The Seven Councils, every part

I first learned the Creed in Latin, as an altar boy in the Catholic Church in the early 1960s, before the Second Vatican Council began changing things. The priest faced the altar, the same direction as the people. There were four of us boys, two servers and two side servers, and we spent most of the Mass kneeling on the steps behind him. At one point, I think it was during the Creed (it was a long time ago), we boys went down flat on those steps.

Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae. I could say it long before I understood a word of it.

Years later I heard it again in an Orthodox church, in English this time, because the Orthodox Church almost always prays in the language of the people. And it came with three words missing. Those three words are a story for later in this series.

If you are new, you will have your own version of that moment. Somewhere in your first few months, usually standing, usually without a book, you will realize that everyone around you knows a long prayer by heart and you do not. I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible. It goes on for a while. People say it without looking at anything, the way you say your own address.

That is the Creed. And nearly every word of the first half of it was fought over, out loud, by a room full of bishops in the summer of 325.

This is the first in a series on the seven Ecumenical Councils. They can sound like the dustiest corner of Church history — old men, old arguments, Greek words nobody uses. I want to try to show you why they are not. Each one was the Church answering a single question that, if it had been answered wrong, would have left us with a different faith. Not a slightly different one. A different one.

A short note at the end explains how I handle the places where tradition and the historians tell it differently. It is worth reading.

The first question was simple to ask and enormous to answer: Who is Jesus Christ?

A Priest in Alexandria

The trouble started, as trouble often does, with a gifted preacher.

His name was Arius, a priest in Alexandria, in Egypt, sometime around the year 318. By every account he was serious, disciplined, and popular. He also had a way with a tune; he set his teaching to verse so that sailors and dockworkers could sing it, which is a very effective way to spread a theology and a very hard way to stop one.

What Arius taught sounded, at first hearing, almost reverent. God is one, he said, and God is unbegotten. The Son is begotten. So the Son must have had a beginning. He is the first and greatest of all God’s creatures, the one through whom everything else was made — but a creature all the same. His slogan, the line that made it into every account, was this:

There was when He was not.

It is worth slowing down here, because Arius was not a fool and his idea was not obviously crazy. He was trying to protect something real: the oneness and the transcendence of God. To many people it sounded like humility. Surely, they thought, it is more respectful to God the Father to keep the Son a step below Him.

His bishop, Alexander, did not think so. And standing beside Alexander was a young deacon named Athanasius, who would spend the next fifty years of his life explaining why.

Why It Mattered So Much

Here is the heart of it, and it is the part that is easiest to miss.

If the Son is a creature — even the highest creature, even the one through whom the stars were made — then He cannot save you.

That is not a technicality. The whole Christian claim is that God Himself came to us. That He took on our flesh, entered our death, and broke it open from the inside. Only God can unite humanity to God. A creature, however exalted, can bring you a message from God. He cannot bring you into God. Athanasius would later put it in a sentence the Church has never stopped quoting: He became man so that we might become god. Not God by nature — we remain creatures forever — but filled with His life, the way iron left in the fire glows with the fire’s heat.

If Arius is right, that sentence is false. Salvation becomes something done for you by a very great go-between, rather than God Himself reaching down and taking hold of you. The worship changes too. If the Son is a creature, then every hymn sung to Christ is a hymn sung to a creature, and the Church has spent three centuries worshipping something that is not God.

So the question was not abstract. It was: is the One we pray to, the One in the icon, the One in the Chalice, God or not?

The Emperor Calls a Council

The argument did not stay in Alexandria. Bishops took sides across the East. Letters flew. Congregations split. And all of this landed on the desk of a man who had only recently stopped persecuting Christians and started favoring them: the Emperor Constantine.

Constantine wanted peace in his empire, and he was beginning to see that a divided Church meant a divided empire. So in 325 he did something no one had ever done. He summoned bishops from across the whole Christian world to meet in one place, at his own expense. He put the imperial post at their disposal — horses, mules, carriages, all paid for by the state. The place was Nicaea, a lakeside city in what is now northwestern Turkey.

An old Greek priest put it differently in a catechism class I sat in. The bishops, he said, were given a choice about whether to come, but they were coming either way. Then he told us the story: Constantine sent soldiers to escort them, and any bishop who declined the invitation was put in the wagon and taken to Nicaea anyway. Everyone laughed. No ancient source says so; Eusebius, who was there, describes warm letters of invitation. But anyone who has ever tried to get a room full of bishops to agree on a meeting will understand why the story is still told.

