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Home , Consubstantiality, Homoiousian, Homoousion, Nicaea

Vigiliae Christianae Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012) 482-502 brill.com/vc

Alexander of and the

Mark Edwards , Oxford, OX1 1DP, United Kingdom: [email protected]

Abstract This paper responds to recent publications which play down the role of Bishop Alex- ander of Alexandria in securing the adoption of the term homoousion at the Nicene Council of 325. It argues that, while the term is not employed in any surviving work from his hand, there is some reason to believe that he sanctioned the use of it by his colleagues. There is no doubt that before the Council he had already declared the Son to be “from the Father’s ”, and it is all but certain that when this phrase was challenged, together with the homoousion at , it was he who produced a concil- iatory exegesis of both innovations, relying on the that had already been expounded in his letters ’ story that he and Hosius of Cordoba had con- certed a plan to introduce the homoousion is not implausible, and it should not be assumed that the author of an anonymous life of Constantine, which corroborates this narrative, is merely paraphrasing Philostorgius. Their testimony is consistent with that of Ambrose of Milan, who can be shown to have been acquainted both with docu- ments and with witnesses of the proceedings at the Council.

Keywords Nicaea, Alexander of Alexandria, homoousion, , , of ,

To whom do we owe the presence in the of the adjective homoousios? There was a time when everyone would have held the opinion, lately endorsed again by Henry Chadwick, that “anti-Arian leaders” had already resolved to press it upon the Council of 325 before its opening.1 The parties to this compact were always assumed to have been Alexander

1) H. Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society from Galilee to Gregory the Great (Oxford: OUP, 2001), 198. J.W.C. Wand, A History of the Early Church (London: Methuen, 1937), 149 was confident enough to affirm that Alexander employed thehomoousion in a charge to the clergy of Egypt, though he offers no documentary proof of this.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/157007212X613410

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion 483 of Alexandria and his Spanish confederate Hosius of Cordova. B.J. Kidd expressed the common view when he opined that, although it was Hosius who was “really responsible for the homoousion”, he did not act without securing the assent of Alexander.2 The historian A.H.M. Jones agrees that Hosius may have sought Alexander’s sanction for recommending the “acceptance of the term” at the Nicene Council, and does not feel obliged to show evidence that Alexander himself would have endorsed it.3 In more recent years, however, a chaste review of the evidence has persuaded many historians that he evinced no partiality for the word, and fails to make use of it even where it was eminently suited to his purpose.4 In contrast to G.C. Stead, who argues merely that it was “not the initial focus of controversy”,5 Timothy Barnes appears to doubt that the homoousion gave rise to a conversation of any note before the Council,6 while P.F. Beatrice holds the extreme position that even Alexander subscribed to it only at the Emperor’s behest.7 Scholars have arrived at this consensus by discounting ancient testimo- nies to the currency of the homoousion in the Egyptian church before the Council of Nicaea in 325. I shall argue here that while the evidence, taken piece by piece, may be almost weightless, its cumulative force is not so trifling. I shall not maintain that Alexander openly embraced thehomoou- sion before the council; it does, however, appear to me highly probable that he sanctioned its use by others, and that when he became its champion at Nicaea he added nothing but the word itself to his earlier pronounce- ments. I shall begin by noting the evidence, in the letters of Arius and in his own, that Alexander made his case before Nicaea without appeal to the

2) B.J. Kidd, History of the Church to AD 461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), 26. 3) A.H.M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (London 1949), 162. 4) See M. Simonetti, Studi sull’ arianesimo (Rome: Editrice Studium, 1960), 125n.76, and R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of (Edinburgh: T. And T. Clark, 1988), 140. 5) G.C. Stead, Divine Substance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 223. (My italics). 6) T.D. Barnes, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 14 (2007), 197, reviewing N. Lenski (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Since, however, Barnes inclines to believe the report of a pact between Hosius and Alexander before the Council, he is not refuting but amplifying the statements in that volume to which he purports to take exception. 7) I shall reply in detail below to some of the propositions of P.F. Beatrice, “TheHomoousion from Hellenism to ”, Church History 74 (2002), 243-272. I shall not contest his history of the term before the Council, and his case for an Egyptian provenance seems to me more tenable than many of its rivals.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access 484 M. Edwards / Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012) 482-502 homoousion; I shall then show, from the testimony of Eusebius of Nicome- dia, that he already believed the Son to be “from the essence” of the Father. Next I shall demonstrate that it is most likely to have been he who con- vinced Eusebius of Caesarea that the homoousion signified nothing more than perfect likeness to the Father. Finally, I shall urge that we have no good reason to disbelieve those witnesses who inform us that Alexander took up the term homoousios at the Nicene Council in order to disarm his chief antagonist, Eusebius of Nicomedia. I do not mean to deny that in his own eyes this political success was also the vindication of a solemn and eternal truth.

The Homoousion in Arius When the term homoousion enters the controversy in the letter addressed by Arius to his bishop Alexander of Alexandria, he assumes that Alexander will recognise it as a plain diagnostic of heresy. Except for the affirmation that the Son is “out of nothing”, which he reserves for his appeal to his fellow-Lucianist Eusebius of Nicomedia,8 this document contains all the rudiments of the theology that came to be known as “Arian”. The scrip- tures, it argues, prove that the Father alone is wise and good, that he alone possesses immortality, that he alone is without beginning, but furnishes a beginning for all other subjects of existence. These subjects include the Son, who could not be called Son unless we can say that “before he was begotten he was not”. Though timeless in origin he is not eternal; and while there is no more authority for speaking of his creation than of his being begotten, founded or established, it is a fact that all four terms are employed in the scriptures. We therefore have no reason to award a seman- tic priority to any of them, or to dwell upon its literal corollaries. Those who do so will totter into one of the infamous heresies which have made the Godhead subject to schism, change or perturbation:9

Offspring, but not as one of the things that are generated, nor in the way that Valentinus affirmed the Father’s offspring to be an emanation, nor in the way that Manichaeus ventured to call the offspring a ὁμοούσιον μέρος [consubstantial part] of the Father, nor in the way that spoke of a “son-Father”, dividing

8) Theodoret,Church History 1.5.4, p. 27.4 Parmentier and Hansen. 9) Athanasius Werke. Erster Band, ed. H.H. Opitz (Berlin: De Gruyter 1934), 243.32-244.2.

