, ch. 17.5)—a peculiar designation that may function as a pun on the name of the adversary.Footnote ¹⁴ It is true that a certain UrbanusFootnote ¹⁵ was eventually deposed by the North Italian bishops sometime before a Roman council met in 378 and that council protested to the emperor Gratian that his condemnation had not yet resulted in his ejection from Parma.Footnote ¹⁶ Following a similar logic, Charles Pietri places the Commentarius within this period of 366–378, which he calls the “reconquest” of North Italy by pro-Nicenes.Footnote ¹⁷ Linking our document to the bishop of Parma on the basis of an allusive noun, while perhaps ingenious, is highly speculative. Indeed, the evidence adduced by Turner and Pietri is too tenuous to be persuasive, and as a result, the arguments for situating the Commentarius in the later fourth century or North Italy evaporate.

Authorship and Identity

No individual is singled out in the Commentarius except the infamous figures of Arius, Sabellius, and Marcion, and in these cases the writer is drawing on customary arguments, both in describing their views and in refuting them. In fact, the modern reader will find it difficult to locate specific references or allusions to the teaching of the so-called Arians that bear any resemblance to the pro-Homoian posture adopted in the councils of Sirmium 357 and 359, as well as Ariminum 359, which confirmed the Son's likeness to the Father by disallowing any other qualifications. If this is strange, then it is stranger that the Commentarius is mute about the West's most indignant point of contention in aftermath of Ariminum, namely, that the “Arians” committed fraud at Ariminum by declaring that the Son was not as one of any other creatures while asserting him to be a creature.Footnote ¹⁸ From accounts of the council, it was this declaration by Valens of Mursa that convinced nearly 400 bishops that there was no harm in signing the Ariminum Creed. Finally, there are no accusations in the Commentarius about the hypocrisy of the “Arians” who shielded the true nature of their theology by taking an agnostic position vis-à -vis how the Son was begotten.

This is not to say that the writer in any way approved of the “Arians'” position. But if our author were a contemporary of Homoian “Arianism,” it is curious that there is no allusion or reference to the western creed of Ariminum (either directly or allusively), since it is this formula which functioned as the West's credal alternative to Nicaea. On its authority Auxentius of Milan successfully claimed to be the legitimate bishop of Milan against the attempts to remove him,Footnote ¹⁹ and Valentinian II issued an edict (23 January 386) sequestering one of the basilicas in Milan for Homoian worship. How is it possible then for the Commentarius to have been penned after these events while preserving absolutely no trace of them?

We would also expect some mention of Photinus, the Monarchian heresiarch of the West, given the repeated condemnations of his position at the councils of Serdica 343, Milan 345, Rome 347, and Sirmium 351.Footnote ²⁰ Likewise, why are there no signs of the evolution of confessional language as a result of the anti-Apollinarian or anti-Macedonian debates? For that matter, the Holy Spirit is hardly discussed at all in our text (ch. 14). Quite precisely it follows the brevity of the earliest versions of the Nicene Creed, with one major exception: the Commentarius refers to the Spirit as a “tertia persona,”Footnote ²¹ which is the way Tertullian described it. No further elucidation of the Spirit appears in the text. In the paltry four lines attributed to him, the Holy Spirit is never defined in the same terms as Father and Son are: Only the Son “is from the substance of the Father,” and is called “a second person”; he is another who is divine (divinitas), not divided, nor is the Father's power in the Son separated, but “one in two persons, always remaining indivisibly one” (ch. 8).