How many came is not certain. The contemporary estimates run from about 250 to 300. The Church remembers them as the 318 Fathers of Nicaea, the same number as the servants Abraham took into battle in Genesis, and that is the number you will hear in the hymns.

That same priest, once the laughter died down, made sure we understood that the next part was no joke. It was entirely true.

Picture the room. These were not comfortable men. Some of them had come straight out of the persecutions. There were bishops missing eyes, bishops with crippled hands, bishops whose legs had been hamstrung for refusing to deny Christ. The historians say Constantine kissed the scars of some of them. A generation earlier the empire had been trying to kill these men. Now it was paying for their travel.

The Church also remembers two saints at Nicaea with stories attached. St Spyridon of Trimythous, a shepherd-bishop from Cyprus, is said to have taken a brick in his hand to show how three things could be one — and as he spoke, fire went up from it, water ran down, and clay was left in his palm. And St Nicholas of Myra, the same Nicholas, is said to have become so angry listening to Arius that he struck him across the face. You should know that both stories come to us from later tradition rather than from the records of the council itself. You should also know that most Orthodox children hear the one about Nicholas sooner or later, and are delighted by it.

One Word

The bishops quickly agreed that Arius was wrong. The hard part was saying so in a way he could not slip out of.

Every phrase from Scripture they proposed, the Arian party found a way to accept. The Son is from God? Yes, they said; so are we all. The Son is the true image of the Father? Yes; so is man made in God’s image. The Son is God? Yes, in a sense. Every biblical phrase could be stretched, and they stretched it.

So the council did something bold. It reached for a word that is not in the Bible, a word that left no room to stretch: homoousios. It means of one essence — the same being, the same nature, not merely a similar one. The Son is not a lesser copy of the Father. Whatever the Father is, the Son is, except that the Father is Father and the Son is Son.

That is the line you say every Sunday: Being of one Essence with the Father; By whom all things were made.

And around it the council built the rest. Listen to how the Creed piles phrase on phrase, as if closing every exit: the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all worlds; Light of Light, Very God of very God, Begotten, not made. Each of those was aimed. Before all worlds answers “there was when He was not.” Begotten, not made answers “He is the first of the creatures.” Very God of very God (“very” here is the old word for true) answers “He is God in a manner of speaking.”

When you say it, you are standing where those bishops stood.

Nearly all of them signed. Arius did not, and neither did two bishops from Libya who stood with him. They were sent into exile.

What Else Nicaea Did

The Creed was the main work, but not the only work. The council also issued twenty canons — rules for the life of the Church — and some of them you can still see on any Sunday.

It agreed that all Christians everywhere should keep Pascha on the same Sunday, rather than each region working out its own date. The detailed tables came later, but the principle was settled there: one Church, one Feast of feasts.

It recognized the long-standing leadership of the great churches of Alexandria, Rome and Antioch over their regions.

And in its very last canon, it said that on Sundays and through the fifty days from Pascha to Pentecost, Christians should pray standing rather than kneeling. If you have ever wondered why the kneeling stops after Pascha and comes back at Pentecost — that is Nicaea, still at work, seventeen centuries later.

What Nicaea Did Not Do

Because Nicaea is famous, it collects stories, and a few of them you will almost certainly hear.

The Church began at Nicaea. It did not. The Church began at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles, nearly three hundred years earlier. By 325 there were bishops in every city, the Liturgy was being served, and the room at Nicaea was full of men who had the scars to prove how long the Church had already been around. Nicaea was not even the first council. The apostles met in Jerusalem to settle a hard question in Acts 15, and Nicaea followed their example, only on a larger scale.

What Nicaea did do was put the Church’s order in writing for the whole world at once. Its canons said a new bishop must be consecrated by at least three others, that the bishops of each province should meet twice a year, and how the great churches stood in relation to one another. But listen to how one of those canons begins: Let the ancient customs prevail. The council was not inventing an organization. It was writing down, for everyone, the one the Church already had.

Constantine founded the Church. He did not. He called the council, paid for it, and opened it, and he wanted very much for the bishops to agree. But he did not write the Creed, and he did not decide what Christians believe. He was not even baptized until he was dying.

Nicaea decided which books belong in the Bible. It did not. Nothing in the council’s Creed, its canons, or the accounts of the people who were there says a word about it. That story is modern, and it has been told so often, in so many novels and documentaries, that people assume it must be true.

And one more, for anyone who arrived from the West, as I did: at Nicaea there was no “Orthodox” and “Catholic.” There was one Church, East and West together, and the bishop of Rome sent two priests to represent him. The sad separation came centuries later. Nicaea belongs to both, and that is worth remembering on both sides.