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the monad, nor as Hieracas said a torch from a torch or a lamp made into two. (Athanasius, Synods 16).

No equivalent to the term homoousios has been adduced from the surviving corpus of Manichaean texts in any language. Nevertheless, the phrase homoousion meros, which implies the abscission of part of the Godhead, indicates that Arius was acquainted with a salient premiss of Mani’s gospel, at least as this was construed within the Church. According to the “epistle called Fundamental”, which Augustine ascribes to Mani himself, the God- head before the origin of the world was an extended realm of light, lying adjacent to an extended realm of darkness. The untimely desire of the darkness to embrace the light precipitated a conflict, which resulted on the one hand in the superimposition of form on darkness, but on the other in the incarceration of splinters of light within the material cosmos. The busi- ness of the Manichaean elect was to amass as many particles of light as could be ingested by the consumption of plants, in which a larger quantity of light inhered than in animals. A voracious Manichee might thus be said to become a ὁμοούσιον μέρος of the divine, one the entirety of his sub- stance had been converted by the alimentary process into light. Arius’ juxtaposition of the Manichaean tenet with the fissiparous con- ception of Sabellius and the of Valentinus reveals that in his eyes the greatest heresy was the attribution of material properties to God. ’s scrupulosity in his use of the term homoousios and the widespread reluctance of Churchmen to sue it after the Nicene council are also explained by the fear of making God incarnate before his time,10 though no-one after Arius chose to vindicate the incorporeality of the Father by deriving the Son “from nothing”. Later historians tell us that the word had been condemned at the council of which deposed Paul of Samosata in 268;11 we cannot say whether Arius was aware of this, or whether that council could have been animated by fear of the Manichees, but he was evidently unacquainted with any use of the homoousion as an orthodox watchword. Far from insinuating that Alexander espoused it, he assumes that it will be as much a Gorgon’s head to him as to other believers. It seems then that, when this controversy erupted, the homoousion did not figure in the preaching of the Alexandrian episcopate.

10) See M.J. Edwards, “Did Origen Apply the Word Homoousios to the Son?”, Journal of Theological Studies 49 (1998), 568-580 for the information collected in this paragraph. 11) Athanasius, De Synodis 43-45; Hilary of Poitiers, De Synodis 80-81.

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Arius does, however, complain to Eusebius of Nicomedia that three bishops of Egypt have declined to join him in upholding the priority of the Father:12

Καὶ ἐπειδὴ Εὐσέβιος ὁ ἀδελφός σου ὁ ἐν Καισαρείᾳ καὶ Θεόδοτος καὶ Παυλῖνος καὶ Ἀθανάσιος καὶ Γρηγόριος καὶ Ἀέτιος καὶ πάντες οἱ κατὰ τὴν Ἀνατολὴν λέγουσιν ὅτι προϋπάρχει ὁ θεὸς τοῦ υἱοῦ ἀνάρχως, ἀνάθεμα ἐγένοντο, δίχα μόνου Φιλογονίου καὶ Ἑλλανικοῦ καὶ Μακαρίου, ἀνθρώπων αἱρετικῶν ἀκατηχήτων, τὸν υἱὸν λεγόντων οἱ μὲν ἐρυγήν, οἱ δὲ προβολήν, οἱ δὲ συναγέννητον. And since Eusebius, your brother of Caesarea, Theodoret, Paulinus, Athanasius, Gregory, Aetius and all the orientals say that God exists before the Son without beginning, they have been anathematized, all but Philogonius, Hellanicus and Macarius, heretical and untutored men, of whom some call the Son an eructation, some an emanation, some co-unbegotten. (Theodoret,Church History 1.5.2).

Theodoret says of these three, and of these three only, that they held the Son to exist eternally and before the ages, equal in honour (homotimos) to the Father and homoousios.13 If he writes, as Hanson suspects,14 with the generosity of hindsight, we may wonder why he did not extend it also to Alexander of Alexandria. The men whom he singles out are the three to whom Arius himself refers as heretics so notorious that simply to be in their company is to be half-convicted of error. If his reticence suggests that Alexander had not publicly espoused the homoousios, he names the three other prelates because in his view they were guilty of errors that Alexander had so far merely condoned. His charge that one at least of them thought the Son “co-unbegotten” with the Father can hardly be true, but would be explicable as an eristic substitution for homoousios, a term which was often thought (by its opponents) to annihilate all distinctions between the Father and the Son.15 The coupling of the predicateshomotimos and homoousios may also deserve attention. In catholic writers, from to Theodoret

12) Theodoret,Kirchengeschichte , ed. L. Parmentier and G.C. Hansen (Berlin: De Gruyter, GCS, neue folge 5. 1998), 26. 13) Ibid. 1.5.6, p. 27.16 Parmentier and Hansen. 14) R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1988), 7. Macarius [of Jerusalem] and Philogonius are commended by Athanasius as ardent supporters of the Nicene Creed in Letter to the Egyptians and Africans 8. 15) See Stead, Divine Substance, 250 and 259-60 on the fear that the homoousion would compromise the primacy of the Father.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion 487 himself, both adjectives occur, but not in company; the rule appears to be that the Son is homotimos in worship, homoousios in doctrinal affirmations, and that the presence of the latter term would render the weaker homoti- mos redundant.16 For the architects of the Nicene Creed and its first defend- ers, however, it seems that parity of honour and identity of substance were equipollent, so that even Athanasius, before the Council of Sirmium in 351, does not appeal to the Nicene homoousion, but is content to maintain that the Son, being from the Father, shares his attributes and is entitled to the same worship.17 When, therefore, Theodoret treats the terms as a pair, showing no particular fondness for either in other writings, this departure from the idiom of the fifth century may betoken the use of a source con- temporary with the events.

