The First Council of Constantinople

The First Council had settled the faith and immediately lost the argument. For the next two generations the Church fought over what Nicaea meant, with emperors, mobs and exile squads on the other side. When the bishops finally met again in the capital in 381, they did two things that shape every Orthodox service to this day: they finished the Creed, and they said out loud what the Church had always prayed — that the Holy Spirit is not a power sent by God, but God Himself.

The years when the world woke up Arian

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It is natural to imagine that Nicaea ended the Arian crisis. It did not. Constantine’s successors in the East favoured the Arian party; St Athanasius was hunted from his see again and again; bishops who would not sign compromise formulas were deposed. At the twin councils of Rimini and Seleucia in 359 the imperial government secured signatures — by exhaustion, pressure and clever ambiguity — for a creed that said the Son is “like” the Father and quietly dropped the word of one essence. St Jerome summed up the moment in one famous sentence.

“The whole world groaned, and marvelled to find itself Arian.”St Jerome

Behind the politics lay a genuine difficulty. Many Eastern bishops were not Arians at all; they simply feared that homoousios — “of one essence” — blurred Father and Son into one indistinguishable God, an error the Church had already rejected. The Nicene faith could not win until someone showed how to say one and three in the same breath without confusion.

The three who found the words

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That work was done by three friends and relations from Cappadocia in central Asia Minor: St Basil the Great, his brother St Gregory of Nyssa, and his friend St Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzus). Their achievement was to give two Greek words two distinct jobs. Ousia — essence, being, what a thing is — belongs to God as one: there is one divine nature, one power, one will, one life. Hypostasis — person, the concrete who — is threefold: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each fully possessing that one divine nature, each irreducibly Himself. One what, three whos. With that distinction the fear behind the resistance to Nicaea evaporated, and the Nicene party began to win back the East.

The new question: is the Spirit God?

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As that battle was being won, another opened. A party the Fathers nicknamed the Pneumatomachi — the “Spirit-fighters,” associated with Macedonius, a former bishop of Constantinople — accepted the divinity of the Son but treated the Holy Spirit as a creature: an exalted ministering spirit, the greatest of the angels, God’s instrument rather than God.

St Basil answered them in 375 with his treatise On the Holy Spirit, and his argument is worth knowing because it is an argument from prayer rather than speculation. Christians are baptised “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” — one name, three, on equal footing, at the moment a person is joined to God. Christians glorify the Spirit in their doxologies. Christians receive from the Spirit what only God can give: forgiveness, adoption, holiness, life. A creature cannot make anyone a partaker of the divine nature. What the Church does when she prays already contains what she must now say.

Basil, worn out by illness, poverty and constant strife, died on the first day of 379 — two years before the Council that would vindicate him. His friend Gregory called him “the pillar of the Church.” Nearly everything the Council said about the Spirit had already been written in Basil’s hand.

A small chapel in a hostile city

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In 379 St Gregory the Theologian arrived in Constantinople. Every church in the capital was in Arian hands; the Orthodox there were a remnant. Gregory — a shy, sensitive man who longed for the quiet of a monastery — gathered them in a private house he called the Anastasia, “the Resurrection,” and there delivered the five sermons known as the Theological Orations: the most beautiful statement of the doctrine of the Trinity ever preached, given in a converted room to a handful of people. He was mocked in the streets, and on one occasion a mob broke in and stoned him at the altar. Within two years the little room had turned the city.

“I cannot think on the one without quickly being encircled by the splendour of the three; nor can I discern the three without being straightway carried back to the one.”St Gregory the Theologian

The Emperor summons the Council

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Theodosius, a Spaniard raised in the Nicene faith, became emperor in the East in 379 and set out to end the confusion. In May 381 he called the bishops of his half of the empire — 150 of them — to meet in Constantinople, in the church of Hagia Irene, “Holy Peace.” St Meletius of Antioch presided; he died within weeks, and Gregory the Theologian took the chair. When a quarrel broke out over who should hold the see of Antioch, Gregory — who had no appetite for ecclesiastical politics and was under attack over his own appointment to the capital — offered himself as the obstacle to be removed, resigned everything and went home to Cappadocia to write poetry. The layman Nectarius, not yet even baptised, was elected in his place.