It Did Not End There

I would be telling you a tidy story if I said the council settled everything. It did not.

Arianism came roaring back within a few years. Emperors after Constantine favored it. Bishops who had signed at Nicaea wavered. Athanasius, by then Bishop of Alexandria, was exiled five times by four emperors, and spent years in hiding — once, the story goes, in his own father’s tomb. There were seasons when it looked as if nearly the whole Church had gone over to Arius. People still describe Athanasius with the phrase against the world, because for a while that is very nearly where he stood.

It took more than fifty years, and another council, before the matter was truly closed. That council, at Constantinople in 381, finished the Creed by saying what the Church believes about the Holy Spirit. The text you say on Sunday is really the work of both councils together. That is where this series goes next.

I find this oddly encouraging. The truth was decided at Nicaea, but it was not won there. It was won over decades, by people who kept saying the same thing through exile and pressure and long seasons when they were outnumbered. The Church has never kept the faith by being comfortable. It has kept it by being stubborn about the right things.

What This Means When You Are Standing in Church

You do not need to remember dates. You do not need to pronounce homoousios. But here is what I hope stays with you.

When you say the Creed, you are not reciting a list of opinions. Every line is a boundary marker put down by people who paid for it, so that you could know who it is you are worshipping. The Christ in the icon is not a messenger from God. He is God, come close enough to be painted.

The Church keeps the memory of these Fathers on a particular Sunday: the Sunday after the Ascension, the last Sunday before Pentecost, called the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council. The hymns that day are full of them. If you are new, that is a good Sunday to pay attention.

And the next time the Creed begins and everyone around you knows the words and you are still catching up, don’t be embarrassed. You are joining a sentence that has been said for seventeen hundred years. It was written for you to grow into.

Light of Light, Very God of very God.

Say it slowly. They fought hard for every word.

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A Note on How This Series Is Written

Simply Orthodox is a teaching site, and the Councils are ground that has been argued over for a very long time. So here is how I approach it.

These essays hold to what the Orthodox Church teaches and has always taught. That is the faith they set out to explain, not a position up for debate.

But the Church has never been afraid of history, and neither should we be. Where historians today read the evidence differently than the traditional account — how many bishops actually came, who said what, whether a beloved story happened just as it is told — I will say so plainly and tell you which is which. Stories the Church has handed down but which do not appear in the records of the time are marked as tradition. The Church remembers, and the historians count. Both are worth hearing, and the one does not cancel the other.

You should also know, going in, that you will hear parts of this told differently. A priest may tell it one way, a book another, the internet a dozen more. Some of that is the difference between tradition and history; some of it is emphasis; some of it is simply people getting it wrong. Hearing a different version does not mean anyone is lying to you, and it does not mean the faith is uncertain. It means the story is old and much loved, and a great many people have told it.

None of this is meant to replace your priest. A website, including this one, can explain; it cannot shepherd. If something here raises a question for you — and with the Councils it may — take it to him. That conversation is the tradition working exactly as it should.

For this essay I have leaned on the oldest witnesses: Eusebius of Caesarea, who was in the room, and his Life of Constantine; St Athanasius, who was also in the room, in On the Incarnation and On the Decrees of Nicaea; the Church histories of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, written within a century or so; and the twenty canons of the council itself. The words of the Creed quoted here come from Isabel Hapgood’s English Service Book of 1906, which is in the public domain. Your parish’s wording may differ a little; follow your parish.

In the early 380s, a bishop named Gregory described what it was like to go shopping in Constantinople.

Ask a man for change, he said, and he will give you a lecture on the Begotten and the Unbegotten. Ask the price of bread, and you will be told that the Father is greater and the Son is less. Ask whether your bath is ready, and the attendant will inform you that the Son was made out of nothing.

He was exaggerating, but not by much. More than fifty years after Nicaea, the question the council had answered was still being argued in the bakeries. And a new question had joined it.

This is the second essay in a series on the seven Ecumenical Councils. The first was about Nicaea, and the word that said the Son is of one Essence with the Father. This one is about the council that finished the job, and gave us the end of the Creed we say on Sunday.

As before, a short note at the end explains how I handle the places where tradition and the historians tell it differently. It is worth reading.

To understand why a second council was needed at all, you have to know what happened after the first one went home.

Nicaea Did Not Hold

The bishops left Nicaea in 325 believing the matter was settled. Within a few years, it was coming apart.

