The Gods Who Fade 0 - Collapse of an Iota

One word was enough. An iota — the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet — was enough to tear the Roman Empire apart for over a century, to pit fathers against sons, emperors against bishops, and to shake four archangels who, until then, believed they were fighting a clear-cut war. Nicaea, 325. The Council was meant to settle the debate: is the Son of the same substance as the Father — homoousios — or merely similar to Him — homoiousios? One iota of difference. A theological abyss. Michael, who led the charge for Nicene orthodoxy, believes victory secured. He does not yet know that the council has settled nothing: it has just opened a century of war. From Constantinople to Adrianople, from Alexandria to the Catalaunian Plains, Arianism survives in the folds of the Empire, coiling within the Gothic, Vandal, and Burgundian kingdoms, while Rome itself — taken, sacked, humiliated — strangely continues to hold. And from the steppes emerges a people who pray to neither side, who never needed a dogma to exist — a revelation that forces Michael to wonder, too late, whether he has spent a hundred years fighting the wrong war. Between contradicting councils, hesitant emperors, barbarian kings negotiating their salvation through faith, and archangels doubting their own cause, Collapse of an Iota tells how a quarrel over theological grammar redrew the map of the world — and what it costs, gods and men alike, to try to impose a single truth on a world that never asked for one. No simple lesson. No victory that closes anything. Only the certainty, distilled page after page, that divine power may never come from the truth of a doctrine, but from the fervor it continues to inspire — even, and especially, when no one truly knows what it means anymore.

Pagina's: 228, Paperback, Independently published