After Nicaea

[ABOVE: Silver Dish with Triumph of Constantius II. 4th Century. Found in the Bosporan Necropolis—Hermitage Museum / [CC BY-SA 4.0] Wikimedia]

For many modern Christians, the Council of Nicaea marks a basic decision of the church about its faith. After that crucial event, all who disagree with Nicaea’s insistence that the Son is one in being (homoousios) with the Father could only be considered heretics.

But that is not how people saw it at the time. The idea that Nicaea was a fundamental turning point developed gradually over the decades that followed. Modern Christians should certainly accept the church’s decision at Nicaea for the trinitarian faith, but they should know that the Spirit only slowly led Christians to this consensus on the true reading of Scripture.

Scholars count two reasons Nicaea was not originally regarded as the decisive moment that many textbooks assume. First, the idea that a creed with fixed wording might serve as a universal standard of belief had not yet developed. The council made an ad hoc decision, and it stated its faith in terms that clearly differentiated its beliefs from those of Arius. But nobody at Nicaea assumed that this particular wording would stand as the fundamental Christian confession for centuries to come. Local creeds continued to be used for teaching converts and children until the next century. (One of the best examples is the Apostles’ Creed, which originated as the local creed of the Roman church.) The Council of Nicaea was well known (because of its size and its association with Emperor Constantine), but no one regarded its confession as a universal marker of orthodoxy. At that point in history, no creed was treated that way.

Second, the controversy between Arius and his bishop Alexander was the product of wider tensions in the early fourth-century church. Nicaea was one battle in a much wider war between different ways of interpreting what the Scriptures said about the Father and the Son. The wider conflict continued for decades. Some popular books have presented the fourth century as the period in which “Jesus became God.” The idea that Christians did not previously consider Jesus divine is, however, unfounded nonsense. But Christians clearly differed considerably over what God meant. Many assumed that there could be degrees of God: Christ was God, but not the one God, the Father (such people often appealed to 1 Timothy 6:16).

A new cast of opponents

Arius played a key part in the events that led up to the Council of Nicaea, but he did not have a role in the controversies that raged between 325 and 381. After the council many bishops readmitted Arius to communion after he placated them with a somewhat bland confession of faith. Then in 337 he died.

Here are the main players in the controversy that erupted in the years after Nicaea:

Marcellus of Ancyra: one of the most important leaders of Nicaea itself, but one who had strongly unitarian tendencies (see pp. 36–39).

Athanasius: bishop of Alexandria from 328 (p. 21). In 336 and 339, he was exiled for maladministration, including charges that he had been violent toward his opponents. Some who had also opposed his predecessor Alexander were delighted to be able to remove one of their theological opponents. Athanasius’s exile was not purely a matter of theology, but he hoped to present the conflict that way. In a rhetorical masterstroke, he presented his enemies as “Arians” rather than “Christians.” Many Western theologians accepted this terminology, and in the later decades so did some Easterners.

The Eusebians: a large group of Eastern bishops who stood in a broad tradition that encompassed both the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea and the slightly lesser-known Eusebius of Nicomedia. They insisted that there existed a basic ontological distinction between Father and Son. But they insisted just as strongly on an ineffable closeness between Father and Son, such that the Son’s being can be said to be from the Father in some indescribable sense, and that the Son is “the exact image of the Father’s substance” (Heb. 1:3). Such theologians found Athanasius’s insistence that the Son is the “proper wisdom of the Father” too unitarian. Comparing the relationship between the Son and the Father to the relationship between a human person and his or her wisdom was too simplistic, they felt. In such a picture, God was truly one, but was the Word of God really distinct from God the Father? Arius himself may be considered slightly Eusebian, but the other members of this tradition were not in any way dependent on Arius, and they knew little of his particular theology.

Like, unlike, or one

During the 350s the controversy shifted considerably. This was partly because of the emperor Constantius and partly because new heterousian theologies emerged.

Constantius II was the most successful of Constantine’s three sons, and during a complex civil war between 350 and 353, he came to control the whole empire. Constantius was a strong opponent of Athanasius, whom he considered a danger to the unity of his realm. He supported a group of “Eusebian” leaders who strongly opposed Marcellus’s theology and distinguished clearly and hierarchically between Father and Son. Scholars now term this theology “homoian.” Homoians argued that the Son is “like” (homoios) the Father, although a distinct and inferior being. They also rejected any use of being or essence (ousia) terminology, saying it was unscriptural and implied that God was materially divided in generating the Son.

The most radical wing of this movement (represented by Aetius and his disciple Eunomius) insisted that Father and Son were unlike in being. Their teaching provoked a strong reaction and seems to have affected public perception of the homoian movement. During the 370s and 380s, Eunomians or Heterousians (heteros = other; ousia = being) increasingly became a distinct church group. (In older accounts these are referred to as “extreme Arians” or “neo-Arians.”) One of their homoian associates, Eudoxius, became bishop of Antioch from 357 and promoted Aetius, to the disgust of many who would previously have been in broad agreement with a “Eusebian” theology.