It should be noted that the Commentarius freely uses the terms persona, res (= nature), and substantia as if the meanings are self-evident. That is, the writer is drawing on an established theological vocabulary that was familiar to him and his readers. Reference to the Father, Son, and Spirit as distinct personae Footnote ²² was well-known to the Latin tradition.Footnote ²³Natura functioned in the same way.Footnote ²⁴ Concerning the term substantia, the Commentarius uses it (similarly to Tertullian) as that which the Father and Son share and what each divine person possesses. When qualifying the clause from the creed, “That is, from the substance of the Father,” the Commentarius speaks of “the Son in his own [substance] (ut propriae filius), who is declared “only begotten” and “first-begotten” (John 1:14; Col 1:15) and is said to be alone “from the substance of the Father” (ch. 3). One can find parallels in Latin expressions that reveal a theology indebted to Tertullian, Novatian, and Hilary of Poitiers (who himself draws on the former two).Footnote ²⁵

Yet another problem with locating this document in the later fourth century is that the writer espouses the older Logos-theology model of the Father as the invisible God and the Son as the visible God as a means of rejecting modalism. Thus the Son is said “to have shown himself to the fathers” (i.e., the Old Testament patriarchs) because “he was the one who was supposed to be seen.”Footnote ²⁶ Along with this, we may wonder at the absence of a doctrine of eternal generation in a document that supposedly originates from the later fourth century. Rather, the Son's divinity is proven by his eternal nativity: “he was and will be, that is, that he is God from God, the Son from the Father, for it is not possible for God to have once not existed” (ch. 1). Later on, we are told, because the Son “was born (natum) from him who always was, it shows that he always was” (ch. 7). This perspective is typical of earlier western tradition. For example, in his Matthew commentary, Hilary declared: the process of divine birth is “from the eternal God … God the Son has proceeded, to whom belongs eternity from his eternal Father” (16:4). Novatian likewise taught that the Son receives his eternality from the eternity of the Father (De trinitate 31).

With regard to Christology, our Commentator espouses a simple Logos-in-flesh Christology, which was on its way out in the West by the late 370s. It is said of the Son: “he assumed (susceptionem) a creature.”Footnote ²⁷ According to this familiar way of interpreting Prov 8:22, “the Lord created me in the beginning of his ways” can refer only to “his human body which he had assumed.” Because the Son is both the “firstborn of God by whom all things were made” and also linked to all creation, “it shows his two natures (duas res).” Thus, the Son, as the “Son of man, who is created by the Son of God, assumed [it] into himself.”Footnote ²⁸ The only doctrinal deviation about which our author warns his readers is “perversity of Marcion, which denies that God can possess human flesh, that is, he is ashamed to ascribe to God a human body.”Footnote ²⁹ It never occurs to our author to wonder whether Christ had a human soul or not.

Dating the Commentarius

There are a couple of internal features that may argue for a date later than the fourth century. First, the “Arians” are described as “conquered heretics” (revicti heretici; ch. 1). If this remark is more than wishful thinking on the author's part, it may indicate that “Arianism” (at least as a political force) is a defeated foe, if not fully eradicated through having lost imperial sanction. Gratian had brought legal support of pro-Nicene ecclesiastical policies to bear on his enforcement of Theodosius's pro-Nicene legislation (10 January 381).Footnote ³⁰ Secondly, the Commentator observes that the “Arians” of his time deny some of the arguments which are commonly attributed to them and thereby deceive the faithful by their evasions: “They think that even now with sophistication (urbanitate), they can avoid the truth, so that they do not speak of what they approve” (ch. 16). From the historian's perspective, the content of these denials sounds reminiscent of what Homoians had been accused of in the late 350s. During the second half of the council of Ariminum 359, Valens of Mursa categorically denied that he upheld any tenets of Arius when he claimed that the Son is a creature but nothing like all other creatures. According to Jerome's and Sulpicius Severus's accounts written at least two decades after the council, Valens's remarks were nothing more than a dodge to avoid the charge of rank subordinationism.Footnote ³¹ None of these considerations, however, allows us to determine a precise date for our document.

