History of the Nicene Creed

The Arian Crisis

Around AD 318, a priest of Alexandria named Arius began teaching that the Son of God was not eternal. God the Father alone, he argued, is without beginning; the Son was begotten, and to be begotten (Arius reasoned) is to be made. The Son was therefore the first and greatest of creatures, the instrument through whom God made everything else, exalted above all, but not God in the full and proper sense. The slogan of his movement put it bluntly: "there was a time when he was not".

Arius was intelligent, ascetic and popular, and he set his doctrine to verses that dock workers and travellers could sing. When his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, condemned the teaching at a synod of Egyptian bishops around 320, Arius appealed to sympathetic bishops elsewhere, above all Eusebius of Nicomedia, a man with the ear of the imperial court. What began as a dispute in one city spread across the Greek-speaking East.

The stakes could not have been higher. If the Son is a creature, then Christians worship a creature, which is idolatry. And if the Son is a creature, he cannot save, for no creature can bridge the gap between God and fallen man. As St Athanasius would later argue in On the Incarnation, only God himself can restore the image of God in man. The whole Gospel hung on the question.

The Council of Nicaea (325)

The Emperor Constantine, who in 313 had joined in issuing the Edict of Milan ending the legal persecution of Christians, watched the dispute threaten to tear apart the Church he had just liberated. In 325 he convened the bishops of the whole Church at Nicaea in Bithynia, near his residence at Nicomedia, providing the public post for their travel. It was the first ecumenical council in the Church's history. Ancient sources disagree on the number who came: Eusebius of Caesarea, who was present, says "more than 250" (Life of Constantine 3.8), while the traditional figure of 318 is a round, symbolic number that later writers linked to the 318 servants of Abraham in Genesis 14:14. Hosius of Cordoba presided among the bishops, legates represented Pope Sylvester I, and a young deacon named Athanasius attended at the side of his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria.

These were not men of the court. Many of the bishops had lived through the Great Persecution under Diocletian, the worst the Church had endured, and they carried its marks into the council chamber. Paphnutius of Egypt had lost his right eye and been hamstrung in the mines for the faith (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.11). Paul of Neocaesarea bore hands crippled by hot irons under the persecution of Licinius (Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.7). Constantine, the historians record, greeted the confessors with honour.

The council examined Arius's doctrine and rejected it. To close every loophole in his subtle language, the bishops confessed the Son to be "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made", and anchored it all in one decisive word: homoousios, "of the same substance", consubstantial with the Father. To the creed they appended an anathema condemning the Arian slogans by name: those who say "there was a time when he was not", or that the Son is "of another substance" or "created", the catholic and apostolic Church anathematises. Nearly every bishop signed; only two joined Arius in refusing, and they were deposed with him. You can read the original creed of 325 with its anathema on this site.

Key dates

• 303

  The Great Persecution begins under Diocletian: churches razed, Scriptures burned, clergy imprisoned, martyrs made across the empire.

• 313

  The Edict of Milan: Constantine and Licinius grant freedom of worship and restore confiscated Church property. The persecution ends.

• c. 318

  Arius begins teaching in Alexandria that the Son is a creature. Bishop Alexander condemns him at a synod of Egyptian bishops.

• 325

  The Council of Nicaea confesses the Son as homoousios, consubstantial with the Father, and anathematises Arianism. Arius is exiled.

• 328

  Athanasius, the deacon of Nicaea, becomes Bishop of Alexandria and the foremost defender of the council's faith.

• 335

  Arian-leaning bishops depose Athanasius at the Synod of Tyre. The first of his five exiles begins.

• 337

  Constantine dies, baptised on his deathbed. His sons divide the empire, and imperial favour swings towards the Arian party.

• 359

  The twin councils of Rimini and Seleucia press a compromise creed omitting homoousios. "The whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian", Jerome later wrote.

• 381

  The Council of Constantinople completes the creed with the article on the Holy Spirit. The Nicene faith is vindicated.