The Creed of Alexander of Alexandria We find the unchanging nucleus of Alexander’s thought in a brief encycli- cal which begins with the words ἑνὸς σωματός, “of one body”.18 Since the nineteenth century, its frugal and tempered style has been thought to war- rant the suspicion that it was drafted on his behalf by Athanasius, his dea- con and lieutenant during the last years of his tenure.19 Be that as it may, it would not have been published under his name if had not expressed an opinion which he had made his own, and to which he could lend his suf- frage at an ecclesiastical synod. It commences with the statutory polemic against his adversary, Eusebius of Nicomedia, whose delinquencies have

16) Thus Basil,On the 5.8 and 6.13 prepares us for his argument that the Spirit is homotimos with the Father by giving this epithet to the Son; at Against Eunomius 1.25 he declares that the throne of the Son is homotimos with that of the Father. Pseudo-Ignatius, Philippians 3, appeals to in the threefold name to prove that Father, Son and Spirit are homotimoi. Theodoret,Questions and Answers 33 attributes the use of the term homoti- mos to an unnamed interlocutor, who, since he is not inclined to admit the prepotence of the Son, would no doubt have shrunk from declaring him homoousios with the Father. 17) Thus the comparison of the Son to the Emperor’s statue, which must be treated with the same reverence as the original, is not repeated in his later works. As Stead, Divine Substance, 262-266 observes, cannot be reduced to parity of honour in the De Decre- tis, De Synodis and De Sententia Dionysii. 18) Socrates, Kirchengeschichte 1.6, ed. G.C. Hansen (Berlin: De Gruyter, GCS neue folge 1, 1995), 6-10. 19) G.C. Stead, “Athanasius’ Earliest Written Work”, Journal of Theological Studies 39 (1988), 76-91.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access 488 M. Edwards / Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012) 482-502 obliged him to produce this manifesto. Next Alexander rehearses in brief the errors of Arius and his partisans. They allege (he says) that there was a time when the Father was not yet Father; that, as there was a time when the Son was not, the Father made him out of nothing; that the Son is therefore both a creature and a thing made, not like the Father in or essence, and not in truth or nature either his Word or his Wisdom. Possessing these appellatives only in an improper sense he is in fact subject to change and alteration, and has neither a perfect vision of the Father nor essential knowledge of him. He is indeed the Father’s instrument, brought into being only that others might be made through him (Socrates, Church His- tory 1.6.10). Much of this would appear to be calumny or invidious deduction;20 what is certain and germane to our current purpose, however, is that Alex- ander would not have attributed these tenets to the Arians had they not seemed to lie on the wrong side of the line between heresy and . It is evident, then, that he himself held the Son to be coeval with the Father, like in essence (as he expressly says)21 and hence no creature, fully endowed with the vision and knowledge of the Father. And so it proves: with another fleeting broadside against Eusebius of Nicomedia, Alexander goes on to demonstrate that every doctrine that he ascribes to Arius is confounded by the scriptures (Socrates, Church History 1.6.12-16). How can have been a time when the Word was not, when tells us that he was “with the Father from the beginning” ( John 1.3)? How can the one through whom all things have come into existence be a creature? How can he be from nothing, when the father says of him “My Heart has disgorged a goodly word” (Psalm 45.1)? Can he of whom it is said that he is the same yesterday, today and for ever (Hebrew 12.8) submit to any change? If he were unlike the Father in essence (1.6.16), would it be said that he is the Father’s perfect image or his radiance. Can he for whose sake all things were made be made for the sake of another, and can his knowledge be circumscribed when he himself declares “as the Father

20) The letters of Arius do not indicate that he pronounced the Son to be “made”, and, far from imputing change to him, he appears to have thought him unchangeable by the Father’s will. It is Alexander, or his diaconal counsellor Athanasius, who infers that what is true of him by the Father’s will is not true of him by nature; even the positions that “there was when” the Son “was not”, that he is the Father’s Word and Wisdom only by courtesy and that he neither sees nor knows the Father’s essence may be Alexandrian glosses on the silence of Arius rather than citations of his own words. 21) Socrates, Church History 1.6.10, p. 8.1-2 Hansen.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion 489 knows me so I too know the Father?” Alexander concludes in a lengthy peroration that one would not have thought such perversity conceivable had not the Apostle warned of heresies in days to come (1.6.24-26, citing 1Timothy 4.1). The other surviving work by Alexander of Alexandria is a voluminous epistle to his namesake, Alexander of Byzantium, which has never been ascribed to another hand. More than four times as long as the ἑνὸς σωματός, it is scarcely broader in scope or more prolific in argument.22 Its strictures on Eusebius of Nicomedia are eked out by comparisons with Paul of Samosata, the first great prelate to be deposed by an assembly of his peers from the neighbouring provinces, and with Lucian of Antioch, who was known to have been the common teacher of Arius and Eusebius of Nico- media, though not regarded on all sides as a heretic. It is in this letter that Alexander expressly declares the Son to be “from the father” (.14.45) in opposition to those who (as he complains repeatedly) suppose him to have been created in time and out of nothing. He now asserts not so much a likeness of essence as a community of nature (1.4.31),23 which he appears to deem equivalent to—we ought not to say, reducible to—a parity of honour (1.4.40). Nor is it any diminution, either of his Godhead or of his majesty, to style him the peerless image of the Father, for if the archetype is eternal so is the image (1.4.27f, 1.4.48). The one prerogative which is denied to the Son is that of being unbegotten. It is by virtue of being born without mediation from the Father that he shares the Father’s nature; the birth is affirmed, and the unity of nature is not concealed, when he con- fesses that “the Father is greater than I” (1.4.52; John 14.28). In expound- ing the words and acts of the Son on earth, we must beware of losing the manhood in the and of burying the divinity in the manhood: to uphold the integrity of the incarnate Christ is not to confound the two natures in the one hypostasis (1.4.36-38).24 The same heresies are unmasked as in henos sômatos, the same texts adduced against them from the scrip- tures; in a notable foreshadowing of later controversies, Alexander confers on Mary the title theotokos, “mother of God” (1.4.53).

22) Theodoret,Kirchengeschichte 1.4, ed. L. Parmentier and G.C. Hansen (De Gruyter: Berlin, GCS, neue folge 5, 1998), 8-25. 23) Barnes (2007), 197 appears to deny that ousia and phusis are equivalent terms for Alex- ander, but I am not aware that this position represents a scholarly consensus. 24) The occurrence of this “Antiochene” formulary in a document that no semantic vagary can deny to be “Alexandrian” has too often escaped the attention of historians.

