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 title: Why the creeds matter
+hidden: true
 description: >-
   Plenty of Christians don't think the creeds are important for their faith.
   Plenty others take the creeds for granted. But Christians ought to appreciate
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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.