The First Council of Constantinople (381)

The creed said at Mass on Sundays is called the Nicene Creed, and most of it was not written at Nicaea. Its proper name is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, because it is attributed to a council that met in Constantinople in the early summer of 381: about a hundred and fifty bishops, every one of them from the East, no representative of the pope, and no surviving record of what was said. Three things need keeping apart in what follows: the council itself, the creed that carries its name, and the moment seventy years later when the whole Church took that creed as its own. For decades the Latin Church did not count the council as a general council at all. It is now the second of the seven that Catholics and Orthodox hold in common, and the reason is not what it was but what it was received as.

This is the second of seven articles on the ecumenical councils of the first millennium. The first covered Nicaea, and this one begins where that ended: with a creed that had not settled the argument.

Fifty-six years after Nicaea

Nicaea had said that the Son is homoousios, of one substance, with the Father. It had not said how one God could be Father and Son without being two gods, or one God wearing two names. Both charges were made against the word, and the half-century after 325 was spent by bishops, several emperors and a great many councils trying to replace it.Modern historians count several distinct parties in the years 325–381, with different creeds and different objections to Nicaea, and no longer group them all as “Arian.” The name survives as shorthand, and this article uses it sparingly. Constantine's son Constantius II favoured a formula that called the Son merely “like” the Father, and under him it became, for a time, the official faith of the empire. The bishop of Constantinople itself was of that party. Athanasius of Alexandria was exiled five times.

Meanwhile the argument moved to ground Nicaea had barely touched. The creed of 325 ends with the words “and in the Holy Spirit” and says nothing more. By the 360s some who accepted the Son as God were denying it of the Spirit, and they were being answered by the theologians who did most to prepare the ground for 381: Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, the three usually called the Cappadocians. Basil's treatise On the Holy Spirit, written around 375, argues that the Spirit is to be glorified with the Father and the Son, though Basil deliberately never writes the sentence “the Spirit is God.” Gregory of Nazianzus, preaching in Constantinople in 380, wrote it plainly.Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.10: “What then? Is the Spirit God? Most certainly. Well then, is he consubstantial? Yes, if he is God.” On Basil's caution, his friend was not always patient; see Gregory's Letter 58.

Basil died at the start of 379 and did not see the council. The other two attended it.Gregory of Nyssa's presence is not a matter of tradition only: he delivered the funeral oration for Meletius of Antioch, who died during the council, and the emperor's law of 30 July 381 (Codex Theodosianus 16.1.3) names him as one of the bishops with whom the churches of Pontus must be in communion.

Why Theodosius called it

The empire's Eastern half passed in January 379 to a Spanish general, Theodosius, and Theodosius was a Nicene. In February 380, before he had set foot in his capital, he issued a law from Thessalonica ordering all his subjects to hold the religion “which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans,” as it was held by Damasus, the bishop of Rome, and Peter, the bishop of Alexandria: one Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.Codex Theodosianus 16.1.2, the edict usually called Cunctos populos. It defines orthodoxy by the two bishops in communion with each other, not yet by any council of the East. That autumn he was baptised, arrived in Constantinople, gave the city's bishop the choice of accepting the Nicene faith or leaving, and when he left, handed the churches to Gregory of Nazianzus, who for a year had been preaching to a small congregation in a private house.

A council followed in May 381. Its purposes, as far as the sources let us see them, were practical: to confirm the Nicene faith as the faith of the Eastern Church under its new emperor, to give Constantinople a bishop in proper form, and to settle a schism at Antioch, where two bishops, Meletius and Paulinus, each claimed the see and each accepted Nicaea.Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 7.7, says Theodosius summoned bishops who shared his own faith, to confirm the Nicene decrees and to appoint a bishop for Constantinople. Nobody at the time called it ecumenical, and nobody in the West was asked to come.

1. c. 360–375
   The dispute over the Holy Spirit takes shape

   Some who accept the Son as God deny it of the Spirit. Basil's On the Holy Spirit (c. 375) is the main answer.

2. January 379
   Theodosius becomes emperor in the East

   Basil of Caesarea dies about the same time.

3. February 380
   The edict Cunctos populos

   Theodosius defines the faith of the empire as that held by the bishops of Rome and Alexandria.

4. November 380
   Theodosius enters Constantinople

   The city's churches pass to Gregory of Nazianzus.

5. May–July 381 disputed
   The council meets

   No acts survive. The opening is placed in May; a law of 30 July names the bishops with whom the churches are to be in communion, and is taken to mark the close.

6. 382
   A second synod at Constantinople writes to Rome

   Its letter to Damasus, preserved by Theodoret, is the fullest early statement of what 381 had taught.

7. 451
   Chalcedon reads the creed of “the 150 fathers”

   The first surviving witness that connects the creed with the council of 381, and the moment it is received as the Church's standard.

