022The city of Ravenna has endured as a shimmering monument to late antique art and civilization—the imperial tombs, the palace churches, the oratorios (prayer chapels) and the baptisteries all glisten with the mosaic makers’ art.
One of the most interesting buildings—and perhaps the one with the most intriguing story—in this northern Italian city is the palace church known today as Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, dedicated to Christ the Redeemer. It was built in the 490s1 to serve the spiritual and political needs of the great Ostrogoth king Theodoric (454–526 C.E.), who brought Arian Christianity to Ravenna in 493 when he conquered the city. During these years, it seemed that Arian Christianity—what today we call the Arian heresy—would dominate Western imperial circles.
Here in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo,2 king and court worshiped and, in that strange late antique world in which rule was seen to be appointed by God, celebrated themselves as rulers chosen by God.
Above the aisles on both sides of the nave of the palace church, as decorated today, are mosaic depictions of processions—from the door, virgins lead to Empress Mary (and the Christ child) enthroned on the left, and male saints lead to Christ the King on the right. This was, after all, a ruler’s church dedicated to a ruler! Near the back of the nave, above the aisle, is a mosaic of a gabled and columned structure labeled “palatium,” meaning palace. Here one would expect to see a stunning mosaic of King Theodoric and perhaps a queen, a court bishop and other functionaries of the court. Depictions of emperor and court are what we find, for example, in the nearby, justly famous church of San Vitale. There the Orthodox emperor Justinian (527–565 C.E.), his wife Theodora and court functionaries stare out at us in timeless regal piety. But—surprise! At Sant’Apollinare, mosaic curtains hang where figures would normally appear.
A closer look at the palatium mosaic, near the back of the nave, reveals several mosaic hands sticking out from behind the columns. Clearly, they once belonged to figures who are now covered over. The curtain, a later mosaic inserted between the columns of the palace, conceals—actually removes—the figures that once stood in the palace. Only traces like the hand remain as a telltale sign.
King Theodoric (454–526 C.E.) and/or his court once filled the spaces between the columns. Their pictures were eradicated when the Catholic (Orthodox) Eastern empire recaptured Ravenna from its Gothic Arian rulers after 540 C.E. And thereby hangs my tale.
The Arian controversy began even before the first Christian emperor Constantine seized sole control of the entire Roman Empire in 324 C.E. In 318 C.E. the bishop of Alexandria, named Alexander, instructed his clergy in the relationship between God and Christ with the phrases, “Always God, always Son” and “at the same time Father, at the same son.”3 Arius, a presbyter (priest) in Alexandria, objected to the use of “eternal” language applied equally to God and to Christ in their relation as “Father” and “Son.” “Fatherhood” and “sonship” were neither eternal nor absolutist terms in the vocabulary of Arius and his circle. Instead, 023the Arian circle maintained, they were biblical terms that implied a sequential relationship between God and the redeemer. If God and Christ were equal in their eternal existence, Arian wags argued, Christ should be called God’s brother, not God’s son.4
The controversy began as a local matter. However, the fury of the Arian controversy, as it has become known, was to dominate imperial, ecclesiastical and civic policies for more than 200 years. As we shall see, it resulted in the first two ecumenical councils of the church, the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. and the council of Constantinople in 381 C.E.; the latter produced a creed still recited every Sunday in mainline Christian churches.
The early Arians are best seen as biblical exegetes concerned with preserving their view of the creaturely nature of the Christ of the Gospels—a Christ who struggled, suffered, died on a cross—as the prototypical obedient servant of God and as the instrument of God in creating and redeeming the universe. The core of the controversy between the Orthodox and the Arians lay in how to understand the concept of “sonship” as applied to the person of the Christian redeemer Jesus Christ. Both sides—Orthodox and Arian—resorted to the biblical text—the Old and New Testaments—as the authoritative sourcebook for clarifying theological language. But they reached exactly opposite conclusions.
