Dear Penumbra,
Thank you for the reply! :yes:
Scientists go to work, and they do work. People go to a church, and the point is to commune with each other, basically. You're saying that self-improvement and focusing on love shouldn't be a priority at churches you go to?
Not at all! I'm saying that they don't have to form part of a creed oriented towards doctrinal unity, not that they shouldn't be a priority at church.
I know what a creed is. It's a statement about a set of beliefs. Belief can include values.
They can, yes, if values are what is causing the grave situation that demands the creed in question.
The fact is, however, that ethical debate was not causing sufficient problems for a creed of a value-centric nature to be necessary at the council of Nicea.
The traditional Christian creeds do not concern much in the way of ethics, because moral debates had not resulted in potential schisms between different groups.
This is the same in most religions. What most separates Mahayana and Therevada Buddhists? They share (with perhaps the exception of Nichren) the Noble Eightfold Path and the basic moral precepts of the Buddha but diverge in terms mainly of metaphysics, such as Nagarjuna's
sunyata concept and canonical issues such as the later sutras that the Therevadins do not accept.
For example, here's a statement on belief, which is largely focused on values:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Yes and that was because the American Revolution was an Enlightenment born campaign for liberal values and traditional English rights that the colonists were supposedly being denied by the British, such as "no tax without representation".
If a moral issue or worldview is what causes the problem at hand, it would make sense to have a document that addresses that concern.
But when it isn't, it isn't!
So the Nicene Creed uses various statements of what they believe, what they share in common, and don't bother to mention anything regarding love or ethics. That's a choice, a priority.
No, it is not that they didn't "bother" to mention it but rather that it would have been pointless to reiterate what everyone already knew and accepted.
I highly doubt that any council father present at Nicea would have disputed Jesus teachings on caring for the sick, the maimed, the disabled, loving one's neighbours and enemies or so forth.
And you talk of the Catechism, which I'm familiar with, but it's not like Catholics get together and recite that every week
.
You've got it topsy-turvy, perhaps because you are like me a child of Vatican II and do not recall the 'old' way of the church before that council (which was in many respects as mammoth as Nicea). It is only a very recent phenomenon, post-1960s, in which Catholics can collectively recite the creed. My grandparents are fairly old Catholics, both aged in their late 80s. Their earliest memories of learning about their religion at Catholic school was through
'catechism class'. Every Catholic child had to sit through a whole hour of catechism instruction via a question-and-answer format. As a result they can recite off-by-heart many portions of the catechism that was then in use, the so-called "Penny Catechism". This was drummed into them:
Catechism of Christian Doctrine
They can recite massive portions of it.
In the pre-Vatican II 'Tridentine' Mass the laity were silent throughout the service and the priest had his back turned to them, leaving them to look at the statues, icons, paintings on the glass window panes and the ritual. These were all educative in nature, deliberately so for those who were illiterate and could not read the bible or other devotional texts:
Read:
http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/word/moral.htm
The ultimate source of moral instruction was the Bible, but ordinary lay people did not, on the whole, possess one of these. The moral messages of the Bible were translated to them through the preachings of the clergy and through the paintings, carvings and stained glass of the churches where they worshipped. Moral messages were encoded in the depiction of Biblical stories, in the depiction of the virtues of the saints and in straightforward didactic imagery. The Virtues and the Vices, or the Seven Deadly Sins, adorned walls and pews. Representations of the Last Judgement on the tympana of the entrance portals of major churches in France, or painted above the chancel arch in English parish churches, not only focused the mind on the perils of the hereafter but depicted very literal and appropriate punishments for certain classes of sins.
I would love it if we could transport back to 13th century France and ask a peasant to recite the Nicene Creed
He would likely have never even heard of Nicea.
But if you asked him what were the "seven deadly sins", "the seven corporal works of mercy" and the "stations of the cross", he'd have been able to tell you thanks to his catechesis in childhood.
The Mass was in Latin, except for the homily, and since most Catholic laypersons could not speak Latin, the vast majority would not have known a word of the creed in their native, vernacular tongue. The traditional means of learning about their faith would have been through
catechesis, not a creed using high theological talk that most laity would have thought largely above their knowledge or even nonsensical:
Catechesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There have been numerous catechisms (as well as other purely moral documents such as
Sentences, a popular ethical genre of the middle ages), the most recent produced in 1992 which every Catholic home is encouraged by the Church to contain because it is described as the "sure norm" for our faith. Whether they have a catechism in their house along with a bible is probably a good barometer of how deeply entrenched the said Catholic is in their religion.
One of the earliest catechisms was the
Didache:
Didache - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It is nearly entirely about morals and bereft of any metaphysical formulations. It begins with a long section on morality known as the "Two Ways". The Catholic Church includes it in a cadre of extra-canonical but highly authoritative texts known as the "Apostolic Fathers" collection:
Apostolic Fathers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Didache is still used as a reference in the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church, as it is the first true catechism produced by the church.
Another example, widely used during the middle ages to teach laity, was St. Augustine's
Enchiridion:
Enchiridion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In every era of the Church such catechisms have been produced and together with formal oral instruction, visual and aural education through stained glass windows, paintings, icons, hymns, virtue plays etc. this was the primary means through which laypeople learned about their faith, not the Nicene Creed.