By whatever name one wishes to call it, it was at Nicaea that Christianity arrived for the first time at a clear, intentional, self-conscious definition of what it was. The first edition of what we know now as the Nicene Creed was rendered there by reasoned debate and adopted by consensus. Christian orthodoxy had at last been born, but so too had the difficulties attendant on orthodoxy, for the wary relationship between truth and power in Christian affairs had been exposed beyond undoing at Nicaea. Constantine had failed completely in his efforts to disguise his intention to foist theological unity upon the gathered bishops not for the sake of the Church so much as for the purpose of solidifying an empire and, thereby, his imperial strength.
A half century later, there was a Second Ecumenical Council. There would be seven such councils over the coming four and a half centuries, and it would take almost fifty years of contentious discussion before the convocation of this second of them was even necessary. But convene it did, in 381 CE, when the bishops and theologians of the Church gathered at Constantinople for the specific purpose of looking again at the creed as it had been established at Nicaea. The changes put in place at Constantinople as a result of that gathering may appear, if they are only superficially scanned, to have been minor—more doctoring words than substance. But there are no minor adjustments in matters of religion.
Every addition and subtraction put into place at the Second Council was believed to be critical by those gathered there. As a result, what we today so cavalierly call the Nicene Creed is really more correctly referred to as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Regardless of its having a formal and more specific name, though, what most of us refer to in ordinary conversation as the Nicene Creed is not the original creed but rather the adjusted one that came out of that Second Ecumenical Council. Thus, with the modifications and additions printed in bold italics, Constantinople gave us these very familiar words:
We believe in One God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds;
Light of Light; true God of true God; begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and became man.
He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried.
And the third day He arose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spoke by the prophets.
And in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.
Obviously there are a number of things being asserted here, but for the purposes of our present discussion, one is of most particular importance. Now, at last, the Holy Spirit has been given an official role. Or, perhaps more discreetly said: the struggle to grasp in words what the Holy Spirit is and does has now arrived at creedal proportions.
By any stretch of rhetorical imagination, there is no way to unsay the fact that the Second or Constantinople Council in 381 CE made Jesus of Nazareth the direct product or result or effected consequence of an act of the Holy Spirit. In some ways, and in ways that would arguably become even more significant in our Emergence times, the Holy Spirit is now reverenced as the giver of all life, the voice of the prophets, and a procession of the Father.1 These, in other words, were not merely linguistic adjustments and accommodations! They were substantive changes that mattered then and have mattered for all the centuries since.
Any real understanding today of the progression of ideas and concepts that led from the Creed of Nicaea to the Creed of the Second Ecumenical Council must rest, ultimately, upon at least a modicum of understanding about a group of three men known to history as the Cappadocian Fathers. We have already met one of them, Basil of Caesarea. The other two in that pivotal trio were Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and their mutual friend, Gregory of Nazianzus.
All three men were brilliant, but they were also deeply devout and persuaded Christians. In their brilliance and their faithfulness, as well as in the ardor of their concerns, they paved the way in the years between Nicaea and First Constantinople (i.e., the Second Ecumenical Council) for a more studied and careful articulation of the Trinitarian God. In particular, the Church owes the Cappadocians great gratitude for their conceptualization or definition of the Trinity as “three-in-oneness.”
At First Nicaea, Constantine had chosen, and then championed, a Greek noun, homoousios, as the proper tool with which to describe the nature of the Son and thereby to counter Arius and his “heresy” of Son as less than Father. Homoousios itself is a melding of two Greek semantic units: homo, meaning “same,” and ousios, meaning something analogous to our English words “essence” or “substance.” By employing it, Constantine and the theologians and churchmen allied with him had sought to describe the Son as “same in being or substance” with and to the Father.
The churchmen and theologians in the eastern part of the empire and Church were, from the very first, uneasy with this solution, however, and for good reason. Homoousios was not innocent of doctrinal history. It had been used over half a century earlier by Paul of Samosate. A deposed Syrian bishop of Antioch, Paul had employed homoousios as part of his promulgation of the Monarchian heresy, which held that God was one and one only, the King of all. Jesus, by this line of argument, was a man who became God at His baptism in the Jordan River. Nonetheless, and despite the history-based objections of the Eastern bishops, Constantine had insisted; and what the emperor wanted, the emperor usually got. Certainly he did in this case, anyway; and after Nicaea, homoousios, already tainted, entered everyday liturgical usage as a way to describe the Father and the Son. They were to be understood as being of one substance.
