Fierra, an excellent staff report on the origin of the word “heretic” and the theory presented in Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code. There is little I can add except for a (hopefully) interesting digression.
In reading Michael Grant’s excellent biography of Constantine the Great, I was impressed with how little Constantine (in Grant’s version) seemed to care about the overly-detailed religious questions of his day. Grant contends he basically saw Christianity as a means of reuniting the empire (not the primary one, but he acknowledged it had a role). He presided over religious councils only to assure that some decision–any decision–be made; the details of the squabble didn’t really interest him.
There is, of course, the famous story about the theological argument at Nicaea over whether Christ was ηομοιουσιος - “of a similar substance”, or ηομοουσιος - “of the same substance” as God the Father. These words differ by a single iota, but one that marked a serious divide between the Arian and Orthodox churches (this may be the source of the phrase “not one iota of difference”). I doubt that Constantine cared which it was, but he certainly cared that it was splitting this supposedly-unifying force for the Empire.
Given that, I also doubt he would care to encourage doctrinal splits by pejoratively labeling opponents haereticus. He was just a man who saw some good in religion despite the pointless arguments it created. Perhaps like many of us today…
I believe the “similar substance” and “same substance” argument was between the Monophysite position and the Chalcedon position. Arianism was the belief that the Son was created by the Father, and hence, in some sense, inferior to the Father.
I personally doubt Constantine was trying to unite the Empire with Christianity. Quite likely, it had far too few followers for such a role. In any event, allegiance to the Empire was to the state, not a state religion.
The word “homoiousious” is generally identified with the Semi-Arian party, which tried to compromise between Nicene and Arian belief. The true Arians didn’t approve of “homoiousious” any more than “homoousious”. For a while, Semi-Arianism was the majority position in the East, but, in time, the more conservative Semi-Arians were brought around to the understanding that nothing can be “essentially like God” except by being God, while the remainder departed even further from the Nicene position, becoming known as the “Pneumatomachi” because they denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit.
I have never heard “homoiousious” applied to the Monophysites, and it does not make sense. The quarrel between Monophysites and Chalcedonians (who make up 99% of Christianity) is not over the Trinity, but over the Incarnation, Chalcedonians maintaining that Jesus was (and is) both 100% God and 100% Human while being only one person, whereas the Nestorians (Syrians) insist that you have to distinguish the two utterly (so that, in the classic Nestorian dictum, it is wrong to call Mary “the mother of God”), while the Monophysites (Egyptians) proclaim, in reaction to the Nestorians, that Jesus is 100% God/Human, and condemn the majority as being semi-Nestorian.
Constantine’s motivations will always be a mystery. But it should be noted that classical paganism had become pretty much a joke by his time
I stand corrected. My memory isn’t what it was. Care to provide a cite for this claim:
I know of at least one specialist who disagrees: Dr. Kenneth Harl of Tulane. He sees no sign that paganism was in decline, and paganism continued for centuries after Constantine.
I said classical paganism. The serious rivals to Christianity were Neo-Platonism, the mystery religions, and the various (some of them quasi-Christian) gnostic schools. Anyone who still took the Olympians at all seriously did so only by way of massive allegorization.
That may be true of the elite, such as the Neo-Platonists that Augustine fell in with for a time, or the famous ‘defender’ of paganism Symmachus (who vociferously defended keeping the altar of Victory in the Senate House), but its persistence was not only amongst the elite but the ‘hoi polloi’, who would be, without much if any formal schooling, very unlikely to relate to the Olympians by allegory or Neo-Platonic wrangling. The Christianisation of the whole empire was by no means a done deal under Constantine.
Plus at least among the Romans, their specific religion, though it eventually became formally Hellenized by Greek influences, had many other elements such as the “home” deities, lares and *penates *, reverence for ancestors, divination, harvest rituals, etc. that probably remained more relevant to the average man-on-the-via for longer than the more ostentatious hellenized worship. Jove, Juno, Minerva, Febus, etc. had identities and attributions traditional to the Roman culture, apart from those respectively associated with Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, etc. This of course, when dealing with the populations that were ethnic Greek or Latin, or that had been succesfully assimilated – and the assimilees probably had carried over their particular form of paganism and just re-adapted everything to go along with that (e.g. “Zeus-Amon” in Egypt). Paganism itself was popular, but did not have a unified “orthodoxy” in place.
Which is why the Romans (and the Greeks before them) had difficulty in dealing with the Jews and subsequently the Christians. Every other people that was conquered simply merged their local religion into the Roman (or Greek) pantheons and minor gods. “Oh, you call the sun god Aten? We call him Apollo, same thing.” It even allowed local gods as well: “You’ve got a god for the lower Nile? Great! He’s obviously local.” Thus, it was easy for Roman paganism to assimilate other paganisms: there were plenty of gods to go around, sometimes the “same” god under different names, sometimes as a “new” god.
When it came to the Jews and Christians, however, there was no assimilation, because Judaism/Christianity didn’t allow multiple gods. “Your one God is really our Zeus” didn’t cut it. Thus, the Jews constantly rebelled against Greek and then Roman rule whenever there were efforts to assimilate the religion.