The Orthodox bishops of Alexandria interpreted Christ’s sonship in one sense in which the Scriptures use the term—in the biological sense. The Christ was the natural offspring of the paternal God. Thus all biblical texts concerning the son of God as divine referred to Christ’s natural relation to the Father. Christ’s sonship was unique because he alone was the biological (“by nature” or “natural”) son of the Father; all other “sons” (that is, believers) were children and “heirs” of God only by adoption. The Orthodox bishops translated the term monogenes, “only begotten,” from the Gospel of John (1:14, 3:16), to mean unique son.
The Arians, on the other hand, taking the second meaning of “son” in Scripture, where it signifies “believer,” regarded Christ’s sonship as parallel to that of all other believers. Some Arians believed that Christ alone was created by God while all other creatures were made through him. But, according to the Arians, the preexistent through the postresurrection Christ was essentially the prototypical believer—an obedient servant who followed God’s will and so was rewarded by promotion to the status of God’s son. In the language of the New Testament epistle to the Hebrews, Christ was the “pioneer and perfecter” of faith (Hebrews 2:10). Thus the Arians translated John’s key phrase about Christ (“only begotten”) as “preferred or chosen son,” not “unique son.” And they considered biblical terms for Christ’s attributes—Word, Wisdom, Power of God—to be attributes common to Christ and to all believers.
To summarize this somewhat technical discussion, we may say that both sides were answering the question, who is the redeemer Jesus Christ most like—God or us? The Alexandrian bishops thought Christ was most like God the Father; the Arians thought Christ was most like us, but faithful, obedient and triumphant in his roles as creating agent, redeemer and reigning lord.
Both sides could find warrant in Scripture since the Bible uses the term “son” in two senses: a biological sense (Isaac, son of Abraham) and an “adoptive” sense, in which obedient believers are said to become “sons of God” (for example, Deuteronomy 14:1–2—“You are the children of the Lord your God….You are a people holy to the Lord your God”; and John 1:12—“to become children of God”). The Orthodox adopted the biological view—Christ was the biological son of God who shared his essential divine nature, preexistent and always. The Arians saw Christ primarily as suffering as a creature and becoming God’s adoptive son by virtue of his perfect obedience.
In 324 C.E., Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, in a letter to his namesake, Bishop Alexander of Thessalonika, wrote that the Arians focused on biblical texts that spoke of Christ’s struggle and ignored those that (to him) clearly underscored Christ’s deity. He said that the Arians:
“remember all the passages concerning the savior’s passion, both the humiliation and the emptyinga and what is called his impoverishmentb and what acquired things [I.e., as opposed to natural or essential] the savior took to himself for our sakes, as a demurrer of his sublime and eternal divinity; but of those sayings [in the Bible] which are indicative of his nature and glory and nobility and union with the Father, they [the Arians] are forgetful.”5
Of course, it was precisely this model of the heroic creature, living by grace and triumphing 024over adversity, that made the Arians and their beliefs so appealing to the people in the streets and, as we shall see, to the pagan Gothic barbarians of the northern frontier.
For reasons unclear to modern historians, Bishop Alexander of Alexandria did not squash Arius and his followers immediately. Part of the reason may lie in Arius’s relationship to Eusebius of Nicomedia, to whom Arius immediately appealed for protection. Eusebius of Nicomedia was bishop of one of the imperial capitals of the East and a patrician by birth and influence.
The controversy over Christ’s nature had spread across the East and by 324 C.E. had long ceased to be a local Alexandrian matter. In that year, Constantine eliminated his last imperial rival and prepared to come East to take possession of this portion of the Empire. Having declared himself a Christian, Constantine no doubt expected to be embraced by the grateful arms of a peaceful Eastern Christian church. However, his ecclesiastical advance man, Hosius of Cordova, found the Arian controversy raging. A synod held at Antioch not only failed to resolve the controversy there, but it also put one of the most famous and influential Eastern bishops, Eusebius of Caesarea, bishop of Palestine and author of the 025first ecclesiastical history, under the ban for his Arian leanings.
Constantine, through Hosius, resolved to call a full council of the bishops of the East, the first so-called ecumenical council of the church, to settle this and other matters. It met in 325 C.E. at Nicaea, probably under Hosius’s presidency.
