Nicaea I: Its Causes, Achievements, and Failures

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Introduction

The Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council,¹According to Rome, all councils it convenes are inherently ecumenical, since Rome claims universal jurisdiction over the church. The Greek church maintains that an ecumenical council is such as receives the official support of both the Latin and Greek churches. was convened in AD 325 to address the threat posed by the teachings of an Alexandrian presbyter called Arius, who had asserted that the Son was created, and so was not co-eternal with the Father. However, before we assess its work we need to set the conflict in the wider context.

Elsewhere, I have distinguished between the doctrine of the Trinity and the Trinity itself.²Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship (Phillipsburg, NK: P&R, 2019) God eternally is, and he always is trinity. From eternity he is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one indivisible being, three irreducible subsistent ‘persons.’ He has made this known progressively in Scripture, in latent form in the Old Testament, for the overwhelming stress then was on the uniqueness of Yahweh in the context of the polytheism of the surrounding nations. In the New Testament, while mainly implicit, it is pervasive and notably un-self-conscious, indicating that it was part of the received knowledge of the church, without need for explanation, defence or fanfare.

However, the doctrine of the Trinity, the developed formulation of what the church understands God to have revealed himself to be, with language stretched and refined to express the reality of God’s self-disclosure, resulted from prolonged reflection on the biblical record. Moreover, it emerged from a response to erroneous ideas that imperilled the gospel.

In short, the Bible does not present us with formalized, scientific definitions of doctrine; that has become the task of the church as it defends the gospel and rejects error.

Two deviant tendencies

Until the early fourth century there were two potentially deviant tendencies affecting the church’s grasp of the Trinity. The first was modalism, which blurred the distinctions of the three persons. In the third century, Sabellius held that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit were merely ways in which the one God revealed himself, like an actor taking on different roles. He maintained that the only God, Father in the Old Testament, had become Son in the New Testament and sanctified the church as Holy Spirit after Pentecost. The three were successive modes of the unipersonal God. Consequently, Christ was merely an appearance of the one God, hardly different than a theophany, with no distinct personal identity. With modalism, God’s revelation in human history as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit did not reveal who he is eternally, and so Christ gives us no true knowledge of God. Moreover, this claim  undermined God’s faithfulness, for we could not rely on him if what he disclosed of himself in Christ did not truly reflect who he eternally is. Tertullian countered modalism in his book Contra Praxeas. Later, Paul of Samosata was condemned on these grounds at the Council of Antioch in 268.

On the other side of the spectrum were those who, recognizing the distinctions of the three, accorded a lesser status to the Son and the Spirit. They held that God was an hierarchical being. This was endemic at the time, for the conceptual and linguistic resources did not exist to distinguish between the way God is one and the way he is three. It was an unstable situation, for unless the Son and the Spirit were held to be fully God, there could be no viable proclamation of the gospel—for we would not have true knowledge of God. If Christ were not unimpaired God, he could not save us; if the Spirit were a creature, how could he deify us? was asked in reply.

Modalism and subordinationism were attempts to make the Trinity intelligible to human reason. We would be left with the one God, the Son and the Holy Spirit as temporary appearances, or a graded deity, with Son and Spirit semi-divine. This mix was a time-bomb, destined sooner or later to explode. The chief problem was how to reconcile the unity of the one God with the status of Christ.³For this whole period, see John Behr, The Formation of Christian Theology: Volume 1: The Way to Nicea (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001).

Arius

Suddenly, bursting on the scene in 318 came an Alexandrian presbyter called Arius, a charismatic figure, popular with women, and the composer of what would today be called praise songs, based on sea shanties. Heretics are usually popular, or their views would not be propagated; Scripture prioritizes faithfulness over dynamism.

Arius left little in the way of writing—a song, a scrap or two—so we learn what he taught largely from those who opposed him and from the decrees of Nicaea. He maintained that the Son was not co-eternal with the Father, came into existence out of nothing, and was a creature. Therefore, for Arius, God was not Father eternally any more than a man is a father before he begets his son. The Son had an origin, ex nihilo. At some point he did not exist, and now exists by the will of God. God used the Son as an intermediary to create other entities; so God is effectively at arm’s-length from the creation. Hence, the Son is a different being from the Father, for the Father is his God. Jesus’s statement ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 10:30) he took to mean a harmonious agreement of will, not identity of being. The Son was an assistant to the Father, operating under orders. Thus the monarchy, oneness in rule, of God was preserved, since the Son was and is not true God.

This was a threat to the gospel. Providentially, the church had been legalized by Constantine only a few years earlier and so the convening of a major council was less of a problem than it might have been before.

The Council

The creed of Nicaea

We know little of the proceedings of the Council of Nicaea, at which Arius was condemned and exiled. One thing we do know is that, contrary to popular mythology, Athanasius was not a major player. True, he was present as secretary to Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, Arius’s principal opponent, but he was still quite young and did not become bishop until Alexander died in 328.

