Catholic of the day) was absolutely untroubled by the Arian controversy. None of its bishops were present at Nicæa; and the doctrine of Arius was known to it only as an accursed thing to be repudiated.
This fact, the ignorance of a not unimportant Church of the greatest of all Church controversies, will bear some examination. First, the fact must be admitted, explain it as we may, that the "Assyrian" Church did know nothing officially of the Nicene Council at the time of its assembling. Not only is there no reference to it in any of the nearly contemporary documents that remain to us (for they, with one important exception, are acta martyrum where such reference might naturally not be found); but the one work of theology (properly so called) that remains to us from the period, is obviously the work of a man who had no knowledge of the council, or what was debated therein. The author in question, of course, is Afraat, the "Sage of Persia." Writing about fifteen years after the council (337–346) he uses expressions, and formulates a creed[1] in a fashion that one may fairly say would have been impossible to a man who had heard of the rights and wrongs of the great controversy that was then agitating "the West," no matter which side he took in it.
The Church of "the East" was not asked to accept Nicæa, or its doctrines, until eighty-five years later, when it frankly and fully accepted both the council and its creed. Individual bishops may have (must have)[2] known of the fact, but not the auto-cephalous Church as such.
The most probable explanation of the phenomenon is as follows. Constantine regarded the council as an "imperial affair." In the whole con-