Instead, I suggest that the writing of this work was prompted by arguments published in the 350s by Latin writers who had begun to defend the Nicene Creed as entirely scriptural. This activity must have been motivated by the blatant rejection of the Nicene formula at the council of Milan 355 and especially by the Sirmium doctrinal statements from councils at Sirmium in 357 and thereafter in 359. Later known as the “Blasphemia,” or “Creed of Ignorance,” the Sirmium manifesto, issued in 357 by a small council, declared that no use should be made of ousia (substantia), homoousios, or homoiousios because they were unscriptural terms.Footnote ³² The same logic was invoked in the same city by another select council in May 359.

While it is unknown how much influence Athanasius had on western bishops outside of Trier, Milan, and Rome, his letter De decretis Nicaenae synodi was probably sent to (Julius of) Rome in the early 350s.Footnote ³³ Athanasius stated at the outset that he was intent on refuting the accusation of the “Eusebians”: “Why did the Fathers at Nicaea use terms not in Scripture; from the substance and of one substance”?Footnote ³⁴ insinuating that the biblical nature of the Nicene Creed had been much criticized for lacking biblical terminology. Greek conciliar and polemical literature had been sensitized by the longstanding requirement that confessions must be biblically based. Throughout the fourth century, it was understood that credal formulations should conform to the linguistic and conceptual limitations of Scripture. For the Latin Christians, however, it was a different story. Until the mid-fourth century, professions of faith were grounded in baptismal formulae of the churches. Most western bishopsFootnote ³⁵ were not acquainted with eastern credal history or with the production of creeds that did not emerge from a church confession.

At Rome, the famous neo-platonist and former rhetor, Marius Victorinus, would have been familiar with Athanasius's arguments. He made a similar case about the Nicene formulation for a western audience, though it went beyond the criticisms of “Arians.” Basil of Ancyra had argued in 358 for the superiority of homoiousios: that the Son was of similar-substance as the Father. Victorinus insisted that only Nicene language did justice to the Son's eternal being which was the same as the Father's.Footnote ³⁶ His plan for writing Contra Arium (IA) was to demonstrate “by using all of the Scriptures” both how the Son was born and also how he was Son by the substance of the Father.Footnote ³⁷ A different reaction to homoiousios (and homoousios) was articulated by a Gallic contemporary of Victorinus, Hilary of Poitiers. In his De synodis, Hilary finds compatibility between the theological intents of homoousios and homoiousios. More important, however, is the theological intent and scriptural foundation on which each term stands.Footnote ³⁸

More Catechetical than Commentary

The enigmatic phrase revicti heretici of the Commentarius may just as easily be explained as a triumphant observation of the galvanization of anti-Homoian sentiment in the west. Through a synodical letter issued by the council of Paris 360, and also through a letter addressed to the “Catholic bishops of Italy” from Liberius of Rome,Footnote ³⁹ the cunning tactics used at the council of Ariminum were now unmasked and its perpetrators condemned as “Arian” heretics. Despite the ratification of the Homoian creed at Constantinople (January 360) as the church's recognized statement of faith, a wave of pro-Nicene fervor swept through the west during the 360s that was explicitly anti-monarchian and anti-“Arian.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Rather than seeing the Commentarius as a polemical commentary, pace Turner, I propose that it was composed as a type of instructional guide or catechesis for explaining the biblical foundations of the Nicene Creed to fellow catholics. Whoever the author may have been, it was someone who had himself had little exposure to the creed or to the details of the theological controversies surrounding the creed. The propositions of the creed are presented as de facto extensions of biblical teaching meant to fend off the falsehoods of heresy. Overall, the text exhibits a crudity of Latin grammar, frequently awkward sentence structure, and limited vocabulary.Footnote ⁴¹ Whether this simplicity of expression is indicative of the writer's personal limitations or hints that Latin was not the author's native language (as was also the case of the rustic scripture commentary of Fortunatianus of AquileiaFootnote ⁴²) is not clear. But what is remarkable about this text is how unremarkable it is for informing us about contemporary Nicene or “Arian” theology contemporaneous with the 360s and 370s.

