THE period of Church History which begins with the Council of Nicæa in the year 325 and ends with the close of the fifth century has many important characteristics of its own. For the greater part of the time the friendship of the State has taken the place of hostility or indifference. The dangers to the Church from the world are now those rather of allurement than of persecution. The proximity to the apostolic age is gone. The heresies which arise are for the most part of a different type from those of earlier times. With the new attitude of the State and of the world have come more opportunity for thought and more possibility of systematic action. Councils on a large scale have become an ordinary feature in the Church’s life. There is a tendency for doctrine to be more carefully expressed and more accurately formulated. The meaning and bearing of the Incarnation in particular are considered and discussed and explained with the most elaborate pains. In the four great councils held at Nicæa in 325, at Constantinople in 381, at Ephesus in 431, and at Chalcedon in 451, the four truths of the Godhead, the Manhood, the one Person, the two natures of the incarnate Son of God, which combine to make up the central features of the doctrine of the Incarnation, receive explicit expression and affirmation. At such a time of consideration and definition it is of some special interest to observe what was said and done in regard to the Eucharist.
The writers and documents belonging to this time which contain references to the Eucharist are from very different quarters and extend from the beginning to the end of the period.
The evidence from the East is of great amount. The Council of Nicæa in 325 included representatives, says Dr. Bright, “from Syria, Cilicia, Phœnicia, Arabia, Palestine, Egypt, Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Pamphylia, Thrace, Macedonia, Greece, Western Europe, and countries lying outside the limits of the empire”. The Dialogue of the otherwise unknown Adamantius was probably written soon after 330. Eusebius, Bishop of Cæsarea, the great Church historian, the friend of the Emperor Constantine, the most learned man of his time, who probably really believed the full truth of our Lord’s deity but hesitated to throw in his lot unreservedly with its orthodox defenders because of the intensity of his caution and the excess of conservatism which made him reluctant to use a new term to describe an old truth, died in 339 or 340. St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, whose long life extended from about 296 to 373, was the foremost defender of the vital truth that our Lord is God in no less sense than that in which the Father is God, the man who beyond all others, even in an age of great men, possessed the keen vision and the clear insight of the highest type of theological mind. His friend, Serapion, Bishop of Thmuis in the Delta, probably the writer of the Liturgical Prayers which go by his name, died about 370. The Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, whose friendship with semi-Arians does not appear to have impaired his own orthodoxy, were delivered in 347 before his consecration as bishop. The Cappadocian doctors, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop of Sasima in 372 and of Constantinople in 381, but spending his life mostly in retirement, who died in 392, and St. Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, who died about 395, though they, and the latter in particular, were not unaffected by the influence of Origen, were great champions of orthodoxy in the struggle with Arianism and had much to do with the victory of the Catholic faith over that heresy. St. Chrysostom, the great preacher of Antioch, who became Bishop of Constantinople in 398, died in 407 after three years of an exile brought about by the machinations of a hostile faction and the enmity of the court. The Apostolic Constitutions, though incorporating much older material, appear to have been compiled in the neighbourhood of Antioch in the latter half of the fourth century. Macarius Magnes probably lived at the end of that century. St. Macarius of Egypt died in 389. St. Cyril, who became Bishop of Alexandria in 412 and died in 444, was the great champion of the Church against the Nestorian heresy. Theodoret, who was consecrated Bishop of Cyrrhus about 423 and died about 457, defended Nestorius and attacked St. Cyril, probably through misunderstandings of the position of both, though it is not impossible that in his zeal to maintain the truth of the two natures of Christ he was led to some want of balance of thought as well as of language. Isidore of Pelusium, famous as an ascetic and spiritual guide, was a contemporary of St. Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret, and died not later than 450.
In the West, though the evidence is less in amount than in the East, there are writers of great authority. At the Council of Arles in 314 representatives of a great part of Western Christendom were present; and it may be regarded as a general council of the West. St. Hilary of Poitiers, who was consecrated Bishop of Poitiers in 353 and died in 368, in spite of a tendency to minimise the reality of the human feelings of our Lord, was a teacher of great orthodoxy and power, to whom the Catholic faith in Gaul owed much, and a man who in the midst of controversy shared to some extent in the great gift of St. Athanasius, the capacity to understand when apparent denials of the truth were verbal only and when they were the outcome of real unbelief. St. Optatus was Bishop of Milevis in Numidia in the latter half of the fourth century. St. Ambrose, who was born in Gaul, where at the time of his birth his father was prefect, became Bishop of Milan in 374 and died in 397. The treatise De Sacramentis, which has sometimes been ascribed to St. Ambrose, is probably not his work, but is likely to have been written in North Italy not much if at all later than 400. St. Jerome, who was born in Pannonia about 346, was baptised at Rome before 366, and between that time and his death in 420 lived in Gaul, Italy, Syria, and Constantinople. St. Augustine, the most eminent of the Latin fathers, was baptised in 387 at the age of thirty-three, was consecrated Bishop in 395 as assistant to the Bishop of Hippo on the coast of Numidia, and succeeded to that see a year later. He died in 430. His writings comprise expositions of Holy Scripture, Sermons, Letters, controversial treatises against the Arians, the Manichæans, the Donatists, and the Pelagians in great abundance. St. Leo was Bishop of Rome from 440 to 461, and Gelasius from 492 to 496.
The types of mind, the lines of argument, the methods of thought, are almost as different as the places are various. In estimating the testimony in regard to any doctrine, agreement and difference are alike significant.