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-title: "381: how the church as we know it was made"
-description: >-
-  The church which defines our world now is in a significant way the one which
-  emerged out of sixty years of controversy from the Council of Constantinople
-  in 381. I've been charting what happened, why, and the ongoing legacy.
-pubDate: 2025-10-05
----
-
-Athanasius defined the fourth century. Not that he was a god, or even a king, or
-that he always got his way. But he wrote the history books. His tale of an epic
-battle fought tooth-and-nail between Arian heretics and him and his loyal allies
-has come to be the standard account of how, over the course of the fourth
-century, the Church redefined what orthodoxy means and how it is declared and
-identified.
-
-The result was the Nicene Creed. It had been first written for a very particular
-polemical purpose in 325, but later found itself the centre of a strange
-theological revival, and was finally revised in a council at Constantinople
-in 381. In so doing, the bishops assembled a recognisable 'Nicene' tradition
-which is still one of the defining features of planet Earth.
-
-For better and for worse, the church as we know it has a capacity both for great
-humility, faith and submission to the mystery of God, but it also has a capacity
-for great intolerance. This is the church created in 381.
-
-To understand the church as we know it today, then, we need to understand the
-complex, confusing journey from 325 to 381.
-
-Athanasius' chronicle of that journey is temptingly simple. The only problem
-with it is that it isn't true. Indeed, his 'history' was never meant to function
-as an all-encompassing narrative of Church history, to be read for centuries
-ever after. His accounts function as polemics, meant to cajole, condemn and
-persuade his readers in his own time of his vision for their future.
-
-Nevertheless, whatever Athanasius' real significance in how his times unfolded,
-his witness is important. He fully inhabited his times, often in the middle of
-the fray. Whether or not we buy Athanasius' portrayal of himself as fighting the
-good fight, he was certainly a fighter. By looking through his eyes, then, we
-can get a perspective on how the Church as we know it came to be.
-
-So it makes sense to start with him. As a young priest in his native Alexandria,
-he became tangled up in a controversy which would come to define his career. A
-strong-minded and fearless young priest had begun to preach. His name was Arius.
-
----
-
-According to the Egyptian tradition, Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, was
-the nineteenth in a direct line of succession from Mark the Evangelist himself.
-With a great deal of justice, he would have regarded himself as one of the most
-important Christian leaders in the world, and at least the equal of the bishop
-of Rome.
-
-Small wonder, then, that the insubordination that plagued his diocese bothered
-him. First Erescentius had started a schism, disputing the rule he used for
-calculating the date of Easter.
-
-Then there was Meletius. During the persecution under the Roman emperor
-Diocletian, Meletius had already rubbed a few people the wrong way: while other
-bishops were in hiding or in prison, he took the initiative to resolve problems
-and ordain priests without properly consulting the absent bishops'
-representatives. Perhaps it was intended kindly: it was seen as meddling. Now
-Meletius accused Alexander of being too soft on Christians who had caved into
-the threat of torture and made sacrifices to the pagan cults. When he decided
-Alexander was never going to match his high rigorist standards, he broke away,
-too.
-
-Alexander must have longed for the relatively good order of the Greek and Roman
-churches, where bickering subordinates were generally willing to let their
-bishop have the last say. The throne of St Mark was in trouble. If Christ's body
-wasn't to get chopped up any more than it already was, he needed to establish
-his personal authority.
-
-This was the context in which Arius, a young firebrand priest, steps onto stage
-right. He surely knew his own bishop's teaching: God is one substance and one
-essence, unchangeable, indivisible. Christ his Son is in every way God: God from
-God, light from light, true God from true God, eternally begotten of the Father
-before all ages. How else could Christ, by adopting human flesh, mediate the
-transcendent God to fallen humanity?
-
-But Arius didn't like this one bit. If God is unchangeable, how could he adopt
-flesh? That suggests he was not flesh, and then became flesh. And in any case,
-if the martyrs were right to give up their lives to know God, he must have the
-perfect, uncompromising transcendence which the martyrs so admired. But how can
-God adopt flesh, never mind suffer and die on a cross, without compromising that
-transcendence? Something had to give. For Arius, the solution was to modify the
-relationship between the Father and the Son.
