The second important calendar change introduced by Constantine was when to celebrate Easter, a matter not as easily resolved as the question of Sunday. The holiest day for Christians, Easter's worship is complicated by the fact that Christ's resurrection occurred during the Jewish Passover, which is dated according to the phases of the moon in the Jewish calendar. This means that the date for Passover - and Easter - drifts against the solar calendar, changing year to year. For early Christians this was a conundrum because they lacked the detailed astronomical know-how required to synchronize precisely the moon's phases with the solar year.
This hardly stopped Christian time reckoners from trying. Indeed, even as science and knowledge from the ancient era began to fall away in these latter days, the question of when to celebrate Easter remained one of the few areas where scientific inquiry would survive during the great darkness to come. But this was still in the future. For Constantine the issue was not so much how to determine the date for Easter, but how to get the various factions of Christianity to agree to celebrate the Resurrection on the same day, even if techincally this date was not exact. Politically this was crucial to establishing one state religion, with one set of rules.
The Easter question came to a head in what is today a quiet Turkish village famous as a lakeside respite for Turks weary of chaotic Istanbul, some 80 miles away. Known as Iznik, this village 1,700 years ago was a prosperous Hellenistic city called Nicaea, Greek for 'victory'. This name appealed to Constantine, who styled himself 'Constantinus Victor'. One historian writes, 'The beautiful town lay on an eminence in the midst of a well-wooded flower embellished country, with the clear bright waters of the Ascanian Lake at its foot.' Says another, 'The bright green of the chestnut woods in early summer stood out in the foreground; in the distance the snow-capped Olympus towered over its mountain ranges.' It was here in 325 that Constantine convened the first major Christian problem and to come up with a unified date for its celebration.
The choice of Nicaea was no accident. Situated strategically in the east, near the new heart of Constantines's revamped empire, the city was easily reached by the three hundred or so bishops who attended, and their delegations. Nearly all of these came from the west. SylvesterI, the ageing bishop of Rome - at this time all major bishops were called by the honorific 'papa' or pope - did not come because he was too ill, but he sent representatives.
Constantine was so anxious to convene this meeting that he paid the bishop's expenses, placing at their disposal the empire's system of public conveyances and posts along its highways. At Nicaea he paid for food and lodging. The sessions were held at a large basilica converted into a church and in the audience chamber of an imperial palace, possibly situated on the shore of today's Lake Iznik.
The council opened in the late spring, probably on 20 May, without Constantine. He came a month later. The early sessions were held in the city's main church, with the doors open to the lay public. Even pagan theologians participated in some of the debates. Gathering in small groups under colonnades and in gardens, dressed in togas and robes, they argued the relationship between God and Christ and the meaning of passages in holy texts, breaking for sumptuous meals of wine, meats, fruits and vegetables laid out by imperial servants.
For many of the bishops and priests it must have been a heady moment, if slightly surreal. Just a few years earlier many of them had been practising their religion in secret. Some had been viciously persecuted. Paul, a bishop from Neo-Caesarea, had lost the use of his hands after being tortured with hot irons. Two Egyptian bishops each had had an eye gouged out. One of these, Paphnutius, had also been hamstrung. Constantine later singled him out at Nicaea and kissed his mutilated face. The historian Eusebius, an eye-witness at the council, writes about the lavish feast held on 25 July to celebrate Constantine's twentieth year as emperor, and the lingering fear felt by the bishops as they passed guards in the banquet halls and saw 'the glint of arms' that so recently turned against them.
But this turnaround from fear to feasting was nothing compared to Constantine's sudden transformation of a church that for three hundred years had lacked a central authority. Scattered and at times hounded by the authorities, Christianity had operated less as a single cohesive religion than as a collection of sects and denominations following the same basic tenants but differing on points major and minor - such as when to celebrate Easter. Unity had always been a goal, though most congregations had remained more or less independent of one another, with doctrine and details of worship left to local elders and members to decide. In cities large enough to assign a bishop, these prelates had exercised some authority, but as one historian noted in talking about Alexandria's free wheeling sects and church leaders, 'it was not an exceptional thing to have a doctrine of one's own.'