One of the few items of which we have clear evidence is the creed.⁴R.E. Person, The Mode of Decision-Making at the Early Ecumenical Councils: An Inquiry Into the Function of Scripture and Tradition at the Councils of Nicaea and Ephesus (Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt Kommissionsverlag, 1978), 116, n.1 lists a wide range of works that discuss the interpretation of the Council. This is not what we call the Nicene Creed, which is the product of the later Council of Constantinople in 381, although it did provide the basis for the later declaration. This earlier creed is as follows:

We believe in one God, Father Almighty, maker of all things, seen and unseen:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten as only-begotten of the Father, that is of the substance (ousia) of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all things came into existence, both things in heaven and things on earth; who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate and became man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens, is coming to judge the living and the dead:

And in the Holy Spirit.

But those who say, ‘there was a time when he did not exist,’ and ‘Before being begotten he did not exist,’ and that he came into being from non-existence, or who allege that the Son of God is of another hypostasis or ousia, or who is alterable or changeable, these the Catholic and Apostolic Church condemns.

The phrase referring to the Son being ‘of the being (ousia) of the Father’ was an innovation. Athanasius tells us how it was included. When it was proposed that the Son was ‘from God,’ Arius’s sympathizers agreed since they accepted that all creatures come from God. Therefore, in order to say that the Son is indivisible from the being of the Father, always in the Father and the Father always in the Son, the bishops were forced to use extra-biblical terms to convey ‘the sense of Scripture,’ realizing that express biblical language alone could not distinguish the truth from the false teaching they opposed.⁵Athanasius, On the Decrees of the Synod of Nicaea, 19-21. Some of the relevant text can be found here: https://www.fourthcentury.com/athanasius-on-nicaea-2/ Together with the allied expression ‘consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father,’ this phrase created a mountain of ambiguity and proved a major bone of contention in the following decades. The problem was the range of meanings ousia had at the time. It could mean generic nature (what is common to the three), asserting that the Son is of the same nature as the Father. However, it could instead refer to a specific individual nature (what is peculiar to one of the three), meaning that the Son is of the same hypostasis as (identical to) the Father, which sounds modalist, erasing any distinctions between them. The final anathema seems to reinforce this latter possibility, for it repudiates the claim that the Son is of another hypostasis or ousia than the Father. In that sense, the terms ousia and hypostasis are apparently synonyms, as they were generally at the time. Eventually, the Council of Constantinople (381) was to use hypostasis for the three, so Nicaea’s assertion that the Son is of the same hypostasis as the Father was by then rejected.

On a central, but less disputed point, the phrase ‘begotten, not created’ opposed Arius’s claim that the Son was a creature, by distinguishing generation from creation. The word homoousios (of the identical being) was used, since Arius could not apply it to the relationships of creatures to the Father, but this word was not clearly defined and would be problematic for some time, until Basil the Great proposed clearer semantic distinctions in the 370s.⁶Person, Decision-Making, 92-94; Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 91.

Decisions

The council outlawed the teaching of Arius. It was seen as a dire threat to the gospel. In doing so it affirmed emphatically that the Son is of the identical being with the Father, underpinning, inter multa alia, such statements of Jesus that ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 10:30) and his comment to Philip, ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). Simultaneously, it deposed Arius, who was not a bishop but a presbyter, from the ministry. In 337, his supporters enabled him to be received back into the church, but on the very day his reception was to happen, he died suddenly, collapsing into a latrine, an event his opponents regarded as a singularly appropriate act of God’s providence. In short, Nicaea’s main achievement was to place on record once and for all that the Son is nothing less than of identical being to the Father, dealing a mortal blow to subordinationism.

Ambiguities

Unsurprisingly, the monarchians, led by Marcellus of Ancyra, were happiest. He and his supporters maintained that there was one hypostasis in God, a claim that struck many at the time as outrageously modalist. Later in the century, when hypostasis was reserved for the three and distinguished from the one being or essence (ousia), such a claim was condemned. That time had not yet come.

However, did the creed really open the door to modalism? After all, many at the council vigorously opposed it. Probably, its intention was to say that the Son came from the Father’s person, since the Father begat the Son and the two are of the same being. Notwithstanding, it became a major source of confusion. Overall, in Hanson’s words, ‘the ancients did not suffer from the same passion for exact accuracy which modern scholarship displays.’⁷R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 164.

Yet Eusebius of Caesarea, author of the famous history of the church, who supported Arius, also signed the document! He and others considered that the phrase ‘begotten not made’ distinguished the Son from the creatures made through the Son. For Eusebius, the Son is probably a creature, but is not to be called ‘something made.’ The Creed’s condemnation of ‘before he was begotten he did not exist’ he defended on the ground that everyone accepted the Son to have existed before the incarnation, which—so he argued—was when he was begotten.⁸Ibid., 165-66.

The Council’s ambiguity allowed a wide variety of people to accept the creed. In the background loomed the powerful presence of Constantine, determined to achieve as widespread agreement as possible for the sake of imperial unity.

In short, Nicaea bequeathed to the church a lexical minefield that caused much turmoil and many casualties in the decades ahead. The following were the principal ambiguities.