Who came

The number remembered is a hundred and fifty, and “the hundred and fifty fathers” became the council's name, as “the 318” had for Nicaea. It is a round number and there is no attendance list to check it against. All were from the Eastern half of the empire, most of them from Syria, Asia Minor and the region around the capital. The bishops of Egypt, Gregory of Nazianzus says, arrived after the council had begun. Gregory of Nyssa was there, and Socrates names Cyril of Jerusalem among the bishops. Diodore of Tarsus, one of the leading Nicene bishops of the East, is named in the emperor's law that followed the council, though with no attendance list it cannot be said outright that he sat in it.Socrates 5.8 for Cyril and the others he names; Codex Theodosianus 16.1.3 for Diodore. Modern reference works usually count Diodore among those present, but the surviving sources name him as a standard of communion afterwards, not as a participant. Rome sent nobody, and there is no sign that Damasus was invited.

Also present, at the start, were thirty-six bishops of the party that accepted the Son's divinity but not the Spirit's, led by Eleusius of Cyzicus. The Greek name for them was Pneumatomachoi, “fighters against the Spirit.” Socrates says the emperor and the council urged them to accept the faith of Nicaea, and that they refused and left the city.Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 5.8; Sozomen 7.7. Both say they were invited in the hope of reconciliation. After that the council was a meeting of one side.

The presidency changed three times, and the changes tell the story. It was first held by Meletius of Antioch, one of the two claimants to that see, which was itself a statement, since Rome and Alexandria backed his rival. Meletius died in the middle of the council. Gregory of Nazianzus, whom the council had just confirmed as bishop of Constantinople, took the chair, and proposed that Antioch's schism be ended by leaving Paulinus in sole possession. He was overruled. Then the Egyptian bishops arrived and objected to Gregory's own appointment: he had years earlier been made bishop of a small town called Sasima, and Nicaea's fifteenth canon forbade clergy to move from one city to another, so his translation to the capital, they argued, was irregular. Gregory, who had never wanted Sasima and had barely set foot in it, resigned rather than fight.Gregory's account of all this is in De vita sua 1506–1918, written soon afterwards and bitter about nearly everyone. The objection from Sasima may have been a pretext; the Egyptians had their own candidate. The detail that Gregory proposed Paulinus for Antioch is his own. His farewell speech to the council survives as Oration 42, and the part of it that is remembered is not about doctrine: he asks to be released, and to be given rest from his labours.

In his place the council chose Nectarius, a senator and civil official of Constantinople who was not yet baptised. He was baptised, consecrated and installed within days, and presided over the rest of the sessions.Socrates 5.8 and Sozomen 7.8. Ambrose had been made bishop of Milan from a similar position seven years earlier, so the choice was less strange to contemporaries than it sounds. The council ended the schism at Antioch by consecrating Flavian to succeed Meletius, which left Paulinus where he was and offended Rome, Alexandria and Milan all at once.

What it decided about the Spirit

The council's acts are lost; there is no record of its debates. What survives is a creed, a handful of canons and a brief description of its faith in the letter its successors sent to Rome the next year. That letter says the bishops confessed one Godhead, power and substance of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, equal in dignity and majesty, “in three perfect hypostases, that is, three perfect persons.”Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 5.9. The letter refers to a fuller doctrinal statement, a tomos, issued in 381, which does not survive. That is the settlement now called Trinitarian orthodoxy: one ousia, three hypostases. The council did not invent the formula, but it is the first ecumenical council to have taught it.

The creed the council is remembered for is a more complicated case. It is not, as one might expect, the creed of Nicaea with a longer third article. It is a different text, longer in most places and shorter in one. It drops Nicaea's phrase “that is, from the substance of the Father.” It drops the anathemas. It adds the Virgin Mary, Pontius Pilate, the burial, “according to the Scriptures,” the Church, baptism, the resurrection of the dead. Its shape is that of a baptismal creed, the kind a local church taught to converts, and the best explanation is that the council took an existing creed of that sort and adopted it, perhaps with adjustments, as its confession of the Nicene faith.Who wrote it, where, and exactly what the council did with it are open questions. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, chapter 10, sets out the evidence. No source between 381 and 451 quotes the creed as the council's; a nearly identical text stands in the manuscripts of Epiphanius' Ancoratus, written in 374, but most scholars take that as a later copyist's substitution. The older theory that the creed had nothing to do with 381 and was attributed to it afterwards is now generally rejected; the council's exact hand in the text remains unrecoverable.

The third article is the reason the creed is remembered as this council's. Where Nicaea had six words on the Spirit, this has six clauses. The Spirit is “Lord,” a title Scripture gives to God. He is “life-giver.” He “proceeds from the Father,” the language of John 15:26. He is worshipped and glorified “together with” the Father and the Son, which is Basil's argument from the liturgy: the Church already praised the Spirit as it praised the Father, so the Church already believed what it was now being asked to say. And he “spoke through the prophets.”

What the creed does not say is as deliberate as what it does. It never calls the Spirit “God.” It never says he is homoousios. Every phrase is scriptural or liturgical, and every phrase implies the Spirit's divinity without stating it in the technical word that had cost the Church fifty years over the Son. That reticence was Basil's policy, meant to make it as easy as possible for the hesitant to sign. Gregory of Nazianzus thought it a failure of nerve, and said so.De vita sua c. 1675–1700, especially 1684–93, where he compares the council's formula to a clear spring into which salt water has been let. His own view, that the Spirit should simply be called God, is in Oration 31. The Catechism today reads the creed's phrase as confessing the Spirit to be consubstantial with the Father and the Son (CCC 685), which is what the council meant and did not say.

