from A - LITERARY GUIDE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
At the Council of Nicaea in 325, the Fathers decreed in their seventh canon that the honour paid to the bishop of Aelia by ‘custom and ancient tradition’ was to be preserved, without prejudice to the rights of the metropolitan city (of Caesarea). ‘Aelia’ (in full: Aelia Capitolina) was the name given to the city established on the site of ancient Jerusalem in 135 after that city had been razed to the ground by the Romans. The canon witnesses to the tensions focused on the city of Jerusalem, with its Gentile name erasing its Jewish associations, while ‘custom and ancient tradition’ honour it as the site of the central events of the Christian faith: the death and resurrection of the Lord. ‘Custom and ancient tradition’ accomplished a good deal in the years following the Œcumenical Council, enabling the Emperor’s mother Helena, on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 326 or 327, to identify many of the sacred sites, as well as discovering the relics of the True Cross. Within a decade of the council, these sites had been adorned by splendid new buildings, raised at imperial expense, not least the complex of buildings on the site embracing Golgotha and the tomb whence Christ had risen, including the Church of the Resurrection (the Anastasis), or the Holy Sepulchre, dedicated on 13 September 335. In this way the tension between secular ‘Aelia’ and religious ‘Jerusalem’ was resolved in the Christian city of Jerusalem, set to become the Holy City of Christendom, the goal of pilgrimage and guardian of the places where God had lived his incarnate life.
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