Hypostasis/ousia

These were used interchangeably in Greek and by the Greek fathers. For many, they were synonyms. Their eventual meanings (person/being) were not what anyone understood by them for most of the fourth century, and it is anachronistic to project these meanings back to the earlier time when they do not apply.

There was not then a single word for what God is as three that could command wide, let alone universal, agreement. The word hypostasis in Greek philosophy from 50 b. c. had different meanings for Stoics than it had for neo-Platonists, although in general it meant ‘realization turning into appearance.’⁹Ibid., 182. In the New Testament it means confidence (e.g., Heb. 11:1) but on one occasion (Heb. 1:3) it refers to the Son as the ‘impression of nature’ of God.

Thus, at the time of Nicaea (1) hypostasis/ousia could be synonyms and used to describe either what God is as three or what he is as one; (2) hypostasis could refer to the three and ousia be either ignored or rejected; (3) hypostasis could be used for ‘distinct existence’ and ousia for ‘nature’; (4) or uncertainty could prevail. Sometimes single writers moved from one meaning to the other. Not only was there no commonly agreed term for the three but the concept itself had barely appeared on the theological radar.

Genetos/gennetos, agenetos/agennetos

Genetos (having come into existence, and thus created) and agenetos (that which has never not existed, never had a beginning, for it has existed eternally) are one pair of antonyms, as are the almost matching gennetos (generated, begotten) and agennetos (ingenerate, unbegotten). The close similarity of spellings and meanings was another massive source of confusion and contention. In the third century there had never been a clear distinction between something created and something generated. Arius used the two pairs interchangeably for Christ, for he saw him as a creature. Athanasius, in an early work, was also confused.¹⁰Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians, 1:30-31. The opponents of Arius had to say that the Son was both agenetos (eternal) and gennetos (begotten of the Father)—gennetos non genetos (begotten, not created).

Hanson remarks, ‘People holding different views were using the same words as those who opposed them, but, unawares, giving them different meanings from those applied to them by their opponents.’¹¹Hanson, Search, 181. Ayres comments, ‘Nicaea’s terminology is thus a window onto the confusion and complexity of the early fourth-century theological debates, not a revelation that a definitive turning-point had been reached.’¹²Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 92. If we add the bewildering speed of events—ecclesiastical, political and theological—it is no wonder the mess took over fifty years to clear. These were muddled times. Isn’t life like that? Yet through it all a solution was reached—but not at Nicaea.

Aftermath

The details, historical and theological, of the period following Nicaea are bewildering, full of labyrinthine complexities. Political intrigue was never far from the fore. The literature describes these machinations in their often sordid detail. The situation was fluid, constantly changing, and the various parties are nowhere near as clear-cut as any classification implies.¹³Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 123–30.

An immediate problem was Marcellus. His most emphatic belief was that God is one hypostasis in one ousia. The Son is a word only. The Logos is united to God, eternal, ‘put forth,’ not begotten, one and the same thing as God, silent in the Father. The Logos is only called Son after the incarnation. While God is called by the names Father and Son, there is only one hypostasis and only one ousia, homoousios meaning for him ‘of identical being,’ so that the Son is identical to the Father. The three are names only. This sounds, and in reality is, modalist, and he pointed to Nicaea in support, due to its equation of hypostasis and ousia.¹⁴Eusebius of Caesarea, Against Marcellus, 1:1:4-5, 2:2:39-41, in GCS 14:4, 42-43; Die Fragmente Marcellis, in GCS 14:185-215; Marcellus of Ancyra? Expositio Fidei, in PG 25:199-208. A significant group were sympathetic to Marcellus. Not until Constantinople I (381), when hypostasis was reserved for the three and distinguished from the one being or essence (ousia), was there a decisive rebuttal.

Nicaea did not end the Arian crisis—it merely confirmed its existence. By mid-century, more able figures than Arius arose to advance ideas similar to his. Further acute discord wracked the church before the Council of Constantinople resolved the matter.

Nicaea’s failure was largely due to linguistic and terminological problems, the lack of a clearly and commonly recognized vocabulary and an agreed theological grammar upon which consensus could be reached. This is the consequence of the church being composed of humans—new issues often take time to work out; bringing new articulation, in acceptable and watertight ways, to what is believed and confessed does not happen overnight. It requires hard work, rigorous critical thought, tough mindedness, patience, persistence, and a willingness to engage with opposing ideas—a combination of gentle persuasion of some and firm rebuttal of others, suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. For this, later in the fourth century, Athanasius paved the way, to be fostered and completed by the three Cappadocians: Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and especially Gregory of Nazianzus. The crisis over Arius was initially and imperfectly parried at Nicaea, but not brought to resolution until several decades later.

Robert Letham is Senior Research Fellow and retired Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Union School of Theology, Wales. He now resides in the USA as a minister emeritus of the OPC (Orthodox Presbyterian Church). He is the author of The Work of Christ (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993), Through Western Eyes: Eastern Orthodoxy—A Reformed Perspective (Fearn, Scotland: Mentor, 2007) and The Holy Trinity: in Scripture, History, Theology and Worship (2004, rev. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2019) among other books.

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