We have already determined that the author has no apparent acquaintance with Homoian Christianity. Despite the references to “Arians,” the Commentarius exhibits little familiarity with early Arian theology aside from knowledge of Arius's letter to Alexander. This is not as strange as it may seem given the general lack of acquaintance of Latin writers with Greek texts written in the 320s. Thus we learn nothing new about the direction anti-“Arian” polemics have taken since the 320s for the reason that the “author does little more than present traditional ‘Arian’ objections to Homoousian theology with conventional refutations.”Footnote ⁴³ This may reinforce Bardy's contention that a small dossier of collected Latin translations from the earliest “Arian controversy” was circulating in the west by the 350s. There is evidence which suggests Hilary of Poitiers, Marius Victorinus, and others were using Latin versions of select documents from Arius and his episcopal supporters.Footnote ⁴⁴ Of these texts, Arius's letter to Alexander was most influential as a symbol of the official doctrine of “Arianism.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Among the first known Latin versions is the one found in Hilary's De trinitate 12.12–13, perhaps the bishop's own translation from the Greek.Footnote ⁴⁶ We also have a few fragments of the letter in Phoebadius of Agen.Footnote ⁴⁷ Also, in the minutes of council of Aquileia in 381, we are told that Ambrose of Milan produced the letter, introducing it with the words: “It contains blasphemies from the beginning because it says that the Father alone is eternal.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The Commentarius offers confirmation that Arius's letters from the 320s were available to Western readers and still regarded as relevant and requiring refutation. A serious problem, according to the Commentarius, is that the Arians “try to throw lesser learned people into confusion when they say if the Father is eternal, if the Son is eternal, there are two principles” (ch. 1). Arius's letter to Alexander accordingly reads: “He is not eternal or co-eternal or co-unoriginate with the Father, nor has He His being together with the Father, as some speak of relations, introducing two ingenerate beginnings.” Of course it is possible that the contradiction of worshipping two ingenerata continued to have currency against Nicene theology in the late fourth century, but it is just as likely that the writer has learned about this argument from the few Latin texts at his disposal. The same is true of the Commentarius's treatment of Prov 8:22, which rails extensively against the contention in Arius's letter: “If he was made, ‘there was [once] when he was not,’ as the perverse mind of the Arians claim.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Much is made of the different meanings of factum (“created”), since it is critical to the Commentator's argument that the Son as factus or principium is relatable only to his incarnation. This too was another familiar doctrinal point.

As we might expect from a catechetical presentation, the Commentarius has the express goal of explaining the defensibility of the creed according to Scripture. The style of our text, although much more theologically primitive, is not unlike Cyril's catechism on the Jerusalem Creed, which seeks to prove the biblical nature of each clause of the Creed. In the case of the Commentarius, the Nicene Creed is treated according to its scriptural warrant in seventeen uneven sections, each one drawing widely on both testaments. Some 150 partial and whole verses are quoted throughout the text as proof of the Creed. Taken together, they are supposed to bear out how the Son is “of one substance with the Father, which the Greeks call ‘homousion’ ”:

Turner is correct in describing this work as a commentary but only in a very general sense, since its format suggests specifically that it was a basic instructional guide to the Nicene Creed for westerners. In fact, literarily speaking, we have nothing comparable to this text among post-Nicene documents from the fourth century.

