The Council of Nicaea, the First Ecumenical Council of the ancient and undivided Catholic Church, bequeathed to the world far more than the one universally accepted creed in Christian history, though that is no small feat. The council itself is shrouded in myth and mystery. The official Acts have been lost. The records we have of which bishops and clerics were present do not agree. Was St. Nicholas, for example, really there? Did he really, overcome by zeal, strike the heretic Arius in the face? Some have even theorized that the number of bishops (318) comes not from careful accounting but rather biblical allusion: “Now when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his three hundred and eighteen trained servants who were born in his own house, and went in pursuit as far as Dan” (Gen. 14:14).
And, of course, no story of Nicaea can ignore the role played by the first Christian emperor: Constantine. The legacy of Nicaea is not only theological but social and political as well. It set the tone for a new, and often fraught, relationship between church and state, even East and West, with enduring lessons for Christians in every age.
First, we have to consider the background. Since the time of the Apostles, 10 of whom, according to tradition, suffered martyrdom, including St. Peter and St. Paul at the hands of the Romans, the Church faced intermittent, usually regional, persecutions in Rome. For three centuries, Christian intellectuals such as St. Justin Martyr, St. Athenagoras of Athens, Tertullian, Origen, and Lactantius made principled cases not just for the end of persecution but also for universal religious liberty—all, with the exception of Lactantius, to no avail.
Then came Constantine, or as we refer to him in my Orthodox tradition, “St. Constantine the Great, equal-to-the-Apostles.” The emperor’s own biography cannot be separated from conflicting and legendary accounts, but the short version is that, having adopted the Chi Rho (the first letters of “Christ” in Greek) as his army’s symbol, he crossed the Milvian bridge, defeated his rival Maxentius, and entered Rome as a liberator, becoming emperor of the West and later, in 324 after defeating Licinius, sole ruler of the empire.
In 313, when relations with Licinius had been better, the two issued the so-called Edict of Milan, returning confiscated property to the Church and granting universal religious tolerance, including for Christians. He did not make Christianity the official religion, though he did promote it. Eusebius of Caesarea’s jubilation over the event captures the relief of long-persecuted Christians: “Finally a bright and splendid day, overshadowed by no cloud, illuminated with beams of heavenly light the churches of Christ throughout the entire world.”
Reflecting early Christian support for religious liberty, Eusebius continues: “And not even those without our communion were prevented from sharing in the same blessings, or at least from coming under their influence and enjoying a part of the benefits bestowed upon us by God.” Constantine drew upon Lactantius in his religious policy and appointed him tutor to his star-crossed son Crispus.
Nevertheless, Constantine’s conversion to Christianity was gradual, and much of his life and worldview retained older Roman practices and perspectives. However, to his credit, upon his triumphant arrival in Rome, he refused to offer sacrifices to the pagan gods and basically reduced the cult of the emperor to a fan club, ending the sacrifices and worship previous emperors had permitted. Even after becoming a catechumen, he delayed his baptism until just before his death. Charitably, we could say this was in recognition of the messiness and moral corruption of worldly power, including his involvement in the deaths of his son Crispus and his (Constantine’s) wife Fausta. That might be too generous, though. In fact, Constantine had planned a lavish public event in which he would be baptized in the Jordan but fell ill before he could realize his plans, dying in 337.
The Council of Nicaea took place at the imperial palace there from May to July in 325. Constantine had called the council to settle a source of civil unrest in his newly unified empire: the relation of Jesus Christ to God the Father. The ancient church historian Socrates Scholasticus notes, “So disgraceful an extent was this affair carried, that Christianity became a subject of popular ridicule, even in the very theatres.” In some cases, angry crowds squared off in city streets chanting their party’s slogans at one another. Even if Constantine weren’t a Christian, as emperor he had to do something. So, what were the details of this chaotic “affair”?
Arius, a charismatic priest of the Church of Alexandria, began preaching that “there was a time when the Son was not.” For Arius, the Son was God’s first and best creation, but Christ was not equal to, nor coeternal with, the Father. The core of Arius’s theology was one that could be reduced to the aforementioned chant and seemed to make sense of some very difficult questions: If Christians worship the Son of God, what is his relation to God the Father? If Christians believe in “one God, the Father,” are they polytheists for also worshipping the Son? If the Son is begotten of the Father, doesn’t that also mean he was created by him? In fact, the Greek words for begotten and created are homonyms and differ only by a single letter. Finally, the anti-Arian party, led by St. Alexander, patriarch of Alexandria, had introduced a philosophical term to the discussion. They claimed the Son was homoousios, or “of the same essence” as the Father. But as Tertullian once asked, What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? Could Christian theological controversy be solved by means of pagan philosophy?
The bishops gathered at Nicaea to settle these questions could not have been coerced by Constantine—several of them likely bore scars and permanent injuries from the brutal persecutions of Diocletian and Galerius. These were men willing to suffer and die for their faith. Rather, they wanted the matter settled as much as the emperor and were grateful for his patronage. By all contemporary accounts, though he played host to their proceedings, Constantine did not interfere, and in fact he may not even have understood sufficiently the subtleties of the controversy to do so anyway. He just wanted an end to civil unrest and peace in the Church, and the council decision seemed to settle the matter. Three-hundred and eighteen bishops finally agreed that “there was not a time when the Son was not,” issuing a creed that included the affirmation that the Son is homoousios with the Father. Christians are not polytheists precisely because Arianism was rejected as foreign to the faith passed down from the Apostles: The Son is not “a god” like Zeus or Poseidon but equally divine with, and inseparable from, the Father and the Holy Spirit.