We have no record of the proceedings of the Council of Nicaea, and only scant notices of the discussions. But the council did produce a creed signed by all but two Egyptian bishops and Arius. The creed not only vindicated the Alexandrian Episcopal Christology, it also anathematized the Arians by rejecting anyone who claimed that, as the Arians did, Christ was “of another hypostasis or a creature or mutable or subject to change.”
Decades later, the Arians admitted they signed the creed only to please the emperor, who was in attendance throughout: “The soul is none the worse for a little ink,” the great Nicene defender Gregory of Nazianzus reported them as having said.6
Athanasius, who later became the great Alexandrian bishop, observed the deliberations of the Council of Nicaea as a secretary to Bishop Alexander. Athanasius wrote an account of the discussions that led to the council’s adoption of the innovative and very “clouded” term “homoousios”—meaning “of the same substance”—to describe the relationship between Christ and the Father.7 The council had considered various biblical phrases to describe how Christ was related to God the Father. The Arians were agreeable to all these terms, however, because they could give them an interpretation consistent with their view of Christ. In desperation, the assembled bishops adopted the term homoousios in order to exclude Arian interpretations. For the first time in Christian history, theologians had to admit that a council was driven to use non-scriptural terminology to control the meaning of scriptural language.
Eusebius of Caesarea, the church historian, had his own theology vindicated by the council and wrote a letter home to his church shortly after the close of the council. Eusebius’s stock as a historian has recently gone up, and if 026we accept his letter at face value, we move an important step closer to understanding why the assembled bishops approved the use of such an innovative and problematic term. Eusebius tells us that the emperor Constantine proposed the term homoousios, and that it was not to be understood as indicating that God’s very nature was being divided, but as indication “that the Son of God bears no resemblance to originated creatures but that he is alike in every way only to the Father.”8 In short, the bishops thought they were answering a very simple question: Is Christ more like God or more like us? They voted at Nicaea for the unchangeability of the Son, his likeness to the unchanging God.9
Far from settling the controversy, the Council of Nicaea only fueled it. For the next 56 years, theologians argued over the proper language to use in describing Christ’s relation to God. Numerous synods proposed a variety of terminological distinctions to counter, cloud or vindicate the creed of Nicaea. Inside the empire, bishops on all sides of the Arian controversy were deposed for theological error and replaced by new bishops with views more acceptable to the reigning emperor. Athanasius of Alexandria underwent no fewer than five periods of exile by imperial order for his 027defense of Nicaea.
Finally, in 379, Theodosius I (379–395 C.E.) called a new ecumenical council that met at Constantinople in 381 C.E. The Council of Constantinople adopted a creed in line with the decisions of the Council of Nicaea, and it is this council’s creed that is still recited in Christian churches as the “Nicene Creed.”10
Up to this point we have been discussing the sophisticated Arianism of the Eastern bishops. But Arian doctrine had a different appeal to the people on the frontiers of the empire in the West. Newly displaced Germanic tribes were being driven to the empire’s borders by emerging peoples who pushed them south and west toward the Mediterranean. There struggle and triumph were the key issues, and the Arian portrait of a struggling and triumphant redeemer addressed precisely the needs of the tribes. The imitation of this heroic figure of Christ was at the heart of the Arianism that made its way among the Goths, according to recent research.11
When and why the Goths were converted to Arianism has been hotly debated. Recently the traditional date for the conversion of the Visigoths (c. 372–376 C.E.) has been confirmed.12 As early as 348 C.E., the Arian Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia succeeded in having ordained as a bishop a descendant of Romanized Goths, a certain Ulfilas, who then carried out missionary work among his people. By adopting the Arian Christianity of the Roman emperor Valens (365–378 C.E.), the Goths could cross over into Roman turf as co-religionists. It was a relatively easy step, especially in face of the disintegration of the older tribal religion of the lower classes among the Goths. In addition, as suggested earlier, Arian theology—Christ as teacher and model, calling us to the “imitation” of Christ—appealed to ordinary believers among the Western barbarians.
By 410, when Rome fell to the Arian Goths, the city had long ceased to be the imperial capital and administrative center of the West. In 293, after the emperor Diocletian appointed his co-rulers (the so-called Tetrarchy), the emperor Maximian shifted the imperial capital to Milan. Milan remained the imperial capital until 402, when Honorius moved it to the more easily defendable town of Ravenna.