The trouble was not that most people loved Arius. It was that many bishops were uneasy with that new word, homoousios. It was not in the Bible. It sounded, to some ears, as if it blurred the Father and the Son together. And there were men close to the emperor who had signed at Nicaea without much enthusiasm, and who now set about quietly undoing it.

The most skilled of them was a bishop named Eusebius of Nicomedia. Within a few years, the bishops who had defended Nicaea most loudly were being removed from their sees one by one. Athanasius, now Bishop of Alexandria, was sent into the first of his five exiles in 335. Arius himself was on the verge of being received back into communion in Constantinople when he died suddenly, in 336, on the eve of it.

The old accounts say he was walking through the city when he was seized with a violent illness, and died in a public latrine of a hemorrhage. The bishop of Constantinople had spent the night before in church, praying that God would take either Arius or himself rather than let Arius be received. Athanasius told the story as a judgment of God, and that is how the Church remembered it for centuries. Some modern historians, noticing how convenient the timing was, have wondered about poison, though no ancient source accuses anyone. Others think it was simply a sudden illness in a man of about eighty. The record tells us what happened. It does not tell us why.

And the emperor who had called the council, Constantine, was baptized on his deathbed in 337. The bishop who baptized him was Eusebius of Nicomedia.

The Whole World Groaned

Constantine’s son Constantius, who came to rule the whole empire, favored the anti-Nicene side, and he had the power to make bishops agree. Council followed council. Creed followed creed: the Son is like the Father, the Son is like the Father in all things, the Son is like the Father according to the Scriptures. Each one sounded close enough. Each one quietly left the door open that Nicaea had shut.

In 359, at two great councils meeting at once, East and West, the bishops were pressured and worn down until nearly all of them signed a creed that dropped the word essence altogether. St Jerome, looking back, wrote one of the most famous sentences in Church history:

The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.

For a while, it looked as if Nicaea had lost.

It had not, and the reason was mostly not emperors or councils. It was ordinary believers and stubborn pastors. Athanasius kept writing from exile. The Desert Fathers of Egypt refused to budge. St Antony the Great, nearly ninety, came out of the desert into Alexandria to denounce the Arians in public. And when the emperor’s soldiers hunted Athanasius, the monks hid him, passing him from monastery to monastery for years. And congregations kept singing the faith they had been taught, sometimes in defiance of the bishop who had been set over them. Empires can replace bishops. They have a harder time replacing what a people prays.

A Pagan Interlude, and an Arian One

Then things got stranger.

In 361 a new emperor, Julian, tried to turn the empire back to the old gods. History calls him Julian the Apostate. He let the exiled bishops come home, mostly so the Christians would go back to fighting each other. He was killed in battle against the Persians less than two years later.

After him, in the East, came Valens, who was an Arian and used the full power of the throne for his side. Orthodox bishops were exiled again. In Constantinople itself, the capital of the Christian empire, every church was in Arian hands.

In 373, Athanasius died. He had defended Nicaea for nearly fifty years, and he did not live to see it win.

The New Question

Meanwhile, something else had happened. The argument had moved.

Once you say the Son is truly God, the obvious next question is: what about the Holy Spirit? Is the Spirit God, as the Father and the Son are God? Or is the Spirit a power, a force, a gift that God sends, but not God Himself?

A party grew up that answered: a creature. They were sometimes called Pneumatomachoi, the Spirit-fighters. Some of them were willing to accept that the Son was fully divine. They drew the line at the Spirit.

And remember: the Creed of Nicaea had not said much about the Spirit. After all its careful words about the Son, it ended, almost abruptly: And in the Holy Spirit. That was enough in 325, when no one was arguing about it. By the 370s, it was not enough.

Three Friends from Cappadocia

The answer came mostly from three men from Cappadocia, in what is now central Turkey. The Church calls them the Cappadocian Fathers.

St Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea, was the organizer: a man who founded hospitals, wrote monastic rules, and fought the emperor’s officials to a standstill. When Basil’s enemies complained that he had changed the words of a doxology, praising the Father with the Son together with the Holy Spirit, instead of through the Son in the Spirit, he wrote a whole book, On the Holy Spirit, to show why the Spirit is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son.

His younger brother, St Gregory of Nyssa, was the philosopher of the family, and the one who gave us that report on the bakeries.

And his best friend, St Gregory of Nazianzus, was the poet and the preacher. Gregory did not want to be a bishop of anything. But in 379 he was persuaded to go to Constantinople, where the Orthodox had no churches left, and minister to the small flock still holding to Nicaea. He preached in a house chapel. He called it the Anastasia, the Resurrection, because the faith in that city was rising from the dead.