The Creed we sing

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The Council received and completed the Creed of Nicaea. The first two articles were kept, with small clarifications; what had been a brief mention of the Holy Spirit became the confession Orthodox Christians sing at every Liturgy.

Notice how it is done. The Council does not simply repeat the word homoousios of the Spirit; it says something the Spirit-fighters could not possibly accept and no Christian could possibly deny — that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. Worship belongs to God alone. To confess that the Spirit is worshipped with the Father and the Son is to confess that He is God, in the Church’s own language of prayer.

Two other phrases have carried great weight since. The Spirit “proceeds from the Father” — this is the clause that the Western church would later expand with the words and the Son (the filioque), an addition made without an Ecumenical Council, which remains one of the two central issues between Orthodoxy and Rome. And “I confess one baptism for the remission of sins” — one, because a person is joined to Christ’s death and resurrection once.

The mind of Christ: against Apollinaris

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The Council also condemned the teaching of Apollinaris, an ally of Athanasius who had gone badly wrong. Trying to explain how Christ could be one and not two, he proposed that in Jesus the divine Word simply took the place of a human mind and soul: a human body animated by God. Gregory the Theologian answered with a sentence that became a rule of Orthodox theology for ever after.

“That which is not assumed is not healed; but that which is united to God is saved.”St Gregory the Theologian, Letter to Cledonius

If Christ has no human mind, then the human mind — where most of our sin actually happens — is left outside salvation. The Word did not rescue a part of us; He took all of it: body, soul, mind, will, human fear in Gethsemane, human tears at the grave of Lazarus. Every later council would work out some consequence of that principle.

The canons — and one with a long shadow

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Seven canons are attributed to the Council. The first names and condemns the heresies. The second orders bishops to keep within the bounds of their own regions rather than interfering in their neighbours’ churches. The seventh sets out how converts from various heresies are received. And the third declared that “the bishop of Constantinople shall have the primacy of honour after the bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is New Rome.” It was a statement about the dignity of an imperial capital, not about doctrine — but Rome never accepted it, and the question of who ranks where would resurface at Chalcedon and, centuries later, in the schism between East and West.

How a council becomes ecumenical

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Strictly speaking, what met in 381 was a council of the Eastern half of the empire. No bishop of Rome attended or sent legates, and no one at the time called it ecumenical. Its authority grew because the Church received it: the Creed it produced was read out and accepted at Chalcedon seventy years later as the faith of the fathers, and by then it had already passed into the baptismal service and the Liturgy. This is how Orthodoxy has always understood conciliar authority. A council is not authoritative because of who convened it or how many attended, but because the whole Church recognises in its decision the faith she has always held. Assemblies with far more bishops — Rimini in 359, Hieria in 754 — were rejected precisely because the body of the faithful did not recognise their own faith in them.

The end of Arianism

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Theodosius made the Nicene faith the standard for the churches of the empire, and within a generation Arianism had almost vanished from the Greek-speaking world. It survived for two more centuries outside the empire’s borders, because the missionary who had converted the Goths, Ulfilas, had been an Arian, and the Germanic peoples who moved into the Western provinces — Goths, Vandals, Lombards — carried his version of Christianity with them. The last Arian kingdoms became Orthodox in the sixth and seventh centuries. It is a reminder that a heresy is not defeated by a decree; it is outlived by a faith that keeps being taught, sung and prayed until nobody can remember why anyone thought otherwise.

Why it still matters

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The Holy Spirit is the most easily forgotten Person of the Trinity — reduced to an atmosphere, an influence, a good feeling in a room. The Second Council will not allow it. The One who hovered over the waters at creation, who overshadowed the Virgin, who descended in fire at Pentecost, who is called down on the bread and wine at every Liturgy, who is given in Chrismation to every newly baptised Christian, is the Lord and the Giver of Life — God, personal, and to be worshipped.

And the Creed that was finished here is not a summary written by a committee. It is a rule of prayer, hammered out over fifty-six years by men who were exiled, mobbed and worn to death for it, and handed to us to sing standing, together, before we approach the Chalice.