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These two letters then contain in nuce the Trinitarian theology of the Alexandrian patriarch in the years preceding the Council of Nicaea. We see that, in opposition to those who regard the Son as a creature of the Father, he postulates a direct emission, comparable to the issuing of a word from the speaker’s heart. He can tolerate no denial of a community of nature or likeness of essence between the Father and the Son. The expression “like in essence” (ὅμοιος κατ᾽ ὀυσίαν) was adopted some thirty years later by writ- ers hostile to Arius who also shrank from certain implications of the Nicene term homoousios. Its meaning for Alexander, however, seems to be not so much “of similar essence” as “like insofar they possess the same essence”; we cannot, therefore, be sure that because he employed this locution he would have rejected the homoousion. Even to infer that he avoided it is to go beyond the evidence. Alexander’s refusal to admit that the Son is in any sense a creature suffices to prove that he is no precursor of the “”; nor would have he have concurred with any author, or homoousian, who believed that it means one thing to speak of the Son as the Father’s image and another to affirm a community of nature or essence. For him these are not opposed or even complemen- tary dogmas: they are authorised statements of the same position. To those who recalled that Seth was the perfect image and likeness of his father Adam, there was no reason to suppose that an image must be of another nature than its archetype;25 in this respect, as in most others, the teaching of Alexander in his letters is fully consonant with that of Athanasius in his Orations against the Arians, though he has not yet arrived at the homoou- sian doctrine which the later Athanasius was to inculcate as a test of strict belief in the divinity of the Son.

The Letter of Eusebius of Nicomedia to Paulinus26 In addition to Alexander’s letters, we possess one other vestige of his teaching before Nicaea. Though our witness is his enemy, Eusebius of

25) Genesis 5.3, cf. Origen, De Principiis 1.2.6. 26) For Paulinus as an associate of Eusebius see Theodoret, Church History 1.5 above. W. Löhr, “Arius Reconsidered (Part I)”, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 9 (2005), 554 n. 83 points out that he is said to have been translated, six months before his death, to the see of Antioch. Since he appears in no list of the signatories at Nicaea, either as bishop of Tyre or as Bishop of Antioch, we must presume that he was dead by June 325, and that a letter which addresses him as bishop of Tyre cannot have been written after the end of

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Nicomedia, he professes to speak of matters known to all, and we have therefore no good reason to hold him suspect. It is true that some have doubted the authenticity of the letter to Paulinus which Theodoret ascribes to him, yet there is no internal evidence of fabrication or of a motive for it. A forger in the Nicene interest might have foisted upon him greater errors than the rejection of the most ephemeral statement in the creed, and would have made him allude to more notorious figures than three episcopal trib- utaries of Alexander, so obscure that Theodoret is required to explain their presence in the document. That the letter was composed before the Nicene Council is evident from the fact that a tenet promulgated by that council is treated as a provincial neologism:27

ὅτι γὰρ οὔτε δύο ἀγέννητα ἀκηκόαμεν οὔτε ἓν εἰς δύο διῃρημένον οὐδὲ σωματικόν τι πεπονθὸς μεμαθήκαμεν ἢ πεπιστεύκαμεν, δέσποτα, ἀλλ’ ἓν μὲν τὸ ἀγέννητον, ἓν δὲ τὸ ὑπ’ αὐτοῦ ἀληθῶς καὶ οὐκ ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας αὐτοῦ γεγόνος. For we have never heard that there are two unbegotten ones, nor have we learned or been persuaded, my lord, that one has been divided into two or suffered any bodily accident; on the contrary, there is one, the unbegotten, and one who has come into being from this one, truly and not from his essence. (Theodoret,Church History 1.6.3).

Eusebius, as a contemporary writing to a contemporary, has no need to name the proponent of the false doctrine that the Son is from the essence of the Father.28 We have already seen, however, that the other doctrine censured here—that the one who has come to be “participates in the nature of the unbegotten”—is affirmed by Alexander himself in the longer of his

324 at the latest. Philostorgius makes him bishop of Tyre on the eve of the Nicene Council (Church History p. 9.16 Bidez and Winkelmann). Some chronological difficulties remain, as it is difficult to find a place for Paulinus in the inventory of known Antiochene bishops. 27) Theodoret.Kirchengeschichte , ed. L. Parmentier and G.C. Hanson (Berlin: De Gruyter, GCS neue folge 5, 1998), 28. Cf. Candidus , Letter 2.2 Marius Victorinus, Contra Arianos I. As M.R. Barnes remarks, “The Fourth Century as Trinitarian Canon”, in L. Ayres,Chris- Origins (London: Routledge, 1997), 49, the “Arianizing” literature of the Nicene age is more frequently adduced by catholics of the fourth century than by their Greek counterparts. 28) Alexander may have begun to favour this expression after an “Arian” presbyter had advised his colleagues that they could allow Christ to be “from God” without renouncing their own position.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access 492 M. Edwards / Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012) 482-502 two surviving letters. Since Eusebius signs off with a request that Paulinus should write to “my Lord Alexander”, appending no other name, we may be tolerably certain that the whole of this oblique polemic is aimed at his Alexandrian counterpart.29 It is surely the strongest proof of the authentic- ity of this text that it does not credit Alexander with the use of the term homoousios. It is likely enough that an author who thought it absurd to hold that the Son is “from the ousia” of the Father would have been hostile to any locution which implied that Father and Son were of the same essence, and that consequently, Eusebius of Nicomedia, on the eve of the Nicene council, would have regarded an advocate of the homoousion as an infidel.

Eusebius of Caesarea and the Nicene Creed Our evidence regarding the evolution of the creed at the Nicene council is sparse; if we cannot rely on the testimony of Eusebius of Caesarea we know nothing. It is often held that his letter to his own congregation at Caesarea, preserved by Athanasius and Theodoret, is an exercise in camouflage; yet no ancient witness says so, and we must remember that, had it been patently disingenuous, he would not have escaped the penalties which fell on dissident prelates like his namesake of Nicomedia or Theognis of Nicaea. Eusebius undoubtedly aggrandizes his own part in the proceedings and omits much information, including names, that we should prefer him to have disclosed. That is to say that, when writing of affairs in which he was engaged, he is as tendentious as a Thucydides or a Caesar, but not that his work is any less useful to the modern historian than theirs. According to his account, it was his own recitation of the baptismal creed of Caesarea that confirmed his own orthodoxy and furnished the council with a prototype for the creed. He implies, indeed, that, but for the word homoousios, there is nothing in the final decree that is unfamiliar to his congregation. The new term, he explains, has been inserted at the behest of the emperor Constantine, though even this anointed representa- tive of God did not ask his subjects to embrace the addition without an acceptable gloss:30

29) Theodoret,Church History 1.6.8, p. 29 Parmentier and Hansen. 30) Theodoret,Church History, p. 50 Parmentier and Hansen. Cf. Socrates, Church History 1.8.46-47, pp. 25-26 Hansen.