To what degree might we consider this document to be a catechesis, given that all the fourth and fifth century evidence for catechetical expositions in the WestFootnote ⁵⁰ is directly connected with preparation for baptism?Footnote ⁵¹ Looking at the Commentarius, there is no reference or allusion to the connection between the credal instruction given and baptism. Nor is there any precedent in the West for the Nicene Creed figuring as a catechetical curriculum. Not until the late sixth century does the Nicaeanum serve in the West as a liturgical formula. None of these points, however, rules out the possibility that the Commentarius was intended as a preparatio of some kind for one or more Latin-speaking churches. The first line (quoted above, beginning with “The faith … has expressed everything in few words …”) shows a resemblance to the way Augustine prefaces a small sermon series for catechumens (Serm. 212.1): “It's time for you to receive the Symbol in which is briefly contained everything that is believed for the sake of eternal salvation.”Footnote ⁵²

Versions of the Creed

Let us digress for a moment and ask about the version of the creed which appears in the Commentarius. Similar versions of the Latin Nicene Creed are known to and cited by writers who are roughly contemporary with the Commentarius. The earliest and perhaps archetypal version appears twice among Hilary's works: De synodis 84 and the first installment of his Adversus Ursacium et Valentem, both written in late 357 or 358 from his place of exile and meant to introduce western bishops to the conciliar and credal activity in the East over the preceding twenty years. Hilary cites the Nicene Creed in both texts with explanatory glosses. His citations of the creed are nearly identical to each other, including the anathemas, excepting the alternation of a few nearly synonymous prepositions (e.g., prius instead of ante). Additionally, both versions include the explanation “what the Greeks call homousion” (quod Graeci dicunt homousion) immediately following “of one substance” (unius substantiae). In the Adversus version Hilary adds to the anathema those who say “and that he was made from non-existing things, what the Greeks call εξ ουχ οντων” (et quia ex nullis exstantibus factus est quod Graeci εξ ουχ οντων dicunt). There is no question that Hilary is presenting information generally unfamiliar to Latin readers as he argues for the importance of the Nicene Creed as a unique standard of doctrinal authority.

A third Latin citation of the Nicene Creed, written ca. 359–360, is located in Lucifer of Cagliari's vitriolic treatise, On Not Sparing Those Who Have Forsaken God 18.Footnote ⁵³ In this version, the anathema at the end of the creed is not mentioned. Instead, Lucifer says in conclusion: “You see that this is the apostolic and evangelical faith, that the Son always reigned with the Father, and upholds the rule, which acknowledges that He is a perfect divine Trinity and consists of one substance.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Otherwise, Lucifer's text matches Hilary's closely,Footnote ⁵⁵ as does another Latin version which appears in Gregory of Elvira's De fide.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this latter case, the creed concludes the anathemas with “Amen deo,” which may indicate its use in public reading, that is, in a congregational setting. Antony Piras has proposed that Lucifer of Cagliari's version of the Latin symbol was already in use in the churches of Sardinia (where he was bishop), and the ending of Gregory's version may lend specific credence to this theory. There is extant another Latin version of the creed (once counted among Ambrose's works though probably dating to the early fifth century) which also ends with an “Amen.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Finally, there is a fifth version of the Latin creed in the so-called Tomus Damasi,Footnote ⁵⁸ a text with a convoluted and uncertain history, usually dated to 377–378. The form of the creed cited in this text is much like Hilary's and the others except for one important difference: there is an expanded clause on the Holy Spirit: “who proceeds from the Father uniquely (proprie), and is true God just as the Son.” Though not the subject of this study, this addition implies the influence of other sources on the earlier Latin text or is itself a gloss.Footnote ⁵⁹

In none of above cases is the creed elucidated clause-by-clause as done by our Commentarius, leading to a tentative conclusion that the Latin Nicene Creed was becoming established in the West by the 370s and read in churches as a means for qualifying orthodox theology. Being read in church does not a catechism make, but it is reasonable to place the Commentarius in this context. There is a similar approach in Augustine's address (ca. 391) to the North African bishops in De fide et de symbolo: Here he uses the Nicene Creed (de fide) as the chief hermeneutic for interpreting the African baptism formula (de symbolo):

The influx of heresy required a more exacting definition of the church's confessions than previously needed. In the case of Augustine, Nicene theology is used to interpret the North African creed; for the Commentarius, the lines of the Nicene Creed are simply being buttressed by scriptural references with minimal and out-dated explanations.