There, in that little chapel, in the year 380, he preached five sermons on God that are still read today. The Church gave him a title it has given only to a few: the Theologian.

Basil did not live to see what came next. He died at the start of 379, worn out at about fifty. But that same year a new emperor came to the throne in the East, Theodosius, and Theodosius held the faith of Nicaea.

In 381, he called the bishops to his capital.

The Hundred and Fifty

They came in May of 381, about a hundred and fifty of them. The Church remembers them as the 150 Fathers.

It was a smaller gathering than Nicaea, and an Eastern one. No bishops came from the West, and the Bishop of Rome sent no one. That is worth remembering, because it means that when this council was over, nobody yet knew it would be counted among the great ones. It earned that title later, when the whole Church, East and West, looked at what it had done and recognized its own faith in it.

The first to preside was Meletius, Bishop of Antioch, an old confessor who had been exiled three times for Nicaea. The emperor embraced him like a father. And a few weeks into the council, Meletius died. The bishops buried him with tears, and the council went on.

Gregory the Theologian, by then installed as Bishop of Constantinople, took the chair.

Gregory Steps Down

You would think this was Gregory’s moment. The faith he had preached in a borrowed chapel was about to be declared the faith of the whole Church, and he was presiding over the council that would do it.

It went badly for him almost at once.

Gregory was a poet, not a politician, and the council was full of politicians. Some bishops objected that he had been bishop of another town before Constantinople, and that the canons of Nicaea forbade a bishop to move from one see to another. Others were simply tired of him: he was sharp, he was impatient with their maneuvering, and he would not take sides in their quarrels. When a delegation from Egypt arrived late and joined the objections, Gregory had had enough.

He stood up before the council and resigned. He told them, in effect, that if he was the cause of the storm, they should throw him overboard like Jonah, and the sea would grow calm. Then he gave a farewell sermon to the city that is still read, and went home to Cappadocia to write poetry and pray. He never returned.

The council needed a new bishop for the capital, and it chose a retired official named Nectarius, a kindly man who was so new to all of this that he had not yet been baptized. They baptized him, and then they consecrated him.

I tell you this not to make the bishops look bad, though some of them do. I tell you because the Church has never pretended her councils were full of saints only. Some of these men were holy, some were ambitious, and some were simply tired. And God brought the truth out of that room anyway. That should comfort anyone who has ever sat through a parish council meeting.

The End of the Creed

The council’s great work was to finish the Creed.

Remember how Nicaea ended: And in the Holy Spirit. Nothing more. The bishops at Constantinople took the Creed of Nicaea, smoothed some of its phrasing, and gave the Holy Spirit what had been missing. This is the text you say every Sunday, in the words of Hapgood’s old translation:

And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, Who spake by the Prophets.

(Ghost, by the way, is simply the old English word for spirit. Nothing spooky about it.)

Notice what they did, and what they did not do. They did not reach for another new word, as Nicaea had with homoousios. They did not write that the Spirit is of one Essence with the Father, though that is what they believed. Instead they said something every Christian could recognize from their own prayer: the Spirit is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son.

That was Basil’s argument, and it was a wise one. You do not worship a creature. If the Church has always given glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, in her baptisms, her doxologies and her hymns, then the Church has always believed the Spirit is God. The council simply wrote down what the people of God had been praying all along.

Then they added the lines that finish the Creed:

In one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the Resurrection of the dead, And the Life of the world to come. Amen.

And with that, the Creed was complete. It has not changed in the Orthodox Church from that day to this.

What Else They Settled

The council also condemned, by name, a list of errors that had grown up in those fifty years, among them the Spirit-fighters and the strict Arians.

One of those names was new. A bishop called Apollinarius, who had actually fought hard against the Arians, had gone too far in the other direction. He taught that Christ had a human body but not a human mind, that the divine Word simply took the place of a human soul. It sounded reverent. Gregory the Theologian answered it in a single sentence the Church has treasured ever since: What has not been assumed has not been healed. If Christ did not take on a whole human being, mind and all, then the human mind, where so much of our sin begins, was never healed. He became fully one of us, so that all of us could be saved.

And the council gave the bishop of Constantinople a place of honor second only to the bishop of Rome, because it is New Rome. That one line would cause trouble for centuries, and it is a story for later in this series.

The Three Words

Now I owe you something. At the beginning of the first essay I told you about learning the Creed in Latin as an altar boy, and hearing it years later in an Orthodox church with three words missing. Here is where those words belong.