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ὃ καὶ αὐτὸ ἡρμήνευσε λέγων ὅτι μὴ κατὰ σωμάτων πάθη λέγοιτο ὁμοούσιος, οὔτε κατὰ διαίρεσιν οὔτε κατά τινα ἀποτομὴν ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς ὑποστῆναι. Μηδὲ γὰρ δύνασθαι τὴν ἄϋλον καὶ νοερὰν καὶ ἀσώματον φύσιν σωματικόν τι πάθος ὑφίστασθαι, θείοις δὲ καὶ ἀπορρήτοις λόγοις προσήκειν τὰ τοιαῦτα νοεῖν. This same word he interpreted, saying that it is not with respect to bodily acci- dents that he is homoousios, and that his being from the Father is not the conse- quence of division or any abscission. For it cannot be that the nature which is immaterial, intellectual and incorporeal should be subject to any bodily accident; one should rather conceive such things in divine and ineffable terms. (Theodoret, Church History 1.12.7).

No other source informs us that Eusebius read out a creed to general accla- mation. It is sometimes urged that his story is contradicted by an allusion in Theodoret to a writing by Eusebius which was produced as manifest evidence of blasphemy.31 We shall see, however, in the present paper that we have evidence of another allocution to the council by Eusebius of Nico- media, which produced quite another effect than the one intended; no conflict between our sources will remain if we assume that it was only this Eusebius whose confession was at odds with the mind of the Council. This is not to deny that the Caesarean Eusebius handles the facts with some elasticity in his narrative, and has chosen to pass over numerous discrepan- cies between his own creed and the one that was promulgated by the coun- cil. We have already noted, however, that it was no uncommon thing for a historian in the ancient world to accommodate truth to his interests, yet refrain from perpetrating an outright lie. What should we make of Constantine’s intervention?32 Hard as it is to believe that it could have been invented in a public document, it is almost harder still to credit the Emperor with the dialectical aptitude or even the command of Greek that would have been required of an interlocutor at this conference. “God from God” is attested in his Oration to the Saints, but not the homoousion. From the silence of Eusebius Beatrice infers that he intervened without prompting, and that the bishops acquiesced with- out conviction.33 Such an imposition upon the clergy would have been a

31) Theodoret,Church History 1.8.1, p. 34.4-5 Parmentier and Hansen. Cf. Stead (1973), n. 58 below. 32) According to Theodoret,Church History 1.12.17 (not found in Socrates), this included the explanation that Christ is latent in the father before his emergence in actuality, a fore- shadowing of Marius Victorinus which would certainly not have been interpolated by Eusebius. 33) P.F. Beatrice, Church History (2002), 156.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access 494 M. Edwards / Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012) 482-502 departure from the stated principles of an Emperor who is reported to have said on another occasion, “You are asking me to judge when I await the judgment of God”?34 Furthermore, we have still to explain, on this hypoth- esis, why the man who forced the term homoousion on 250 bishops should have been ready to waive it, less than a decade later, in his dealings with the two friendless presbyters Arius and Euzoius (Socrates, Church History 1.26); nor can one easily understand why the prelates who accepted the homoousion only in deference to imperial fiat in 325 should have become vociferous in their espousal of it, not under Constantine, but under his heir Constantius, who was commonly regarded as an enemy of the coun- cil. It is surely more probable that, as the traditional theory argues, they eschewed it for the sake of peace so long as it was not openly condemned, but made it a shibboleth when it seemed to them that without it they could not preserve the substance of the creed. It would lessen our difficulties to suppose that Constantine acted on the advice of his ecclesiastical mentors.35 This would account on the one hand for his hardihood in enjoining this new term on the assembly, and on the other for his readiness to waive it when he received a confession from Arius, in the presence of different counsellors, and after an interim which had made it clear that the homoousion could not guarantee the unity of the Church. This is more than a convenient hypothesis, for Eusebius of Cae- sarea’s own letter reveals that when he sought a commentary on articles in the new creed which were not in his own, he turned not to the Emperor but to a party of theologians whom he expects his correspondents to iden- tify by reputation alone:36

Καὶ δὴ τὸ ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας ὡμολογεῖτο πρὸς αὐτῶν δηλωτικὸν εἶναι τοῦ ἐκ μὲν τοῦ πατρὸς εἶναι, οὐ μὴν ὡς μέρος ὑπάρχειν τοῦ πατρός . . . Οὕτως δὲ καὶ τὸ ὁμοούσιον εἶναι τοῦ πατρὸς τὸν υἱὸν ἐξεταζόμενος ὁ λόγος συνίστησιν, οὐ κατὰ τὸν τῶν σωμάτων τρόπον οὐδὲ τοῖς θνητοῖς ζῴοις παραπλησίως . . . παραστατικὸν δ’ εἶναι τὸ ὁμοούσιον τῷ πατρὶ τοῦ μηδεμίαν ἐμφέρειαν πρὸς τὰ γενητὰ κτίσματα τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ φέρειν, μόνῳ δὲ τῷ πατρὶ τῷ γεγεννηκότι κατὰ πάντα τρόπον ἀφωμοιῶσθαι.

34) Optatus, De Schismate Donatistarum 23. 35) O. Skarsaune, “A Neglected Detail in the Creed of Nicaea”, Vigiliae Christianae 41 (1987) has detected the handiwork of Alexander in almost every line of the Creed, and accepts the report of his pact with Hosius before the Council. 36) Theodoret,Kirchengeschichte , 51 Parmentier and Hansen.