Over the years after 325 CE and before Constantinople in 381 CE, however, the distinctiveness of the members of the Trinity had seemed to many Christians to somehow be dissolving, if not coming increasingly into outright question. It was the Cappadocian Fathers who found the way forward by creating the language that would thereafter be used to explain what they called three-in-oneness.
Up until the Cappadocians in the middle of the fourth century, little distinction had been made in Greek between the word ousia and the word hypostasis. Both were used to denote what we in English would call “essence” or “being.” Basil and the two Gregorys changed this. They began to write voluminously on the subject, in fact, persuading bishops and theologians all over the Christian world that the two words should be understood not as synonyms, but as referencing distinctly different constructs.
Borrowing from some of the ideas of Aristotle, the Cappadocians argued that the understanding of this difference between ousia and hypostasis is itself a holy work, especially and inasmuch as that distinction—however fine and torturous it might be—offered the explanation for what the Cappadocians saw as being the world’s greatest mystery. The Trinity, they said, is, in fact, one ousia (or “essence”) and three hypostases (or “individuals”; this concept would eventually be renamed as “persons”).
This distinction on the part of Basil and the two Gregorys has endured now for centuries. No small part of that longevity lies in the fact that, as a solution, it deftly avoids polytheism as well as Jewish monotheism. Basil himself understood this, almost turning those categories on their heads in the process when he wrote:
It is indispensable to have clear understanding that, as he who fails to confess the community of the essence (ousia) falls into polytheism so he who refuses to grant the distinction of the hypostases is carried away into Judaism.2
But shortly after the Cappadocians had successfully made their point, it became the Western bishops’ turn to be troubled over a specific word. Basically, the whole thing was a simple matter of Western Latin’s distorting the meaning of the Eastern Fathers’ Greek, but that point seems to have been lost in the fourth-century fray.
The word hypostasis, defined most literally, means “foundation” or “sediment.” It was heard, however, as something rather different (and very troubling) by the bishops and theologians in the West, many of whom rarely understood Greek nuances and subtleties.
When Roman ecclesial translators took hypostasis over into Latin, they rendered the Greek prefix hypo- into the Latin one of sub-, a not unreasonable rendering had the whole exercise been merely a matter of hypo- and sub- as freestanding linguistic elements. But they were not; each was but a member-part or prefix to a larger word. The unfortunate consequence was that, when the Greek stasis became the Latin stantia, there was a lack of linguistic equivalency, which is a polysyllabic way of saying that there was trouble, and hypo-stasis became a “sub-stance.” Compounding one misunderstanding upon another, when the East then spoke of God as having three of these hypostases, the West heard it as three substances, and that simply could not be! That would be tritheism!
Blessedly, by the time the Second Ecumenical Council (or First Council of Constantinople, if one prefers that name) was actually convened in 381 CE, much of the misunderstanding had been either cleared up or, at least to some extent, ameliorated. Indeed, several centuries later and most beautifully, one of the inheritors of the Cappadocians’ wisdom, St. Symeon the New Theologian, would be able to describe the Trinity as “triple light in unity but unique light in three.”3 Or more mundanely, but perhaps more clearly, “The Trinity . . . is one ‘what’ and three ‘who’s.’ ”4
There is one other point that must not be overlooked here, though it may seem incidental initially: every important creedal decision in the opening centuries of the Christian era was made at an ecumenical gathering of the world’s Christian leaders. “Ecumenical” meant worldwide; it meant West and East, both. And “gathering” meant what it said: governance and decision by a coming together. The Jerusalem Conference had set the precedent, and that precedent was to be followed precisely for four centuries.5
Notes
1. Even four years before the Second Ecumenical Council, a Roman consul, in a condemnation of the heresy known as Apollinarianism, would declare: “As men who hold fast through everything to the inviolable faith of the council of Nicaea, we do not separate the Holy Spirit, but together with the Father and the Son we offer him a joint worship as complete in everything, in power, honor, majesty and Godhead” (Creeds, Councils and Controversies: Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church A.D. 337–461, ed. J. Stevenson [London: SPCK, 1966], 88).
2. Basil of Caesarea, “Basil on the Doctrine of the Trinity, 375,” Creeds, Councils and Controversies, 122.
3. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns of Divine Love, trans. George A. Maloney (Denville, NJ: Dimension, 1976), 39.
4. Scot Douglass, Theology of the Gap: Cappadocian Language Theory and the Trinitarian Controversy (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 2n1.
5. While a detailed discussion of the seven ecumenical councils is not requisite here, the interested reader may want to see Appendix B for a listing and brief annotated overview of them.