Between the Councils: Athanasius Against the World

Nicaea defined the faith, but it did not end the fight. Within a few years the friends of Arius, led by Eusebius of Nicomedia, regained influence at court, and Arius himself was recalled from exile. The battleground shifted from the council chamber to the sees of the great cities, and above all to Alexandria, where Athanasius had become bishop in 328. For the next half century the Arian and semi-Arian parties, often backed by the emperors Constantius II and Valens, worked to bury the word homoousios under a succession of rival formulas and packed synods.

Athanasius would not move. Deposed on manufactured charges at Tyre in 335, he was exiled five times under four different emperors, spending roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop in banishment or in hiding among the monks of the Egyptian desert. His refusal to yield gave the era its proverb: Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world. He was not alone: Hilary of Poitiers was exiled to the East for the same faith, and Pope Liberius was dragged from Rome by imperial order. The low point came in 359, when the twin councils of Rimini and Seleucia were pressured into a vague compromise creed that dropped homoousios altogether, prompting Jerome's famous verdict: "the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian" (Dialogue against the Luciferians 19).

Yet the tide turned. Athanasius's writings, above all On the Decrees of the Council of Nicaea and the Orations against the Arians, convinced a new generation that Nicaea's word was the faith of the Scriptures. The Cappadocian Fathers, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa, gave that faith its settled vocabulary of one substance and three Persons, and Basil's treatise On the Holy Spirit (c. 375) defended the divinity of the Spirit, the last article still under attack. Athanasius died in 373 without seeing the victory. It came eight years later.

The Council of Constantinople (381)

In 380 the new emperor Theodosius I declared for the Nicene faith, and in 381 he convened a council of around 150 bishops at Constantinople. The council reaffirmed Nicaea and completed its creed. Where the creed of 325 had ended abruptly with "and in the Holy Spirit", the fathers of 381 confessed the Spirit as "the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets", and added the articles on the Church, baptism, the resurrection and the life of the world to come. In the original Greek the Spirit "proceeds from the Father" (ek tou Patros ekporeuomenon): the text of 381 contains neither "and the Son" nor "only".

This enlarged text is properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, and it is the creed the Catholic Church recites at Mass today, in the West with the later addition of the Filioque. Though the council of 381 was a council of Eastern bishops, its creed was received by the whole Church: when the fourth ecumenical council met at Chalcedon in 451, it read out the creed of "the 150 fathers" alongside Nicaea's as the standard of orthodoxy. What Nicaea began under fire, Constantinople finished, and no ecumenical council since has ever replaced it.

"The Fathers at Nicaea determined well when they wrote 'of one substance' (homoousios), that all might understand that the Son is of the same reality as the Father, and not a creature." St Athanasius of Alexandria, De Decretis, c. 352

The Later Western Story in Brief

The creed of 381 spread through the liturgies of East and West, and in the West its history took one further turn. At the Third Council of Toledo in 589, when King Reccared and the Visigoths of Spain renounced Arianism, the creed was professed with the words "and the Son" (Filioque): the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. It was an anti-Arian confession, pressing home the full divinity of the Son against the heresy Spain was leaving behind, and from Spain the practice spread through the Frankish lands.

Rome herself was slow to touch the text. Around 810, Pope Leo III affirmed the doctrine the word expresses but refused to add it to the creed, and had the creed of 381 engraved without it on silver shields displayed at St Peter's. Only around 1014, under Pope Benedict VIII, was the creed sung at Rome with the Filioque. The Catechism of the Catholic Church itself notes plainly that the words were not in the creed confessed at Constantinople in 381 (CCC 247); the Catholic Church holds the Filioque to be a true development of the same apostolic faith, not a corruption of it. That story, with the Eastern objection and the Catholic answer, deserves its own page: read the full history and defence of the Filioque.

Answering the Critics of Nicaea

No council in history has attracted more mythology than Nicaea. Constantine, it is said, invented Catholicism, dictated the creed, or corrupted a pure and simple faith with imperial power. The claims dissolve on contact with the sources. Here are the most common, steelmanned and answered.