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Now as to the phrase “from the essence”, they affirmed that it signified that, while he is from the Father, he does not exist as a portion of the Father . . . Likewise, after scrutiny, it was established that the expression “homoousios with the Father” was not to be understood in the way that applies to bodies or similarly to mortal ani- mals . . . The expression homoousios“ with the Father” signifies that the bears no resemblance to creatures that have come into being, but uniquely resem- bles in all respects the Father who begot him. (Theodoret,Church History 1.12.9- 10 and 12).

The evidence gathered above suggests that “they” would have included Alexander of Alexandria when it had to be proved that the Son is “from the ousia” of the Father. While it is conceivable that we have to do with a mis- cellaneous party in which each man upheld his own watchword, the most natural reading of Eusebius’ words would imply that a single party defended a particular constellation of beliefs. Defenders of the locution “from the essence” would therefore also be advocates of the homoousion. The gloss which is supposed to have been supplied by the interlocutors of Euse- bius—the homoian explanation, as we may call it, that to share the same ousia is to possess identical properties—is perfectly reconcilable with the doctrine of Alexander in his letters. It is equally consonant with the posi- tion of the same Eusebius in his writings against Marcellus after the Coun- cil, where his unwillingness to speak of a single ousia must be weighed against his insistence that the Son is the consummate likeness of the Father. A reader like Athanasius would take Alexander’s juxtaposition of idioms to mean that perfect likeness cannot amount to less than identity of ousia, whereas Eusebius of Caesarea hears rather that identity of ousia need amount to nothing more than perfect likeness. It would have been prudent in Alexander to countenance both readings of his thought, and thus bring peace to a factious council. Accordingly, the same facts which indicate that Alexander was one of the unnamed proponents of the homoousion will suf- fice to restore the credit of Eusebius of Caesarea, whose letter, as we have noted, is transcribed without demur by authors faithful to the Nicene set- tlement of 325.

The Testimony of Philostorgius On the one hand, then, Eusebius of Nicomedia seems to attest Alexander’s patronage of the formula “from the essence of the Father”; on the other hand, Eusebius of Caesarea indicates that he addressed the Nicene Council

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access 496 M. Edwards / Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012) 482-502 as a proponent of the cognate term homoousion. But did Alexander bring the homoousion to Nicaea, or had he found it expedient, in the course of the debate, to adopt the palladium of an ally? We have some evidence from an ancient source, albeit not one of unimpeachable authority. Philostor- gius, while the epithets “Arian” and “Arianizing” are not fair indications of his sympathies, is certainly the one witness who makes a favourite of Euse- bius of Nicomedia, simply turning the received narrative on its head when no other course will suffice to vindicate his hero. He can hardly have meant to deceive when he constructed a hagiography for Eusebius from the glori- ous accidents and forensic intrigues which were known to belong to the life of Athanasius.37 What he says, on the other hand, of Alexander’s policy at the beginning of the debate which produced the creed of 325 is not contradicted elsewhere, and when it can be compared with other accounts agrees so closely that we have no reason to doubt the particulars that we cannot verify:38

This man asserts that before the Nicene Council Alexander, having encountered Hosius of Cordova and his fellow-bishops after his arrival in Nicomedia, under- took by synodical vote to confess the Son to be homoousios with the Father,39 and banish Arius. (Photius, Bibliotheca 40 = Philostorgius, Church History 1.7).

Philostorgius thus states openly what the Caesarean Eusebius tacitly inti- mates in his account of the proceedings: that Alexander of Alexandria was, at least for that majority who spoke Greek, the principal sponsor of the term homoousion at the Nicene Council. Hanson and Beatrice discount this testimony, but even if were true, as the latter asseverates, that “few scholars” are “ready to take [it] seriously”,40 the names of Chadwick,41

37) Philostorgius, Kirchengeschichte, ed. J. Bidez and L. Winkelmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, GCS, 1981), 23.11-24.11. 38) Ibid., 8.5-9.9, pp. 9-10 Bidez and Winkelmann. 39) Stead, Divine Substance, 252 may be right to infer that Alexander is represented as tak- ing the initiative; I see no reason to entertain his doubts as to whether a “literal” endorse- ment of the adjective homoousios is implied here, though we must remember that Photius is paraphrasing the original text , and without goodwill. 40) Hanson (1988), 200. 41) See n. 1; for a further example of minute veracity in Philostorgius, see Chadwick, “Faith and Order at the Council of Nicaea: A Note on the Background of the Sixth Canon”, Har- vard Theological Review 53 (1960), 177.

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Loofs, Declercq, Skarsaune, and Barnes42 might turn the scale against a greater number. An anonymous life of Constantine recounts the same episode:43

Alexander, setting off from Alexandria sailed with the utmost speed to the Pro- pontis and the region of Nicomedia. Having got there, he came to terms with those around Hosius of Cordova, persuading them to add their suffrage to his own opinion and maintain the homoousion, winning them over with the most judicious arguments.

This author, we note, sees only a just concordat where Philostorgius hints at a conspiracy: when authors of different persuasions concur, it is custom- ary to believe them. It is possible, of course, that the biographer of Con- stantine has merely applied his own rouge to a story which he purloined from Philostorgius, and that those details which are peculiar to his narra- tive were either his own invention or were present in the Church History but omitted by Photius in his epitome. The anonymous Life goes on to relate that “those around Hosius and Alexander prepared in readiness the document (biblion) which all were required to sign”. There are two reasons for supposing this to be genuine:

1. It commences (p. 9.33 Bidez and Winkelmann) with the superscrip- tion “in Nicaea, the metropolis of ”. This formula occurs also as the rubric to a chapter in Gelasius of Cyzicus and to a later epitome of the Council’s decrees in the Vetus Synodicon.44 Nicaea had been the metropolis of Bithynia in the Hellenistic era, but under

42) Skarsaune (1987), 51-52; Barnes (2007), 197; F. Loofs, Die Synode von Antioch im Jahre 324/5 (separately published, Berlin 1913); V.C. De Clercq, Ossius of Cordova, Catholic University of America Studies in Christian Antiquity 13 (1954), 203. In employing the customary form “Hosius” I do not mean to imply that I disagree with De Clercq’s conten- tion that the ancient form was “Ossius”. 43) Philostorgius, ed. Bidez and Winkelmann,9.26-10.29. On the indebtedness of the Life to Philostorgius see pp. lxxxviii-xcv and J. Bidez, “Fragments nouveaux de Philostorge sur la vie de Constantin”, Byzantion 10 (1935), 403-437. Even if the dependence of the Life on Philostorgius were proved, no-one familiar with the practice of Arrian in his Anabasis, or with the “synoptic problem”, will suppose that this precludes the intertwining of the Church History with other documents. 44) Life of Constantine at Philostorgius, p. 9.33 Bidez and Winkelmann; Gelasius of Cyzi- cus, Church History 2.26; Vetus Synodicon 35, trans J. Duffy and J. Parker (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Centre for Byzantine Studies, 1979), 29.