One more clause was aimed at a particular man. “Of whose kingdom there will be no end” answers Marcellus of Ancyra, a supporter of Nicaea whose theology had the Son's distinct existence ending when his work was done, and who had been an embarrassment to the Nicene side for decades.

The canons

The oldest Greek collections give the council four canons. Two more that travel with them were passed by the synod of 382, and a seventh was attached later still.Tanner prints all seven, noting that canons 5 and 6 were framed at the synod of 382 and that canon 7 is an extract from a letter the church of Constantinople later sent to Martyrius of Antioch. The Latin collections knew only the first four, and Rome for a long time did not accept the third.

• Canon 1. The profession of faith of the fathers at Nicaea is not to be abrogated but is to remain in force, and every heresy is anathematised. The canon then names them: Eunomians, Arians, the party that fought the Spirit, Sabellians, Marcellians, Photinians and Apollinarians. The list is a map of everything the fourth century had argued about.
• Canon 2. Bishops are not to interfere in churches outside their own region, and the regions are named: Alexandria for Egypt, Antioch for the East, and the bishops of Asia, Pontus and Thrace for their own dioceses. It is the civil map of the empire applied to the Church, and a rebuke to Alexandria, which had been interfering at Constantinople.
• Canon 3. Because Constantinople is “New Rome,” its bishop is to enjoy the privileges of honour after the bishop of Rome. By 381 the city had been an imperial capital for about half a century, and its bishop had no apostle, no martyrs and no ancient rank. The canon gives him second place on the ground that his city is New Rome: a rank founded on the city's standing in the empire rather than on its place in the Church's past. Rome objected, not to the second place for itself but to the principle; the argument would be fought again at Chalcedon seventy years later, and the canon was a sore point between Rome and Constantinople for centuries.
• Canon 4. Maximus, called the Cynic, who had been secretly consecrated bishop of Constantinople the year before by Egyptian bishops while Gregory was in charge of the city, never was and is not a bishop, and every ordination he performed is void.

What the council did not do

It did not think of itself as ecumenical, and the West did not think so either. When the Eastern bishops met again in 382 and were asked to come to a general council at Rome, they declined, and sent the letter to Damasus instead.Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 5.8–9. The invitation had come from the Western bishops through the emperor Gratian; the Easterners pleaded the length of the journey and the state of their churches. Rome held its own synod that year and, as far as the evidence shows, ignored Constantinople's creed. The council's standing came later: at Chalcedon in 451 its creed was read alongside Nicaea's and received explicitly as the faith of “the hundred and fifty fathers,” and by the time of Gregory the Great, a century and a half after that, a pope could write that he received the first four councils as he received the four Gospels.For Chalcedon, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, trans. Price and Gaddis, the sessions in which the creeds of Nicaea and of the 150 were read out and acclaimed. For Gregory, Letters 1.24. The reception of Constantinople's creed was more straightforward than the reception of its third canon, which Rome continued to resist. This is why the Church's list of ecumenical councils is not a list of meetings that were called ecumenical. It is a list of meetings whose teaching the whole Church came to receive.

It did not write the Filioque. The creed says the Spirit “proceeds from the Father.” The Latin “and the Son” entered the creed in the West. The earliest surviving text of the creed with the addition is in the acts of the Third Council of Toledo in 589, though whether those words are original to the acts or were copied in later is disputed, and Latin theologians had used the language well before that. By the usual account it was not sung at Mass in Rome itself until 1014, under Pope Benedict VIII, at the request of the emperor Henry II. The Catechism notes that the addition is not in the creed of 381 and remains a point of disagreement with the Orthodox (CCC 247). Whether the addition is a legitimate development or an unauthorised change to a conciliar text is a real question, and it is not one this article can settle.

And it did not finish the work on Christ. Canon 1 condemns the Apollinarians, followers of Apollinaris of Laodicea, a friend of Athanasius and firm supporter of Nicaea who had taught that in Christ the divine Word took the place of a human mind. The council condemned the teaching; its surviving text gives no reasons. Gregory of Nazianzus had already given the reason in a letter that would carry the next two councils: “what has not been assumed has not been healed.”Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101, to Cledonius. The letter is usually dated to 382, just after the council. How the Word could be fully God and fully man in one person was the question of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451.

Why it matters

The Catechism quotes this council, not Nicaea, when it explains the Church's faith in the Holy Spirit: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father” (CCC 245). Nicaea had answered one question, whether the Son is God. Constantinople answered the question that Nicaea's answer had raised, and answered it in the form of a creed meant to be prayed rather than a test meant to be signed. That is why it is this text, and not the creed of 325, that the Church took into the liturgy. Every Sunday, when Catholics say “with the Father and the Son he is adored and glorified,” they are saying what a hundred and fifty Eastern bishops, some of them reluctant, agreed to say in the summer of 381.