-
-Arius accepted that Christ had to be in some sense divine, in order to mediate
-God to humanity. But he denied that he was quite as much God as God is. He has
-something like his Father's essence, not in a co-equal way, but rather in a
-derivative way. This makes sense of Father-Son language, which suggests the
-Father came first, and the Son came next, a derivative of the Father. So the Son
-is God from God, but not true God from true God. The Son was begotten in time,
-and is not eternal: only God the Father himself is eternal.
-
-At another time in another place, Arius might have passed for a creative,
-independent thinker without much notice. But Arius was directly contradicting
-Alexander just as the latter was desperate to assert his authority. It got ugly.
-
-Alexander called a council of local bishops in about 320. The council condemned
-Arius and removed him from his post as priest. In response, Arius went on the
-campaign trail, visiting bishops in Palestine and Asia Minor who he thought
-would be sympathetic to his theology. Shortly afterwards, he returned to
-Alexandria, triumphantly brandishing vindications from two councils, one in
-Jerusalem and one in Bithynia. He wasn't going to make it easy for Alexander.
-
-Luckily for Alexander, the Emperor Constantine had just united the eastern and
-western halves of the Empire. He had famously converted to Christianity after
-seeing the sign of the cross at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, and saw the
-bishops as means towards his mission of uniting the Empire under one government
-and one God. Constantine had been made aware of the dispute between Arius and
-Alexander, and he didn't want schisms in the church any more than Alexander did.
-
-He called a council in his own palace in Nicaea, paying the travel expenses and
-hotel bills of all the bishops in attendance. For those bishops, many carrying
-the scars of torture they had endured under Diocletian, it must have been a
-bewildering experience. Alexander was in attendance. His secretary was
-Athanasius.
-
-In 325, the council condemned Arius. To avoid anyone else following in his path,
-they produced a statement of faith, designed to exclude Arius' teaching, no
-matter who taught it. This statement of faith is now known as the Nicene Creed.
-
-The council also fixed the date of Easter to boot. Alexander must have been
-relieved.
-
-You might have thought that would have been the end for Arius. In fact,
-Constantine engineered his re-admittance into the church as soon as 328. Arius
-died in peace in 336. Constantine's mission wasn't to purge the church, but to
-unite the church. As long as all sides worshipped God and could live in peace,
-he wanted as many people as possible included. His mission was unity, not
-uniformity.
-
-Bishops like Eusebius of Caesarea in Syria got this. He had been provisionally
-excommunicated on suspicion of Arianism in 325, but was reconciled at Nicaea
-given the chance to explain himself and sign up to the Nicene Creed. No sooner
-had he done this, however, than he had started explaining to the faithful back
-home how they could carry on believing that the Son was not really eternal, even
-as the Creed was designed to exclude exactly such a claim. While Eusebius might
-seem duplicitous, at the time, this was exactly the kind of tolerant pragmatism
-that Constantine asked of the bishops: as long as they didn't cause more
-out-and-out conflict.
-
-Alexander didn't have long to enjoy the peace of Nicaea. He died just a few
-years afterward in 328. The throne of St Mark passed to Athanasius.
-
----
-
-The peace didn't last long. Just as Athanasius was donning his mitre, Eusebius
-was plotting against Eustathius the bishop of Antioch, and engineered his
-deposition. In his defence, Eusebius accused Eustathius of the long-condemned
-heresy, Sabellianism. Then in 335, he followed up by deposing Marcellus, the
-bishop of Ancyra, at a council in Tyre.
-
-To defend his action, he wrote _Against Marcellus_, in which he accused
-Marcellus of being a Sabellian, too. Sabellius' heresy was (to borrow a modern
-term) modalism, the view that 'Father', 'Son' and 'Spirit' are mere titles,
-aspects, 'modes' of God, not in any real way distinct. He also accused Marcellus
-of adoptionism, another agreed heresy. Marcellus taught that the Son only became
-an aspect of the divine nature at the Incarnation, and that in the last day,
-Christ would hand over his kingdom to his Father.
-
-This action would cast a long shadow over the next half-century. Time and again,
-bishops allied to Eusebius' way of thinking, or 'Eusebians', would re-affirm
-their opposition to that 'heretic' Marcellus and his 'Sabellianism'. This is a
-crucial dynamic for understanding where theological factions drew up their
-battle lines, and for what compromises were needed in order to get to 381.