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Roman sway it yielded this status to Nicomedia, not without ran- cour and defiance.45 Although Nicaea was “by long custom” a metropolis, according to a letter of produced in 431 at the Council of Ephesus,46 this was only an honorific designation, and the usage appears to have been confined to documents emanating from the city.47 It seems more probable, therefore, that the biogra- pher was quoting from an archive, whether directly or indirectly, than that he was the author or dupe of a fictitious memorandum. 2. The superscription is followed (p. 10.11-15 Bidez and Winkelmann) by a drafted creed which includes an anathema on the adjective ktis- ton, or “created” (10.14). This is attested in the treatise of Athanasius On the Decrees of the Nicene Council, and in historians who follow him.48 As there is no evidence that the Life drew upon his testimony, the coincidence is best explained by supposing that it accurately reproduces the draft which was retained in Alexandria, and that this was not identical in all respects with the version that was finally pro- mulgated. This conjecture accounts for the discrepancy between Athanasius’ transcript of the creed and the shorter variant which is preserved by Ambrose, Basil, Theodoret and Cyril;49 it also accounts for the absence of any reference to this anathema by Eusebius in his letter to Caesarea, although (in Athanasius’ version of this docu- ment) he has quoted it as an article of the creed. Eusebius, that is to say, comments only on the final version; Athanasius, in reproducing his apology, interpolates the word ktiston in the creed because he is guided by his own memory of the draft.

45) See L. Robert, “La titulature de Nicée et de Nicomédie: la gloire et la haine”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 81 (1977), 1-39. 46) E. Schwartz (ed.), Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum II.1.3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1932), 61-62. 47) See the exordium to the decrees of the (Seventh Oecumenical Council) , most conveniently consulted in J. Alberigo, Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta (3rd edition, Bologna: Istituto per le Scienze Religiosi, 1982), 133. 48) Athanasius, appendix to De Decretis, Gelasius of Cyzicus, Church History 2.7.6 and Socrates, Church History 1.8.25, who is clearly dependent on Athanasius. 49) Ambrose, De Fide 1.20; Theodoret, Church History 1.12.8 (also citing the letter of Euse- bius), Basil, Letter 125.2 (Deferrari) and Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius 3.3. M.F. Wiles, “A Textual Variant in the Creed of the Council of Nicaea”, Studia Patristica 26 (1991), 428- 433 is more inclined to suspect Athanasius of mendacity.

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The Life thus affords good evidence that Alexander and Hosius precon- certed the introduction of the homoousion at the Nicene Council; if its testimony is derived from Philostorgius, we have no reason to doubt any other detail in his story of the pact.

Ambrose of Milan The story of a pact between Alexander and Hosius, as we have seen, is com- mon to Philostorgius and the anonymous life of Constantine. We might guess that it was Hosius who prompted his eastern ally, since we have found so far that, while Alexander extended his protection to Egyptian prelates who favoured the term, he did not feel obliged to use it in his own summaries of ecclesiastical doctrine. For all that, we must be circumspect, as we know even less of the sentiments of Hosius before the council of Nicaea.50 Although he would appear to have presided in Antioch at a pre- liminary synod, which denounced the teaching that there is more than one ousia in the Godhead, our fragmentary and questionable documents of this meeting do not contain any reference to the homoousion.51 When the Council of Sardica, at which he presided in 343, invoked the term homoou- sios, its authority was presumed to lie in its having been adopted as a canon by the Nicene fathers, not in its being synonymous with unius substantiae or with any locution that was already customary in the west.52 Again, we can only guess whether it was Hosius who acted as a conduit of information to Bishop Ambrose of Milan, who supplies an important chapter of this story by preserving a letter written by Eusebius of Nicome- dia before the Nicene Council. Ambrose, as Beatrice observes, was too young too have had any “direct contact with the council”;53 it does not follow that, as Beatrice proceeds to assert, he knew little of it. He was able to embarrass his interlocutors at the council of Aquileia in 381 by reciting

50) See Beatrice (2002) and Michel Barnes (1997), 49. 51) See De Clercq (1954); L. Abramowski, “Die Synode von Antiochien 324/5 und ihr Symbol”, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 86 (1975), 356-66. 52) Athanasius, Tomus ad Antiochenos 5-6, in Athanasius. Werke Band 2, ed. H.-C. Bren- necke, U. heil and A. von Stockhausne (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), 344-346; C.H. Turner (ed.), Concilum Nicaenum, Supplementum: Councilium Romano-Nicaenum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), 541. 53) Beatrice (2002), 145. Ambrose, we should note, is an earlier source than those to whom we owe our transcripts of Alexander’s correspondence and the letter of Eusebius to Paulinus.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access 500 M. Edwards / Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012) 482-502 a letter of Arius,54 and, for all his veneration of Athanasius, he reports the anathemas to the Nicene Creed in the form attested by more accurate witnesses.55 At the same time, Ambrose cordially embraces both the doc- trine of Athanasius and his hermeneutic principles, and it is therefore highly improbable that he would follow any record of the Council, which was calculated to weaken public faith in the authority of the creed. Never- theless, the circumstances to which he ascribed the presence in the creed of the word homoousion are not entirely creditable to its sponsors, as they indicate all too plainly that it was not part of the primitive deposit but a windfall, that its adoption was a piece of forensic strategy, and that, but for the indiscretion of Eusebius of Nicomedia, its utility as a criterion of exclu- sion would not have been apparent even to the most industrious enemies of Arius. All of which is to say that the following anecdote would not have been handed down to us by Ambrose if he did not believe that he had it from an unimpeachable source:56

