The First Council of Nicaea (325)

Every Sunday, Catholics stand and say that Jesus Christ is “consubstantial with the Father.” The word is strange in English because it was contested in Greek. It was chosen at a meeting in the summer of 325, in a lakeside town in what is now north-western Turkey, by a few hundred bishops who had been summoned there by a Roman emperor. This is the first of seven articles on the councils that the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches count as ecumenical: councils received as speaking for the whole Church, whose teaching binds it.

Why an emperor called a church council

In 324 Constantine defeated his last rival and became sole ruler of the Roman Empire. He had favoured Christianity for a decade, and he wanted the Church to be one thing, not a set of quarrelling parties. He found the Church in the middle of a quarrel.

Around 318, or a little later, a priest in Alexandria named Arius had begun teaching that the Son of God was not eternal. God the Father alone was without beginning; the Son was begotten, and therefore, Arius reasoned, there was a point before which the Son did not exist. He put it in a phrase that his opponents never let him forget: “there was when he was not.”Almost everything Arius wrote is lost. His teaching is known from a few letters and fragments, most of them quoted by his opponents. The Son was exalted above every other creature, brought into being by the Father before the rest of creation and the agent through whom everything else was made. But he was brought into being.

His bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, condemned the teaching and removed Arius from his post. Arius appealed to bishops elsewhere, and several agreed with him, most importantly Eusebius of Nicomedia, then an imperial residence. Within a few years the dispute had spread across the Greek-speaking East. Constantine first sent his adviser, Bishop Hosius of Córdoba, with a letter telling both sides to stop arguing over what he called a trivial question. That did not work. So he summoned bishops from across the empire to a council, and offered to pay their travelling expenses.Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.6, on the summons and the use of the imperial post.

1. c. 318
   Arius begins teaching in Alexandria

   The dating rests on later historians and is approximate. Some scholars put the start of the dispute as late as 321.

2. 324
   Constantine becomes sole emperor

   He defeats Licinius, and the Christian East comes under his rule for the first time.

3. Summer 325
   The council meets at Nicaea

   The bishops sit in the imperial palace. The sources disagree on the exact dates; the council's day-by-day record does not survive.

4. 381
   The Council of Constantinople issues the creed said at Mass

   It reaffirms the faith of Nicaea in a distinct text; the Nicene Creed as recited today comes from this second council.

Who came

Eusebius of Caesarea, who was there, says more than 250 bishops attended.Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.8. Later tradition fixed the number at 318, an echo of the 318 servants of Abraham in Genesis, and the “318 fathers” became a way of naming the council. The real figure was probably somewhere between the two.

Almost all of them were from the East. The Latin West sent a handful: Hosius of Córdoba, who took a leading part and may have presided; two priests, Vitus and Vincentius, representing the bishop of Rome, Sylvester, who did not travel; Caecilian of Carthage; and a few others. Arius was present, though as a priest he could not vote. So was Alexander of Alexandria, with a young deacon named Athanasius, who would spend the rest of his life defending the faith of Nicaea.

Constantine opened the council in person. Eusebius describes him walking in dressed in purple and gold, waiting for the bishops to invite him to sit, and then urging them to make peace. He attended the debates and, by Eusebius’ account, joined in. He was not baptised; that came on his deathbed twelve years later.

What the council decided about the Son

The bishops rejected Arius. According to Athanasius, they first tried to say so in the words of Scripture alone, but every biblical phrase they proposed, Arius's supporters found a way to accept in their own sense. “From God” could be said of any creature; “the power of God” is what Scripture calls the locust. So the council reached for language that could not be bent: the Son is begotten “from the substance of the Father,” and he is homoousios, “of one substance,” with the Father.Athanasius, De decretis 19–20. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his letter home, says that the emperor himself put forward homoousios; Eusebius had reasons to present it that way, since he had to explain to his own church why he had signed a creed he was uneasy about. Who first proposed the word, and how it reached the final text, is still debated.