One group of Eusebian proponents—who strongly opposed the homoian radicals and the homoian attempt to prevent the use of essence language—focused around Basil of Ancyra (who had replaced Marcellus in that bishopric). They described the Son as “like the Father according to essence” and were known as Homoiousians (homoios = like; which is easy to mix up with the orthodox homoousios, meaning “same” or “one”). Many people sympathized with their approach because they seemed to uphold Eusebian principles. They believed it was necessary to talk about essence or being to preserve and emphasize the unique closeness between Father and Son. Homoiousians taught that the Son was from the Father in a unique sense: his essence differed from the Father’s only in not being unbegotten. The language of “likeness in essence” thus seemed to uphold the balance they desired in theology.

The homoiousian approach was very different from that of the heterousian theologians, who could describe the Son as a creation: unique indeed, but still a created product of the divine will. During the 350s these tensions among the Eusebians could not be easily contained.

The Emperor strikes back

In 359 and 360, Constantius called two councils that, under pressure from him, promulgated a homoian creed (see pp. 24–26). This was of immense importance. Before Constantius’s councils, the wording of the Nicene Creed was becoming an increasingly important point of reference for some, but historically a creed functioning as a universal marker of Christian identity did not yet exist. But by the councils of 359 and 360, Constantius and his advisors had come to see the logical end of the gradual rise in the use of creeds over the previous 20 years. Forcing provincial councils and individual bishops to agree to one creed seemed an obvious way to ensure uniformity.

In the face of this new policy, only one creed—the Nicene—could stand as a clear alternative. Between 360 and 380, the policies of Constantius and the rise of heterousian theologies prompted a variety of groups to coalesce around the Nicene Creed as a standard of faith. Scholars now call these theologians pro-Nicene. This coalescing of different groups was made possible in part by the death of Constantius in 361. His sudden death and the antipathy of his successor Julian “the Apostate” toward any kind of Christianity meant that the homoian creed never had the chance to gain a firm foothold.

This rapprochement between these previously opposing groups involved a slow and often difficult negotiation toward a shared sense of the core faith for which they agreed Nicaea would be a symbol. The theologies of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus are three key examples of pro-Nicene theologies. So are the Western theologies of Athanasius, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, and later Didymus the Blind and Cyril of Alexandria.

The mystery of three in one

Two key themes united pro-Nicene theologians. First, and most important, pro-Nicenes agreed that God’s being is not divided and that the persons of the Godhead are truly distinct from each other. Pro-Nicenes were prepared to accept a wide variety of terms for unity and distinction in God: what mattered was that God is undividedly one and yet irreducibly three. How this is so is a mystery. In this context it seemed much more possible to say that Father and Son are of one “essence” or “being” without implying that God is material or that Father and Son are “parts” of God.

This sense of the incomprehensible divine unity and distinction provided the context in which to understand the earlier Nicene insistence that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. It was also the context in which they understood the relationship of the Spirit to the Father and to the Son. These later decades saw pro-Nicenes clearly state that the Spirit is one with Father and Son against those who still maintained earlier beliefs that the Spirit is subordinate to Father and Son (often misunderstood as the greatest of the angels).

An important corollary of the divine unity was the doctrine of inseparable operation: all three persons are present in each and every divine action. While we easily attribute particular roles to each person, calling the Spirit “sanctifier” or the Son “redeemer,” Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine showed how Scripture encourages us to speak of the persons in this way because of the weakness of our human intellects: we must realize that Scripture also tells us that, in the divine unity, God, Word, and Spirit all sanctify.

Second, pro-Nicenes emphasized that human beings would always fail to comprehend God and that one could only make progress toward knowledge and love of God through discipline and practices that would reshape the imagination. Increasingly pro-Nicenes emphasized the importance of the joint purification of the soul and the body as a precondition for attention to the divine mystery. The fallen mind had lost its natural attention to God and become obsessed with material imagery.

This sense that the human intellect needed to be purified was the context for their understanding of Scripture as a divinely revealed and always trustworthy resource for the Christian imagination. Scripture resulted from a divine act of love: God spoke in human words, but of realities that lie beyond our comprehension. Recognition and exploration of the mystery at the heart of Christian faith is at the heart of pro-Nicene theology.

To Constantinople and beyond

In 381 the reconciliation of the previous two decades resulted in the Council of Constantinople, through the help of the pro-Nicene emperor Theodosius. This council promulgated a revised version of Nicaea’s creed that is still used by Christians today. The council added clauses on the Spirit to insist that “with the Father and the Son He is worshiped and glorified.” Groups of non-Nicene Christians continued to be a real force within the Christian world through the next century, but increasingly they became distinct and isolated ecclesial groups. Homoian theology survived among many of the German tribes who came to rule over the western half of the Roman Empire, but over the centuries that followed, even they gradually came to accept the Nicene faith.

Christians believe that in Christ, the Word of God who is eternally one with the Father, is at work. They believe that the Spirit who is one with Father and Son filled the earliest Christian community at Pentecost. Christians should also never forget that the Spirit is the Spirit of truth who dwells in the Christian community, leading it into truth (John 14: 17, 26).

The story of the fourth century is one of the most important examples of this leading. The emergence of classical trinitarian theology was a slow and complex process, the culmination of Christian reflection and argument that had begun at Pentecost. But we should not hide from the messiness of this process: it is always real human beings that the Spirit leads. Thus the faith of Nicaea is the true faith of Christians, but it was drawn out of the community’s reading of Scripture: it was found not only by human effort but by the inspiration of the Spirit shaping and guiding, leading a real human community into the truth.