Nicaea and the Divinity of Christ

In 325 there gathered at Nicaea, not far from Constantinople, the first council of the whole Church, the one called the first ecumenical council, that is, of the entire Christian world. Peace had just been restored to the Church, and for the first time her bishops could assemble in broad daylight. What brought them together was the gravest of questions: is Jesus Christ truly God, or only the highest of creatures? On the answer hung the whole Gospel.

The question of Arius

The trouble had started at Alexandria, from a priest named Arius. Anxious to preserve the unity and oneness of God, he taught that the Son was not God in the full sense: he was the first and most perfect of creatures, drawn from nothing by the Father before all ages, but drawn from nothing all the same. In the formula that summed up his doctrine, “there was a time when the Son was not.” Christ would then be a superior intermediary, more than a man and less than God. The thesis had an appearance of wisdom about it: it seemed to defend the transcendence of God and his perfect unity. It spread quickly, until it divided whole provinces.

Why everything hung on it

Beneath a question that might seem abstract, salvation itself was at stake. If the Son is only a creature, then it is not God who came to us: God would have remained at a distance, content to send an intermediary. The cross would no longer be the gift God makes of himself, but the sacrifice of a third party. Above all, a creature cannot unite us to God or divinize us, for none gives what he does not have. This is the argument Athanasius would defend, a young deacon of Alexandria present at the council: God became man so that man might become god, sharing in the divine life; but this is possible only if the one who became man is truly God. To adore Christ, as Christians had always done, made sense only if he was God; if he was not, the Church was adoring a creature, which is idolatry. Between the two theses there was no middle ground.

The council of Nicaea

To settle the matter, the emperor Constantine summoned the bishops of the whole Empire. They came by the hundreds, some still bearing in their flesh the marks of the recent persecutions. The council examined the doctrine of Arius and rejected it. There remained to state the faith of the Church in terms that no evasion could turn aside, for the partisans of Arius accepted all the words of Scripture while giving them another sense. The Fathers then chose a word that is not found in the Bible, but which faithfully kept its meaning: the Son is consubstantial with the Father, of the same substance as he, drawn not from nothing but begotten of the very substance of the Father. The Creed of Nicaea proclaimed it: the Son is God born of God, light born of light, true God born of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father. The doctrine of Arius was condemned. For the first time, the Church assembled had fixed her faith in a common formula, to which all had to subscribe.

They drew their argument from words of Christ himself, “the Father is greater than I” John 14:28, or from the Wisdom brought forth “at the beginning of his work” (Proverbs 8:22), which the Greek of the Septuagint read as “created”. The Fathers answered that these words regard the Son in his humanity, where he lowers himself, not in his divinity, where he is the Father’s equal, and that Wisdom is begotten from all eternity, not created in time.

The council did not stop at the faith. It fixed for the whole Church the common date of Easter, which until then the Churches kept on different days, and gave its first canons, those rules of discipline that ordered the life of bishops and communities. Nicaea thus showed that a council settles at once the faith and the life of the Church.

This word, in Greek, is homoousios (ὁμοούσιος), “of the same substance”. The debate that followed turned on a single letter: to spare the Arians, some proposed homoiousios (ὁμοιούσιος), “of like substance”, which granted the Son a resemblance to the Father without his equality. Between “same” and “like” there was but an iota, yet on that iota the whole Gospel hung: a Son only like God would remain a creature.

Athanasius against the world

The victory of Nicaea did not end the struggle. For more than half a century, Arianism regained strength, often supported by the emperors, who deposed and exiled the bishops faithful to Nicaea. Become bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius was driven from his see five times and spent years in exile; he held firm when almost the whole Empire seemed gone over to error, so alone at times that his steadfastness was summed up in a phrase: Athanasius against the world. After him, the three Cappadocian Fathers completed the defense and exposition of the faith of Nicaea. In 381, a second council, gathered at Constantinople, solemnly confirmed Nicaea and completed the Creed by affirming also the divinity of the Holy Spirit. From these two councils comes the Creed the Church still recites at Mass.

Arianism did not die with the councils. Carried to the Goths by the bishop Ulfilas, it became the religion of most of the Germanic peoples who settled in the Empire, and it took centuries for them to rejoin the faith of Nicaea. This is what will later give all its weight to the catholic baptism of a Frankish king, the only one to embrace at once the faith of the councils when his neighbors refused it.

What Nicaea fixed

Nicaea added nothing to the faith: it named what the Church had believed since the apostles, when she prayed to Christ as her Lord and her God. But in naming it, it gave the Church the power to recognize error and to confess her faith with one voice. The word consubstantial guards the whole Gospel: because the Son is truly God, it is indeed God who became man, God who died for us, God who unites us to himself. This same faith, carried to its end, will confess the one God in three Persons. Taking up, on the scale of the whole world, the gesture of the first council held at Jerusalem, Nicaea showed how the Church, down the centuries, would keep intact the deposit received: by gathering to confess together what she has always believed.