Editing Council of Nikaea (section)

== Councils of Nikaea IRL ==
The [[wikipedia:First Council of Nicaea|First Council of Nikaia]] (Latinly spelled Nicaea, or Nicea) was a meeting convened by Emperor Constantine in the year 325 in [[derp|Nicaea]] not far from Byzantium. This was to sort out some controversies in Christian doctrine: in particular related to the divinity of Jesus (or lack thereof), a couple of schisms, and miscellaneous organizational details like how to deal with [[heretics]]. Slavery was also a big issue. One of the outcomes of the meeting was the [[wiki:Nicene Creed|Nicene Creed]], which was meant to be a distillation of the most fundamental tenets of Christianity: basically, that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit all exist and are divine, that Jesus was sent to be crucified for humanity's sins, and that the living and dead will be judged before being resurrected into the kingdom of Heaven. The original version of the Creed includes a line saying that heretics who deny that Jesus was divine (or say that he was not always divine) are "condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church," but that got removed at Theodosius' First Council of Constantinople in 381; other words have been added in, for instance about the Virgin Mary, such that our "Nicene Creed" is more accurately a Theodosian Creed. Most Christian denominations adhere to the Nicene Creed to this day, the late-antique dissidents mainly having recoalesced around Islam. Although there are some Christians (such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Unitarians) who have lately abandoned this.

There was also a [[wikipedia:Second Council of Nicaea|Second Council of Nicaea]] in the year 787, which was convened by the Empress Irene in response to the iconoclasm (the destruction of religious icons and artwork) promulgated by her predecessors. See, the previous three Emperors had said that erecting images of Jesus and saints and so on was heresy, because one of the Commandments forbade the creation of graven images for the purpose of worship, and because paintings and sculptures could not be divine and therefore could not properly convey the holy nature of their subjects. Their opponents (the iconophiles) retorted that venerating icons of actual saints was not at all the same thing as worshiping idols to false gods, that destroying art and church property and torturing the monks who made it was hardly an appropriate response, and that the Emperors didn't seem to have a problem with people erecting images of ''them''. In the end, the Second Council ruled that it was actually the iconoclasts who were the heretics, and that making icons and venerating them was totally okay so long as it didn't cross the line into worship of the icon, rather than the faith that the icon represented. This one is more controversial than the First Council; many Protestant denominations say that the distinction between veneration and idolatry is just playing word games. Some actually state quite bluntly that it's the Catholics who were the real heretics all along.

Since the God-Emperor of Mankind was known to be active in the early history of humanity, he probably took some amusement at the idea that he, a man who had very publicly made a point to [[Lorgar]] that he was ''[[Imperial Truth|not to be worshipped]]'', was handing down the ban on psykers on a world named for a city in which men had decided that Jesus Christ (who may have been the Emperor Himself) was divine and that it was okay to make religious icons!

Historically, the Nicene Creed considerably shaped the world of Christianity, from the relationship of the priesthood with the Kings & Lords, to the Trinity, to ownership of humans. As a result of Trinitarian victory, it was stated that Kings no longer counted as Priests (unlike in most paganisms) nor were they of superhuman or godlike nature (unlike the Indian ''Raj'', for instance), though the Kings of converted heathen lands often clung to the importance of divine or supernatural origins of the Royal lineage (such as Odinic origins, or the Merovingian ''Quinotaure'') It also made the dubious claim that Jesus counts as the only priest in Christianity; the Catholic Bishops also fought against slavery inside their diocese causing it to be replaced by a dichotomy of serfdom (with the tie being formed with the land instead of with a human owner) and freemen (Churls) already present in the Pagan European substrata. Such secular concerns were arguably more important to the anti-Trinitarians participating to the Council, mimicking in a way the great economic importance of psykers in the Imperium. Ironically, these aspects of the Nicene Creed are quite in line with their 40K subversion.