Sicut auctor ipsorum Eusebius Nicomedensis epistula sua prodidit scribens: Si verum, inquit, dei filium et increatum dicimus, homoousion cum patre incipimus confiteri. Haec cum lecta esset epistula in concilio Nicaeno, hoc verbum in trac- tatu fidei posuerunt patres, quod viderunt adversarii esse formidini, ut tamquam evaginato ab ipsis gladio ipsorum caput nefandae haeresis amputarent. Just as their sire Eusebius revealed in his letter, writing “If we say that he is true Son of God and uncreated, we are on the point of confessing that he is homoousios with the Father”. When this letter had been read out (locuta esset) at the Nicene council, the Fathers inserted this word into the exposition of faith, because they saw how fearful it was to their adversaries. Thus it was that, with [the Arians’] own sword which they themselves had unsheathed, they cut off the head of this abom- inable heresy. (Ambrose, De Fide 3.15.151).

54) See Acta Concilii Aquiliensis 44 in Ambrose, Werke X.3, ed. M. Zelzer (Vienna: Hin- richs, CSEL 82, 1990), 329. At p. 353 a hesitant interlocutor is urged to remember what he signed sub Agrippino; perhaps this means the document which reaffirmed the sover- eignty of the Nicene Creed at Rimini in 359, for no Agrippinus appears in the list of signa- tories to the Nicene Creed. For another case in which a deacon’s signature follows a bishop’s (this time at Nicaea itself ), see Gelasius of Cyzicus, Church History 2.28.2, ed. W. Loeschke (Berlin: De Gruyter, GCS, 1918), 105.1. 55) De Fide 1.20; see n. 49 above. To speak of the Son as a creature is, for Ambrose, a confes- sion of Arian sympathies, and he would not have suppressed the anathema had he found it in his copy. 56) Ambrose, Werke VII, ed. O. Faller (Vienna: Hinrichs, CSEL 78, 1962), 151.

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This is not an incredible narrative: we have already seen that the creed contains one formula, “from the ousia of the Father”, which Eusebius of Nicomedia had pronounced heretical in his correspondence. We can har- monize two accounts if we suppose that the missive described by Ambrose, not the creed of the Caesarean Eusebius, was the blasphemous text which, according to Theodoret, was held up to the indignation of the bishops at Nicaea.57 As Stead observes,58 there is nothing in the words locuta esset to imply that it was read out by the author himself. According to this hypoth- esis, the “blasphemy” (to borrow the partisan language of Theodoret) is the rejection of the homoousion, on the eve of the Council, by Eusebius of Nicomedia. If it was his enemies who published the letter on this occasion, they must already have been aware of its contents; the manoeuvre will therefore have been devised at just such a preliminary meeting as is described by Philostorgius. Ambrose gives a hagiographic account of these transactions, Philostorgius an inimical one; nevertheless, when we juxta- pose their narratives, they make up a diptych of the same event—that is, the adoption at Nicaea of a resolution taken by a small conclave in Bithynia some time before the oecumenical gathering of June 325.

Conclusion The evidence assembled here suggests that Alexander of Alexandria favoured prelates who had espoused the term homoousios, that he publicly held the Father and the Son to be like in essence and of the same nature, and that even before the Council of Nicaea in 325 he had declared the Son to be “from the Father’s essence”. At the same time, none of our witnesses, the majority of whom are ostentatious partisans of the Nicene faith, con- tends that he himself employed the term homoousios in a public writing before the Council. Nevertheless, the pro-Nicene Ambrose, the dissident Philostorgius and the amphibious Eusebius of Caesarea have left reports which, when collated, indicate that at Nicaea Alexander appointed himself the champion of the homoousion, though he was the not the first to intro- duce it into the debate. This conclusion has not been reached by the

57) See n. 31 above on Theodoret,Church History 1.8.1. 58) G.C. Stead, “Eusebius and the Council of Nicaea”, Journal of Theological Studies 24 (1973), 85-100, esp. 99-100. D.M. Gwynn, The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius and the Construction of the ‘’, 213 cites the letter as a “questionable” witness to the sentiments of Eusebius.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access 502 M. Edwards / Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012) 482-502 permutation of elements arbitrarily plucked from half a dozen contradic- tory sources; on the contrary, it has been shown that, if we give equal weight to all testimonies, a single narrative will emerge from their unde- signed coincidences which could not have been derived from any one of them or even from a selective combination. The train of events may be reconstructed as follows. The party opposed to Arius—of whom Alexander, as his ecclesiastical superior, had been the most vociferous—was at first content to rest its case on the principles set forth in the patriarch’s letters. When, however, Eusebius of Nicomedia menaced them with the homoousion some time before the Council of Nicaea, they agreed to turn his barb against him, and therefore recom- mended to the Emperor at Nicaea that this term should be enshrined in a synodical definition of the faith. The chief remonstrants were the two Eusebii. Eusebius of Caesarea, who had at some point tendered his own creed to the assembly of bishops, was satisfied by an explanation reproduc- ing the content of Alexander’s letters; Eusebius of Nicomedia succumbed (as he would have said) to the machinations of his arch-enemy and was deposed. Authorities are divided as to whether he rejected the creed itself or the anathemas (Sozomen, Church History 1.21), but the former is surely more probable, since the two articles that he is known to have denied at the beginning of the council—that the Son is from the ousia of the Father and that the Son is homoousios with the Father—were both accretions to the body of the creed. We learn from all sources that Alexander was part of a coalition at the Council. That Hosius was one of his confederates we need not doubt, though we cannot produce any evidence, except an asseveration in Philos- torgius, of his having been a prime mover in this transaction. This paper does not profess to answer all questions:59 I have tried to elicit as much as our sources can be induced to tell us about the role of Alexander of Alex- andria in the proceedings of Nicaea, but if there is one respect in which our witnesses agree, it is in their propensity to tell us a great deal less than we wish to know.

59) Basil of Caesarea is often understood to have said in Letter 81 that his countryman Hermogenes drafted the Creed, although the latter does not appear as one of the Bishops at the council. If he means only that Hermogenes signed the creed, this would be another instance of a subordinate appending his signature to that of the Bishop.

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