In response, Constantine did what any other emperor might have—he used the arm of state power to enforce the decision of the council and restore civil order. As Jaroslav Pelikan notes, after the council he “issued an edict against heretics on that basis, forbidding them to gather and confiscating their church buildings and places of assembly. That edict treated Christian dissenters far more harshly than it did pagans.” Unfortunately, while Nicaea marks a theological triumph for orthodox doctrine, it marks the beginning of the end of the short-lived religious liberty of Christian Rome. After Constantine’s death, bishops who had been sympathetic to Arius, or at least skeptical of the Nicene party, gained influence on successive emperors, East and West, in order to persecute orthodox Christians.
Saint Athanasius, successor to Alexander as patriarch of Alexandria and adherent to the declaration of Nicaea, found himself suddenly on the run, hiding out in the desert with monks, fearing for his life and lamenting the collusion of state and church. “There have been many Councils held heretofore,” he wrote, “and many judgments passed by the Church; but the Fathers never sought the consent of the Emperor.” His stubborn support of Nicaea earned him the Latin epithet Athanasius contra mundum, “Athanasius against the world,” and so it must have seemed in his time.
After Athanasius’s death, the Cappadocian Fathers, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Basil the Great, would take up his mantle, and the two Gregories would play a major role in the Second Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople in 381. The Nicene Creed as Christians know it today comes from that Council’s revision of the Creed of Nicaea to include a fuller account of the Holy Spirit and the Church.
After this time, Arianism became scarce in Christian Rome, but it did not die out. Instead, it found fertile soil among the barbarians (Germans, basically). When Old Rome fell to the Goths in the fifth century, the conquerors were not pagans but Arian Christians, who spared anyone who took refuge in the city’s churches, as St. Augustine recounts in his City of God. The Byzantine symphonia, or “harmony,” between church and state, while an improvement over pagan conceptions of the emperor as a god with total authority over all of life, would nevertheless lead, again and again, to theological combat being waged by way of the sword of the state.
This was not so in the West during the early years of the so-called Dark Ages, however, where Constantinople had lost its jurisdiction and was forced to acknowledge the Goths as legal “visitors” in control of Rome from Ravenna. In the fifth and sixth centuries, Arian and Catholic Christians lived together in relative religious freedom. Ironically, it was under these circumstances, through missionary zeal originating with St. Columbanus of Ireland, that orthodoxy finally vanquished Arianism—freely, and largely without bloodshed. The triumph of Nicaea in the West was also (though again short-lived) a triumph of the religious liberty sought by so many early Christian apologists.
Though Constantinople reunited the empire under St. Justinian, two centuries later relations between East and West would break down again in the eighth century. As Orthodox priest and church historian Fr. John Meyendorf recounts: “The radical change in Byzantine imperial policies which would occur under the iconoclastic emperors Leo III (717–741) and Constantine V (741–[775])—forceful imposition of iconoclasm, confiscation of the pope’s Sicilian revenues, and cutting all military support of the papacy against the Lombards—put an end to the period of ‘Byzantine’ papacy. Pope Stephen II looked for support elsewhere and switched his loyalty to the Franks (754).” This would lead to another fateful event when, as Fr. Andrew Louth notes, in the year 800, “on Christmas Day 25 December, at the beginning of the third mass of Christmas, Pope Leo [III] solemnly crowned Charlemagne ‘Emperor of the Romans’ to the acclamation of those present.”
The newly revived Western Empire nevertheless often clashed with the pope in Rome. Under Spanish influence, the emperor had adopted a version of the Nicene Creed with an addition to the clause about the Holy Spirit. The original (from 381) says that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father.” In Spain, at the conversion of the Visigoth King Recared in the sixth century, apparently as an additional, anti-Arian affirmation of some sort, the word filioque, meaning “and the Son,” was added. Though the popes did not disagree with the underlying theology, to exercise their political independence they refused to adopt formally this version of the creed.
It wasn’t until the eleventh century, at the eve of the Great Schism, that Rome finally accepted the creed with the word filioque. While the actual complaints cited in the papal bull that caused the schism were liturgical practices—Eastern Christians use leaven in the Eucharist while Western ones did not—nevertheless Nicaea’s legacy remains the major theological point of dispute between Western Christians and the Eastern Orthodox Church to this day. The very creed that technically unites all Christians today also stands as the greatest source of division between them.
As we mark the 1,700th anniversary of Nicaea this year, a celebration at which both Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew had planned to attend before the former’s death on Easter Monday this year, we should consider the long and complicated legacy of this First Ecumenical Council. Nicaea pronounced and protected the tradition of faith passed down by the Apostles, but it also sparked a recurring entanglement of church and state that hurt Christian witness, valorized theological error, and led to the martyrdom of many saints—a cautionary tale for those in our own day who believe the state should play a greater role in enforcing orthodoxy. The divided churches will never be restored to the communion of the one Catholic and Orthodox Church apart from the hard—and free—work of loving discourse, by which, as Christ himself prayed, “as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:21).