At Ravenna various rulers held sway until, in 488, Theodoric marched on King Odovacar (476–493) with the support of the Eastern emperor Zeno (474–491). By 490 Theodoric had conquered most of Italy except Ravenna, which finally fell to him in 493.
Theodoric also chose Ravenna as his capital, ruling all of Italy from there (493–526). Known for his tolerance of other Christians and other religions, he was nonetheless an Arian Christian ruler and began an ambitious program of building for his Arian court, and for the Arians in Ravenna.13
What is known today as Sant’Apollinare Nuovo was part of that building program. All that survives of the interior decoration commissioned by Theodoric are the Christological scenes on the walls of the upper nave, Mary enthroned and approached by the Magi on the front of the left wall, 030the depictions of the palace and of the nearby town of Classis at the back of the nave, and the depictions of prophets and apostles between the clerestory windows.14
Tensions that existed in Theodoric’s day between the Arian kings of Italy at Ravenna and the Orthodox emperors at Constantinople accelerated with his death in 526; but it was not until 540 that Ravenna was captured by forces of Constantinople, and not until 554 that Italy was entirely pacified. Probably because of the large number of Arian adherents in the city, the Orthodox moved slowly to “reconcile” (that is bring into the Orthodox camp) various Arian churches in and around Ravenna. By 561, the Orthodox bishop Agnellus (ca. 556–570) put out a list of such “reconciled” congregations. He probably transformed the interior of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo at that time.15
Agnellus’s restoration of the church expunged the figures from the “palatium” mosaic and added the processional mosaics of saints and virgins on the nave walls to cover whatever the Arians had constructed there. Thus the interior decoration of 031the church as the visitor now sees it represents a composite of the Orthodox restoration with only traces of the original Arian regal mosaics. Constantinople wanted to expunge not just the Arianism of the Gothic kings of Italy, but also the memory of Arian kings as rulers of Italy.16
With Ravenna back in Eastern Orthodox hands, Bishop Agnellus was free to engage in what the Romans called damnatio memoriae—the eradication from history of the losing (and in this case, “polluting”) figures. The church had picked up this old Roman way of eliminating its most feared enemies. Sant’Apollinare Nuovo was not the only building in Ravenna to feel the effect of the new rulers. A perfectly splendid and serviceable baptisteryc built by the Arians was demoted to an oratorio (a prayer chapel) by the Orthodox conquerors.17
Before the Arian controversy, theologians tended to focus on the preexistent Christ, the Christ who could be identified with the Logos doctrine developed by the philosophers and incorporated into Hellenistic Judaism by Philo of Alexandria. But Athanasius’s doctrine of the eternal deity of the Son of God shifted the point of mediation between God and the world from the preexistent Logos to the Incarnate Christ.18 Later, the victorious God of the cross and resurrection was stressed, rather than a preexistent mediatorial reality. Thus, Christian theology moved toward a Christocentric view of God that stressed the incarnate Son as the clearest revelation of God. Scholars have yet to explore the effect of this on Christian intolerance for philosophical pagan theology and on Christian departure from Jewish conceptions of God.
But the Arian mosaics of Ravenna were not completely expunged, and they have not lost their luster. They still stun and delight the crowds of tourists who flock here, pouring over their guidebooks and feeding the coin meters that activate the monument’s interior lighting. Visitors from around the world stand transfixed as the luminous mosaics shimmer mysteriously, bringing to life long-dead rulers, scenes from the Gospels and the triumphs of martyrs. In antiquity these mosaics evoked in the 032worshiper the other-worldly triumph of the Gospel over the shadowy material world of human history. In these great halls, the light of heaven pierced a sorrow-filled world with radiating waves of light and warmth, directing the eye forward to the center of worship and above to the heavenly cosmos. To the discerning supplicant, they still do.
22The city of Ravenna has endured as a shimmering monument to late antique art and civilization—the imperial tombs, the palace churches, the oratorios (prayer chapels) and the baptisteries all glisten with the mosaic makers’ art. One of the most interesting buildings—and perhaps the one with the most intriguing story—in this northern Italian city is the palace church known today as Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, dedicated to Christ the Redeemer. It was built in the 490s1 to serve the spiritual and political needs of the great Ostrogoth king Theodoric (454–526 C.E.), who brought Arian Christianity to Ravenna in 493 when he conquered […]
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See Philippians 2:5–11—“Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the time of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.…”
2.
