Monday, May 3

As I turn right off Kiviportintie and into Riskupuisto I pass an alley that parallels Kiviportintie. I look down it and see a cyclist in the distance speeding towards me. If I wait another five minutes he might hit me.

I leap out of the way before a bicycling disaster happens.

I have spent the last twenty five minutes listening to a podcast in which Melvyn Bragg grills a team of academics about the Arian heresy which left both the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths high and dry in the fourth century. Having converted to Christianity they suddenly found that they had converted to the wrong brand of Christianity and now stood accused of heresy.

The difference between the Arians (including the hapless Visigoths) and those who followed the creed established at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 lay in the supposed nature of the relationship between God and Jesus.

According to Arius God created Jesus and therefore Jesus, by definition, held a subservient (and lesser) place in the spiritual hierarchy. The Holy Ghost had an even lower place beneath Jesus. The creed agreed at Nicaea, on the other hand, claimed that they all had exactly the same status and formed a trinity from one angle and a single Godhead from another.

This disagreement continued for several hundred years until finally other things came to seem more important.