Two things stand out. The creed is short on the Holy Spirit, a single clause, because the Spirit was not what was in dispute. And it ends with anathemas, sentences naming the exact phrases Arius used and declaring that anyone who holds them is outside the Church. The creed was not written as a prayer. It was written as a test.

The tradition is that only two bishops refused to sign, Theonas of Marmarica and Secundus of Ptolemais, and that they were exiled with Arius. Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicaea signed the creed but, by most accounts, balked at the anathemas; within a few months they too were exiled, as the conflict over Arius went on.Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.8–9, and the council's letter to the church of Alexandria, which Socrates preserves. Eusebius of Nicomedia's own explanation of his signature does not survive.

The twenty canons

The council also passed twenty rules of church order. Most are about clergy and discipline, and several are still cited:

• Canon 4. A bishop should be consecrated by all the bishops of his province, or at least three, with the consent of the rest.
• Canon 6. The bishop of Alexandria has authority over Egypt, Libya and Pentapolis, “since a similar custom exists with the bishop of Rome,” and Antioch keeps its ancient rights. It is an early witness to the great sees having authority over regions, though the later system of patriarchates should not be read back into it.
• Canon 15. Bishops, priests and deacons are not to move from one city to another.
• Canon 17. Clergy who lend money at interest are to be deposed.
• Canon 20. On Sundays and during the fifty days of Easter, prayer is to be offered standing, not kneeling. The rule is a reminder that the posture of the Easter season was once uniform across the Church.

The canons are not where the council's fame comes from, but they show what a council was for: not only doctrine, but the ordinary order of the Church.

Easter

The council also settled a practical quarrel that had lasted more than a century: when to celebrate Easter. Some churches, especially in Asia Minor and Syria, kept it in step with the Jewish Passover, on whatever day of the week that fell. Others, including Rome and Alexandria, kept it on a Sunday. The council decided for the Sunday, and asked that the whole Church keep the same day. The decision survives not in the canons but in the council's letter to the church of Alexandria and in Constantine's own letter to the churches, which Eusebius reproduces.Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.18–19; Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.9. How to calculate that Sunday was not settled; in practice it came to rest on Alexandrian reckoning, and disagreements over it lasted for centuries. That East and West today still often keep Easter on different dates is a later matter, of the Julian and Gregorian calendars, not of Nicaea.

What Nicaea did not do

Because it was the first, Nicaea has attracted claims that belong to other places.

It did not decide which books are in the Bible. No list of Scripture was discussed there; the surviving canons, creed and letters say nothing about it. The canon of Scripture took shape through use over centuries, and was recognised by later councils.

It did not invent the divinity of Christ, or vote on it. Christians had prayed to Christ as God from very early; Pliny the Younger, a pagan governor writing to the emperor Trajan around 112, reports that they sang hymns “to Christ as to a god.” The question at Nicaea was narrower and harder: what it means for the Son to be God if there is only one God. Arius had one answer. The council rejected it.

And it did not end the argument. Within a decade Arius was recalled from exile, Athanasius was banished, and homoousios was being attacked as unscriptural and as a word that made Father and Son indistinguishable. The dispute ran for another fifty-six years, through emperors who favoured the council's opponents, and those opponents were several parties, not one; historians no longer call them all “Arian.” It lasted until the Council of Constantinople in 381 reaffirmed the faith of Nicaea and issued the creed said at Mass today. That creed keeps Nicaea's decisive word, but it is a distinct text, not simply Nicaea's creed with additions. It is called the Nicene Creed because Nicaea is where the word was chosen.

Why it matters

The Catechism puts the council's achievement in one sentence: it confessed that the Son is “begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father,” and so is true God (CCC 465). Nicaea established that the Church could say what it believed in words that were not in Scripture when Scripture's own words were being read two ways. That precedent, more than any single phrase, is what the next six councils would rely on.