-
-Even the bishop of Alexandria wasn't immune from Eusebius' purge. Athanasius had
-vigorously defended his ally, Marcellus, at the council of Tyre in 335. Eusebius
-set about plotting his downfall. He dug up dirt. He accused Athanasius of using
-threats and bribes to get himself elected, and sending goons to beat up his
-political opponents. Once he'd found evidence of Athanasius meddling with the
-crucial Egyptian grain export that kept Rome fed, he had the emperor on side.
-Constantine convened a meeting in 336 and exiled him to the German frontier.
-
----
-
-Or at least, that's how Athanasius tells it. Athanasius loves a plot: at the
-time, alleging a conspiracy was a classic rhetorical technique for painting your
-enemies as heretics.
-
-Eusebius was no stranger to rhetoric himself, and it's to his 337 best-seller,
-the _Life of Constantine_, that we owe our standard account of Constantine's
-reign. He regarded Empire and Church as allies in a joint mission, to unite the
-world under one government and one faith. To him, someone like Athanasius,
-constitutionally incapable of tolerating anyone who disagreed with him and
-willing to use gangster tactics to get his way, was a threat to this divine
-mission.
-
-It's worth remembering that after Constantine died, Athanasius would be
-re-exiled by four more Roman emperors. In his lifetime, only Julian failed to
-exile Athanasius, and him only perhaps because he didn't have time in his
-whirlwind twenty-month reign. We also can't be sure how much influence Eusebius
-actually had in the expulsion of Athanasius and his allies: it coheres well
-enough with the emperor's anti-sectarian agenda that it might have happened with
-or without Eusebius' involvement.
-
-Perhaps Athanasius was a brute. Still, the Roman Catholic Church manages to
-venerate both Eusebius and Athanasius as saints. This may seem like a
-contradiction. But perhaps an ability to tolerate contradiction is precisely the
-legacy of 381.
-
-But we're not there yet. By 335, Eusebius had engineered the exile of
-Eustathius, Marcellus, and Athanasius. After Constantine died, he had to do it
-all over again, but by 339, he had persuaded his successor, Constantius, to
-re-assert his father's exiles of the three men. With the Empire once again
-split, Athanasius and Marcellus headed to Rome to re-group and re-think.
-
----
-
-From Rome, Athanasius and Marcellus were safe for now from Eusebius' clutches,
-but also relatively impotent. In this period of exile in the 340s, in an effort
-to claw back his reputation, Athanasius developed the polemic which still
-defines the standard history of the fourth century. He invented a cunning label
-for Eusebius and his cronies: he called them 'Arians'.
-
-Eusebius rejected the label as ridiculous. Arius had been reconciled, and more
-to the point, had died in 336. For that matter, why would a bishop follow the
-teaching of a mere priest? Not only that, but the label ignored significant
-differences between Arius' and Eusebius' teaching. His verdict was clear: the
-label 'Arian' is a baseless slur, with no other purpose than to tar his
-reputation as a heretic.
-
-He was right, of course. But like it or not, Athanasius' theory of an Arian
-conspiracy began to win adherents, not least Julian, the bishop of Rome. Julian
-called a council to exonerate Athanasius and Marcellus. When the Greeks refused
-to turn up, he called a local council anyway and vindicated the two men. In the
-face of Greek obstinacy, Julian wrote east, pleading the bishops to take the
-'Arian' threat seriously.
-
-In response, the easterners held a council in Antioch in 341, agreeing four
-creeds which powerfully condemned Marcellus' teaching, including the influential
-Dedication Creed. This includes assertions that Father, Son and Spirit are
-'three in subsistence, one in agreement', that the Son was generated before time
-began, against Marcellus' teaching that the Father, Son and Spirit are aspects
-of God without division in subsistence, and that there only came to be a divine
-Son at his incarnation. They explicitly condemned Arius, Sabellius and
-Marcellus.
-
-So the divisions grew deeper. Without an emperor to compel the bishops to come
-together, there may not have been much chance of a rapprochement. But even if
-there were to be such an emperor, who's to say that their settlement would have
-satisfied the bishops?
-
----
-
-Meanwhile, in the 340s and through the 350s, two further theological movements
-gathered steam: the homoians and the heterousians.
-
-The homoians, perhaps tired of the squabbles between the Athanasian and Eusebian
-factions, determined to sidestep their petty debates altogether.