See 2 Corinthians 2:9—“For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything.”
For the founding date, see Richard Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, The Pelican History of Art (Hammondsworth/Baltimore/Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 138.
2.
See Guiseppi Bovini, Ravenna, trans. by Robert Eric Wolf (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1971), p. 77. Although initially dedicated to Jesus Christ by the Arian king Theodoric, the church was subsequently renamed in the sixth century the Church of St. Martin and received its present name, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, just after 850 C.E.
3.
Arius, Letter to Eusebius of Nicodemia 2, in William G. Rusch, The Trinitarian Controversy, Sources of Early Christian Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), p. 29.
4.
For further references and readings on early Arianism, see Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh, “The Centrality of Soteriology in Early Arianism,” Anglican Theological Review 59 (1977), pp. 260–278; Early Arianism—A View of Salvation (Philadelphia and London: Fortress Press and S.C.M., 1981); Dennis E. Groh, “New Directions in Arian Research,” Anglican Theological Review 68 (1986), pp. 347–355; and “Arius, Arianism,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, edited by David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 384–386.
5.
Epistle to Alexander 14.37.
6.
Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration XVIII 17; quoted from H.M. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: D. Bell, 1900), p. 46.
7.
Athanasius, De Decretis 20, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, second series, vol. 4, St. Athanasius: Select Letters and Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), p. 163.
8.
Eusebius of Caesarea’s Letter to His Church, in Rusch, The Trinitarian Controversy, p. 54.
9.
For why unchangeability was such a key issue for Christian theologians at this time, see my remarks in “The Religion of the Empire: Christianity from Constantine to the Arab Conquest,” in Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism—A Parallel History of Their Origins and Early Development, ed. by Hershel Shanks (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992).
10.
The present text of the Creed of Constantinople was preserved and transmitted to us by the Council of Chalcedon (451 C.E.) and can be found in Richard A. Norris, Jr., The Christological Controversy, Sources of Christian Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), p. 157. For scholarly discussions as to whether this creed actually derives from the Council of Constantinople, see Hanson, Search for the Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988), pp. 812–815.
11.
Concerning Christ as teacher and model in Germanic Arianism, and the importance of the untouched Arian Jesus cycle in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo for the “imitation” of Christ motif, cf. Sörries, Die Bilder der Orthodoxen im Kampf Gegen den Arianismus. Eine Apologie der orthodoxen Christologie und Trinitätslehre gegenüber der arianischen Häresie, dargestellt an den ravennatischen Mosaiken und Bildern des 6. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main/Bern: Peter Lang, 1983), pp. 67 and 87. The Jesus cycle definitely dates to Theodoric’s building of the church: Otto G. Von Simson, Sacred Art—Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), p. 71.
12.
Zeev Rubin, in “The Conversion of the Visigoths to Christianity,” Museum Helveticum 38 (1981), pp. 34–54, has sustained this date and reaffirmed E. A. Thompson’s picture of the social situation of the Goths at this juncture of history. Rubin’s position is reported in the text following this note. I am grateful to Gideon Bohak of Princeton University for this reference.
13.
For the extent and progress of his program, see now Mark J. Johnson, “Toward a History of Theodoric’s Building Program,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 42 (1988), pp. 73–96.
14.
Johnson, “Toward a History,” p. 85.
15.
Sörries, Die Bilder der Orthodoxen, pp. 22–24, 57, 271.
16.
Sörries, Die Bilder der Orthodoxen, p. 59.
17.
Guiseppi Bovini, Ravena Felix (Ravenna: Edizioni A. Longo, 1957), p. 31. Though the Arian baptistery is not explicitly mentioned in the list of structures “reconciled” to the Catholic Church by Bishop Agnellus in 561 C.E., Sant’Apollinare Nuovo is, and clearly figures in the Orthodox damnatio: Reiner Sörries, Die Bilder der Orthodoxen, pp. 24, 57, 72.