The line the council wrote says the Holy Spirit proceedeth from the Father. That is what the bishops wrote in 381, and what the Church affirmed again at later councils.

Two centuries later, at a local council in Toledo, in Spain, in 589, churchmen in the West added a word to the Latin Creed: Filioque, “and the Son.” The Spirit, they now said, proceeds from the Father and the Son. They meant it as a defense against the Arians in their own country. The addition spread through the Frankish lands, and over the next few centuries it became part of the Creed across most of the West.

Rome resisted it for a long time. Around the year 809, Pope Leo III had the Creed engraved on two silver shields, one in Greek and one in Latin, and hung them in St Peter’s, without the added word. But eventually Rome adopted it too, early in the eleventh century.

The East never did, partly because of what the words claim about the Holy Trinity, and partly because a creed agreed by the whole Church cannot simply be changed by one part of it. Those three words became one of the deepest wounds between East and West, and they are still there.

So when you stand in an Orthodox church and say Who proceedeth from the Father, and stop, you are saying the Creed exactly as the 150 Fathers wrote it.

What This Means When You Are Standing in Church

The next time you say the Creed, listen to how it changes as it goes. It begins with the Father, simply. It lingers a long time over the Son, piling phrase on phrase, because that is where Nicaea fought. And then it comes to the Holy Spirit, and the Church, and baptism, and the resurrection, and the life of the world to come, and it begins to move faster, as if it can see home from here.

That last part is Constantinople. It took fifty-six years, two councils, emperors who tried to stop it, and more exiles than anyone counted. It took Athanasius, who did not live to see it, and Basil, who did not live to see it, and Gregory, who saw it and was pushed out of the room.

And it ends with a promise: the Life of the world to come.

At Pentecost, when the Church celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit, there is a Vespers that evening when, for the first time since Pascha, the people kneel again, while the priest reads long prayers to the Holy Spirit. If you have never been, go. You will be kneeling where Basil knelt, praying what Gregory preached, and confessing what the 150 Fathers wrote down.

Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.

That is the whole of it. They simply wrote down how the Church prays.

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A Note on How This Series Is Written

Simply Orthodox is a teaching site, and the Councils are ground that has been argued over for a very long time. So here is how I approach it.

These essays hold to what the Orthodox Church teaches and has always taught. That is the faith they set out to explain, not a position up for debate.

But the Church has never been afraid of history, and neither should we be. Where historians today read the evidence differently than the traditional account, I will say so plainly and tell you which is which. Stories the Church has handed down but which do not appear in the records of the time are marked as tradition. The Church remembers, and the historians count. Both are worth hearing, and the one does not cancel the other.

You should also know, going in, that you will hear parts of this told differently. A priest may tell it one way, a book another, the internet a dozen more. Hearing a different version does not mean anyone is lying to you, and it does not mean the faith is uncertain. It means the story is old and much loved, and a great many people have told it.

None of this is meant to replace your priest. A website, including this one, can explain; it cannot shepherd. If something here raises a question for you, take it to him.

Where tradition and the historians differ in this essay:

• Arius’s death. The accounts come from Socrates and from Athanasius, who presents it as a judgment of God. Some modern historians suspect poison; others, natural causes. No ancient source accuses anyone.
• The Creed of 381. The Church has always received the Creed as the work of this council. Historians note that the full text first appears in the surviving records seventy years later, at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, where it was read out as the creed of the 150 Fathers. Most scholars accept that it comes from 381; some think the council endorsed an existing creed rather than composing it.
• Gregory of Nyssa’s bakery joke. It is real, from a sermon preached in Constantinople a couple of years after the council. It is satire, and meant to be.
• The 150 Fathers. The number is traditional and close to what the records suggest.
• Theodosius. He did not only call the council. The year before, he had decreed that his subjects must hold the faith of Nicaea. The Church has always had to live alongside emperors, and not every way they helped was gentle.

For this essay I have leaned on the Church histories of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret; the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers, especially Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, Gregory the Theologian’s Theological Orations, his farewell sermon to Constantinople and his letters against Apollinarius, and Gregory of Nyssa’s sermon On the Deity of the Son and the Holy Spirit; St Jerome; St Athanasius’s Life of Antony; the canons of the council; and the acts of Chalcedon, where the Creed was read. The words of the Creed quoted here come from Isabel Hapgood’s English Service Book of 1906, which is in the public domain. Your parish’s wording may differ a little; follow your parish.