-
-A key term of the theological disagreement was 'essence' or 'ousia'. Athanasius,
-in his lifelong battle to make sure Arius stayed dead, insisted that Father, Son
-and Spirit shared the same ousia. In contrast, Eusebius, with his anti-Sabellian
-polemic, needed to assert the real distinction between Father, Son and Spirit,
-and so asserted that each had a separate ousia. So the difference can be summed
-up as a counting problem. How many divine ousias are there? One or three?
-
-The homoians claimed that both sides were mistaken, simply because they used the
-word 'ousia'. There is no mention of ousia in Scripture, so, they claimed, we
-have no basis for asserting it of God one way or the other. All we can truly say
-is that Father, Son and Spirit are distinct but somehow alike. Whereof we cannot
-speak, there must we remain silent.
-
-This might have worked as a way forward, except that the heterousians provoked
-such a strong reaction that 'ousia'-talk was needed to refute them. Aetius, and
-his followed Eunomius, argued that since God is simple, and all generate things
-are divided, it follows that God is ingenerate. But the Son is generate:
-therefore Father and Son must be altogether unalike. They expressed this by
-saying that Father and Son are unlike in ousia. This teaching was swiftly
-branded 'neo-Arian', provoking a strong reaction. To counter the heterousian
-teaching, their opponents were forced to fight on their terms, and that meant
-using 'ousia'-talk.
-
-Thus enters Basil of Caesarea. He argued that if we abandon 'ousia'-talk, we
-will have no way of saying that the Father and Son have anything in common at
-all, which makes a nonsense of the idea that the Son brings humanity knowledge
-of his Father. Without like essence, they might as well be two completely
-different Gods. Therefore we have to say at least that they have like essence --
-'homoiousia'. But without direct access to perfect knowledge of the invisible
-God, we're not in a position to judge that they have exactly the same essence,
-so he stopped short of agreeing with the 'homoousia' of the Nicene Creed which
-Athanasius so treasured.
-
-Seeing the opportunity to make common cause against the homoians, Athanasius
-started to soften. He wrote an extremely charitable commentary on Basil's
-theology which emphasised their similarities and papered over their differences.
-Athanasius recognised that both he and Basil wanted to assert the unity of God
-while still preserving distinctions between Father, Son and Spirit. The two
-began to campaign against the homoian movement.
-
-But Basil got there too late. In 359, the emperor Constantine II called a
-council in Constantinople, and in 360 it issued a homoian creed with full
-imperial backing. Any campaign against the homoians would have to take place sub
-rosa.
-
----
-
-In Athanasius' and Basil's long, slow campaign against homoianism, their weapon
-of choice was surprising: they dusted off the Nicene Creed of 325. Athanasius
-argued, against the homoians, that 'ousia'-talk, although not directly
-Scriptural, was essential in order to draw out the consequences of Scripture
-while ruling out Arian mis-interpretations.
-
-Thus Nicaea, conceived as a one-off meant to clean up the Arian controversy,
-found a new life as the anti-homoian movement -- or perhaps you could call it
-the Nicene revival? -- rallied around it.
-
-As the movement progressed, the formerly disagreeing bishops found ways to come
-together. An essential move was that made in Athanasius' _Antiochene Tome_
-of 362. In it, he relented on his long opposition to there being three
-'hypostases' or 'substances' in the Godhead.
-
-'Hypostasis' had for a long time been used interchangeably with 'ousia'.
-However, Athanasius claimed that perhaps God could have three hypostases, but
-only one ousia, at the same time. In so doing, he wedged apart a sharp technical
-distinction between 'hypostasis' and 'ousia' which previously wouldn't have made
-sense. Logical or not, it enabled the Nicene revival to have its cake and eat
-it. God is both one in ousia, protecting against Arianism, and three in
-hypostasis, protecting against Sabellianism.
-
-So the Nicene revival gained a new superpower: the power to use formerly
-synonymous terms to assert contradictions without blushing. This power to accept
-apparent contradiction as part of the unknowable mystery of God is perhaps the
-most important legacy of the period. Arguably, the church has been at its best
-when it has put aside the need to know everything, and embraced this spirit of
-tolerance, humility and faith.
-
----
-
-For much of the 360s and 370s, the homoian emperor Valens had ruled over the
-eastern part of the Empire, while his big brother, Valentinian, ruled the west.
