The original Santa wasn’t very nice

This is one the funniest cartoons I’ve seen lately. But its implications are far from funny.

If the Incarnation and the Resurrection are the two most staggering miracles of Christianity, then the cartoon illustrates the third one: its survival.

It reminds us, in a humorous form, of the precarious balance at the very heart of Christian doctrine, with half a step to either side potentially able to turn it into nothing more than an antiquarian artefact.

The clash between the two terms, homoousios and homoiusios, defined the first ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325 AD. The two words differed in only one letter, ‘i’, ‘iota’ in Greek, which gave rise to the expression “one iota of difference”.

Yet that one letter spelled the difference between survival and demise, universal truth and subversive heresy. At issue was the divinity of Christ and the nature of the Trinity.

Homoousious (‘of one substance’ in Greek) was the doctrine stating that God the Son is of the same essence as the Father and thus is equal and co-eternal with him. Homoiusios referred to the heresy stating that the essence wasn’t the same, but only similar.

That made Jesus a sort of adopted son of the Father, and certainly not his equal. Proponents of that doctrine insisted on a pecking order in which Jesus was a divine being but not God. He occupied a place above any human or even any angel, but below the Father.

The principal champion of that doctrine, probably the deadliest in the history of Christianity, was Arius, a Cyrenaic presbyter. One of his most impassioned opponents was St Nicholas, a Greek bishop from Asia Minor.

A later legend turned him into a nice, cuddly Santa Claus who stuffs children’s stockings with presents. St Nicholas owes his Christmassy reputation to the numerous miracles attributed to him, but perhaps his greatest miracle was defeating Arianism at Nicaea.

Apparently the arguments got so heated that St Nicholas even punched Arius in the face, but then Arius could try the patience of even a saint. Anyway, if you love our civilisation, you should join me in celebrating the TKO victory St Nicholas and his friends won over Arianism at Nicaea.

For, if the difference between the two terms was only one letter, there was a universe of difference between the two doctrines. If a Christian is someone worshipping Jesus as God, then there would have been no more Christians ever had Arius picked himself up from the floor and gone on to win.

Nor, and this point should also be important to non-Christians, would there be any Christian civilisation, no Christian culture. No Giotto, no Dante, no Bach – even no Voltaire or Tolstoy, two apostates from Christianity and yet two products of it.

Arianism was among the first deadly heresies endangering the survival of Christianity, but far from the last one. Throughout its existence Christianity was a ship having to steer a course among both rocks and mines, each threatening its survival.

Here is the list I can think of offhand, and I am sure it isn’t complete:

Gnosticism – Manichean dualism of darkness and light, accompanied by rejection of the body as evil and a claim to special knowledge that will lead to salvation.

Docetism: Christ’s body was not human but only a phantasm, and therefore his sufferings were only apparent.

Chiliasm – the kingdom of God will eventually arrive without God’s help.

Pelagianism – man is unaffected by the Fall and can keep all the divine laws.

Socinianism – denial of the Trinity. Jesus is a deified but not divine man.

Catharism – the physical world is definitely meaningless and possibly evil.

Eckartism (Free Spirit heresy) – it’s possible to reach perfection on earth through merely a life of austerity and spirituality.

Orthodoxy triumphed against all these foes, but it suffered its greatest damage from internecine strife. “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand,” as recorded by St Mark.

The East-West Schism of 1054 split Christianity asunder, and, like the clash between St Nicholas and Arius, it too was largely caused by divergence in the understanding of the Trinity. Atheist commentators would later mock the argument as petty, the way they also mocked “religious wars fought over one letter”.

The issue was that of filioque, a disagreement that seems to be recondite, obscurely theological and, to a non-Christian outsider, trivial.

The West, as represented by Rome, had declared unilaterally that the Holy Spirit proceeds equally from the Father and the Son. The Roman bishopric inserted words to that effect into the Latin text of the Nicaean Creed, though not into the Greek version.

In turn the East, as represented by Constantinople, insisted that the procession was not double but single, from the Father through the Son. And in either event, the East maintained that the West had had no business deciding such matters on its own, without convening an ecumenical council.

The clash wasn’t just academic but violent, coming to the fore both in the 1182 massacre of the Latins (Western Christians) by the Greeks (Eastern Christians) and the 1204 slaughter of the Greeks by the Latins during the Fourth Crusade.

What to us may seem like a squabble over technicalities was a matter of life or death to our ancestors. And they were right.

Without going too deep into matters theological, the issue of filioque had far-reaching secular ramifications as well. The Western doctrine is symbolically represented by an equilateral triangle, with the Holy Spirit proceeding equally from the Father and the Son. By contrast, the Eastern version is more like a vertical line leading from the Father through the Son.

Could that be why political pluralism found a more natural home in the West, and political tyranny in the East? Let’s not forget that for at least a millennium and a half Christianity was a dominant factor in every walk of life, and the briefest of looks at even today’s cultural and political institutions will serve a useful reminder of that fact.

The balance of Christian orthodoxy has survived in the East, perhaps the only doctrinal shift that didn’t bring the house down. But the structure was badly shaken, becoming less sturdy on both sides as a result. Christianity became more vulnerable to its enemies, less animated by its erstwhile pugnacity.

St Nicholas, once he has wound down his parcel delivery business for another year, must be looking on with sadness in his eyes. He fought, he won, but those who came after him have frittered his victory away. But not completely! exclaims the old saint and sits up. And the look in his eyes once again becomes a ho-ho-whole lot steelier.