Pope Leo will travel to Iznik (ancient Nicaea) in Turkey as part of his first Apostolic Journey from November 27–30, 2025. This trip commemorates the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea. Before my recent illness, I still had dreams of traveling and thought Nicaea, now a laid-back Turkish beach town, would be a great Fall getaway. This Council has always fascinated me.
In 325 C.E., a relatively modest number of bishops, mainly from the East, met for three months, from May until the end of July, on the shores of Lake Ascanius, near Constantinople. It was a backwater on the main East-West trade corridor. One source says that Constantine invited all 1800 bishops of the Christian church (about 1000 in the east and 800 in the west), but only 318 — the traditional number — attended; more realistically, the number was probably about 250. And only five from the West, or Roman churches. In any case, that rounds out to about 15% of active bishops. Notably absent was Pope Sylvester I, whom the Emperor had appointed to the See of Rome. They spoke, wrote, and decreed in Greek.
Constantine called the Council to quash Arianism, which was tearing up his quest for unity and power. It is almost universally accepted that the early church widely accepted Jesus as a divine being, but the notions of what constitutes divinity were diverse and fluid. Constantine was undoubtedly aware that 32 of his immediate predecessors had been declared gods by apotheosis. The presbyter Arius preached that Jesus was divine but also created, that is, He had a beginning. For either the convert Constantine or his domineering mother, that wasn’t going to fly. I think it is entirely likely that before the Council was called, the fix was in. The only question was how the assembled bishops would declare Jesus coequal with God the Father.
Arius was present at Nicea to defend his position that Jesus, although God, was a created being. Approximately 22 bishops supported Arius when the Council opened, but this number dwindled to just two at the end. The two remaining supporters, Secundus of Ptolemais and Theonus of Marmarica, were exiled along with Arius. Constantine lifted the sentence on Arius 11 years later, but he was conveniently murdered in a public latrine just before his official rehabilitation. This I found in footnotes labeled facts about the Council of Nicaea that got buried.
What this handful of churchmen argued about, agreed on, and finally decided over three short months formally introduced the concept of Being from Neoplatonism into the conversation about God. The statement that Jesus was “begotten not made” moved Christian theology firmly into the camp of Greek philosophy, and Jesus, the eternal Son of God, within the general definition of anthropomorphism.
That formulation dominated Western theology and argument for nearly two millennia, that is, until the Fall of 1963 in a classroom on North Benson Road in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Father Harold O’Connor SJ, affectionately known as “Crazy Harry” at Fairfield Prep, taught Latin, Math, and Religion to Sophomores, or sof-o-mores, and proudly coached his winning debate team. In religion class, the most memorable anecdotes were a toss-up between his personal technique for curbing profuse sneezing while saying mass — so he wouldn’t look like he was picking his nose, but performing a sacred ritual gesture. In 1958, the first spacecraft, Sputnik, crashed back to Earth, and Harry had a very profound observation about the Person of Jesus declared at Nicaea: he said, “No matter what kind of life we discover in the wide universe, never forget the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost came to save us.” Yes, Crazy Harry, that statement has been wedged into my inner theological questioning for more than half a century.
All the inner contradictions of the debate at Nicaea resurfaced recently when a former Jesuit described writing poems based on the hard-fought doctrinal declarations of the Nicene fathers, and JD Vance’s publicly expressed hope that his Hindu wife follow him into the one, holy and apostolic Church. My former Jesuit confrere was getting carried off by words and language, while JD was looking for a seat with more leverage at the debating table. I should remind JD that although he has drawn Pope Leo into the debate, his wife’s Krisha is supported by Modi and the BJP. And India has nukes. But I digress.
How is it that Jesus, coequal with the Father, looked like a human from the beginningless beginning? Not only physical resemblance, but also shared human emotional responses of love, forgiveness, anger, and compassion, to name just a few.
Am I forced to revise Pascal’s bet to include a non-humanoid form of Divine Person? You think I’m kidding? Pascal's Law of Probability strongly favors the discovery of non-human life forms. If, for example, intelligent life were discovered on Proxima Centauri b, located about 4.24 light-years away from Earth, what is the probability that Jesus was born, died, and resurrected there to save its inhabitants? Less than zero.
But science fiction has been exploring these possibilities since way before George Lucas.
Anselm said, “id quo nihil maius cogitari potest.” The reality of God exists because at the farthest edge of human understanding, the mind can go no further. We can move almost seamlessly into science fiction by allowing Anselm an imagination and, as part of thinking (distinct from brain function to satisfy all you materialists), he uses human beings’ proclivity to the phantasmagorical as a worthy vehicle to arrive at the reality of God, especially with regard to the Second Person, “id quo nihil maius imāginari potest.”
And so, in honor of Crazy Harry O’Connor, I will outline a course in science fiction leading up to the 1700th Anniversary of Nicaea.
Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 describes the death of a small, prosperous planet in the Canopean Empire. Its happy, content people become victims of an unforeseen Ice Age. The storyline involves the building of a wall around the entire “girth” of the planet, the attempts of the once harmonious species to accommodate their dire circumstances, the arrival of Johor, an emissary from Canopus, who stays with the doomed inhabitants and helps them form a consciousness that allows the essence of their being and their civilization to survive its death.
There were enough similarities with the esoteric teaching of the half-mad Armenian mystic and cult leader G.I. Gurdjieff to convince Bob Ochs that Lessing was a member of the Fourth Way whose storytelling did not devolve into Mr. G.'s unintelligible gibberish. Philip Glass was commissioned to write the music for Lessing’s opera, but it was never recorded, and the only known bootleg recording has been lost. Lessing did not win the Nobel Prize in literature for gibberish. It’s a wonderfully told story. The arrival of Johor fulfills my criteria for creating a Superior Being in science fiction. Though they share many humanoid characteristics, the Canopeans are a distinct species. In post-Ice Age theology, Johor might become the Second Person of the Trinity.
Philip Zenshin Whalen loved a cracking good yarn, and he loved Walter M. Miller Jr.’s 1959 A Canticle for Lebowitz. It all takes place on Earth after a devastating nuclear holocaust. Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 novel The Sparrow follows the psychological breakdown of Jesuit Father Emilio Sandoz after his encounter with alien life.
Nothing is certain or without risk. This includes our belief in the Trinity. My approach to theology is anthropological. This adds a level of ambiguity to most dogma. I am certain that the early Church held that Jesus was divine, but the fathers at Nicaea did not irrevocably tie us to a Neo-Platonic notion of Divine Being. Look to the Emperor Constantine and his mother.
Science fiction opens a window to thousands of other possibilities. Let the imagination fly as far as it can go. Otherwise, we are forced to constrain our Christology to a vague cosmological Unitarianism in which the inhabitants of any world system we discover have an incarnate Deity that comes from whichever species on the planet is most evolved. Even within our own world, that eliminates far too many possibilities.
Crazy Harry sneezed, an intriguingly lovely conundrum appeared, and the Son of God was “born, not made.”
“Id quo nihil maius imāginari potest.”
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