-In the late 370s, Valentinian and then Valens died within quick succession of
-each other. Valentinian's twenty-year-old son, Gratian, was left to clear up the
-mess. In 379, Gratian delegated rule of the east to Theodosius, who was to
-implement a decisively different religious policy than his predecessor, Valens.
-
-In 380, Theodosius issued an edict, saying that only those who agreed to the
-homoousios clause of the Nicene Creed could be considered 'catholic' Christians.
-The message was clear: the homoians were out, and the Nicenes were in.
-
-In 381, he called a council to Constantinople, and it (probably) issued the
-revision of the 325 creed which is still used in various versions in all the
-world's largest Christian denominations. There would be no more revisions, and
-it would become, then as now, compulsory reading for all those preparing to don
-vestments.
-
-One question is, why did the 381 creed differ in the ways it did from 325? Many
-of the differences, including the much-enlarged section on the Son, seem to have
-little controversial content: nobody was disputing that Jesus was born of the
-Virgin Mary, for example, though she makes her first appearance in the Creed in
-the 381 version. Some historians think this suggests that the 381 was based on a
-similar, but distinct creed from 325. This seems unlikely to me, given that
-about half the creed is in verbatim agreement with 325.
-
-However, a couple of edits stand out. There are some clear signs of
-anti-Marcellianism: 'his \[the Son's] kingdom shall have no end', the Son is
-begotten of the Father 'before all ages'. Perhaps a clear emphasis on the
-eternal relationship between the Son and the Father was part of the diplomacy
-needed to get the Eusebian faction on-side.
-
-The new details on the Holy Spirit are interesting too. They suggest a delicate
-compromise. Some bishops were reluctant to suppose that the Father and the
-Spirit have the same essence. On the other hand, others reckoned that they must
-share the same essence, given that they are equally deserving of worship. Thus
-the creed does not have a 'homoousios' clause for the Spirit, but does assert
-that the Spirit 'together with the Father and with the Son is worshipped and
-glorified'. With a spoonful of humility, both sides can be satisfied with that.
-
-The revised Nicene Creed was the focus point, the distillation of a growing
-theological movement, formed by the various anti-homoian bishops finding a way
-to keep true to their own convictions while respecting each other's red lines.
-
-As a result of the context of 325, Athanasius' relentless anti-Arian polemic
-which kept that movement alive, and the 'neo-Arian' heterousian movement, the
-new Nicene tradition insisted on the full co-equal divinity of Father, Son and
-Holy Spirit. This doctrine ensures Nicenes can affirm that Christ mediates true
-knowledge of the transcendent Godhead to humanity: the one who was born of Mary,
-suffered and died on the cross, was raised from the dead and ascended into
-heaven was true God from true God, of the same essence as his Father.
-
-To satisfy the Eusebian strain, which defined itself by opposition to Marcellus,
-the Nicene tradition included a commitment to a robust distinction between
-Father, Son and Spirit, and to the eternity of the Son: begotten of the Father
-before all ages, his kingdom shall have no end. As a result, Nicenes inherited a
-way of thinking about God's action in the world, as instrinsically co-operative
-without being divided.
-
-The biggest change between 325 and 381 was not the text, but what the text is
-used for. In 325, the Creed functioned to condemn Arius in order to heal the
-divisions his teachings had caused. In its second life, the Creed found an
-altogether new purpose: to serve as a common statement of orthodox faith. It
-started life as a way to define who was out. It ended up defining who was in.
-
-Where was Athanasius? Consider that when Athanasius was appointed bishop in 328,
-he was relatively young for a bishop at thirty-five. That means that in 381, he
-would have been the ripe old age of eighty-eight. In fact, he didn't make it
-that far: he died in peace in the countryside outside his native Alexandria
-in 373. If he had seen the outcome of 381, he might have regarded his life
-project complete. Perhaps he knew that with the new generation of bishops, the
-tide was turning for good, and died in peace. Perhaps not. Either way, his
-compromises, and his beloved homoousios, have left a permanent mark on the
-church.
-
-This is the legacy of 381. It is two-faced: any common statement of faith can be
-used to exclude. Indeed, in the late fourth century, both non-Nicene Christians
-and pagans found themselves the victims of increasing state-backed sectarian
-violence.
-
-However, 381 also bears witness to the power of humility and faith. Once we stop
-grasping at perfect knowledge we cannot attain, we can begin to appreciate the
-mystery of God. This is one legacy I hope we can carry forward into our century.