Interesting site. We certainly should revile the pneumatomachi and all their works. What you found is a synod at Nicea, I don't know how it compares to the church councils. The Council of Nicea is one of the major events in the church, convened by Constantine and attended by some of the heavyweights, I think Athanasius and Augustine. In case everyone's eyes haven't glazed over, here's a brief history that ought to take care of that:
The 4th and early 5th centuries witnessed an extraordinary flowering of Christian literature, the result partly of the freedom and privileged status now enjoyed by the church, partly of the diversification of its own inner life (compare the rise of monasticism), but chiefly of the controversies in which it hammered out its fundamental doctrines.
Arianism, which denied Christ's essential divinity, aroused an all-pervasive reaction in the 4th century; the task of the first two ecumenical councils, at Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), was to affirm the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. In the 5th century the Christological question moved to the fore, and the Council of Chalcedon (451), completing that of Ephesus (431), defined Christ as one person in two natures. The Christological controversies of the 5th century were extremely complex, involving not only theological issues but also issues of national concerns--especially in the Syrian-influenced East, where the national churches were called non-Chalcedonian because they rejected the doctrinal formulas of the Council of Chalcedon.
Involved in the 5th-century Christological controversy were many persons and movements: Nestorius, consecrated patriarch of Constantinople in 428, and his followers, the Nestorians, who were concerned with preserving the humanity of Christ as well as his divinity; Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, and his followers, who were devoted to maintaining a balanced emphasis on both of the natures of Christ, divine and human; Eutyches (c. 378-after 451), a muddleheaded archimandrite (head of a monastery) who affirmed two natures before and one nature after the incarnation; the Monophysites, who (following Eutyches) stressed the one unified nature of Christ; and the moderates and those who sought theological, ecclesiastical, and even political solutions to this highly complex doctrinal dispute, such as Pope Leo I. It was a time when the Alexandrian and Antiochene theological schools vied with each other for the control of the theology of the church. In the Syrian East the Antiochene tradition continued in the schools of Edessa and Nisibis, which became centres of a non-Greek national renaissance. The issues of grace, free will, and the Fall of Man concerned the West mainly. Meanwhile, old literary forms were developing along more mature lines, and new ones were emerging, including historiography, lives of saints, set piece (fixed-form) oratory, mystical writings, and hymnody.
|
