The First Council of Nicaea

In the summer of 325 something happened that had never happened before: bishops from across the Roman world — and from beyond its borders — travelled to a lakeside town in Asia Minor and sat down together to speak with one voice. They had come to answer a question that sounds abstract and is not: is Jesus Christ God in the same sense that the Father is God, or is He the first and greatest of God’s creatures? On the answer hung the whole meaning of the Gospel.

The Church comes out of hiding

---

For nearly three centuries Christianity had been an illegal religion. Believers had been dragged before magistrates, stripped of property, sent to the mines, and killed. Then, within a single generation, everything changed. In 313 the Edict of Milan granted the Church her freedom; by 324 Constantine ruled the whole empire alone and openly favoured the Christians. Churches were built in the open air of the great cities. Bishops who had been fugitives were suddenly public figures.

And almost at once the Church faced a danger she had not faced before. Persecution attacks from outside, and outside pressure tends to make a body close ranks. This new trouble came from inside — from a respected priest, in a great city, preaching in a church, with a large and devoted following.

Arius and the question he asked

---

Around the year 318 a presbyter of Alexandria named Arius began to teach publicly what he believed followed logically from Scripture. The Bible calls Christ the Son, “begotten of the Father.” But whatever is begotten, Arius reasoned, must begin — a son comes after his father. Therefore the Son of God, however exalted, cannot be eternal. He is the first and highest of all created things, the one through whom God made everything else, but a creature nonetheless. Arius put it in a phrase that his opponents would never let him forget.

“There was a time when the Son was not.”The slogan of Arius

Arius was not a fool and not a scoundrel. He was an ascetic, an able preacher, and by all accounts a persuasive man — and he was a brilliant populariser. He set his teaching to simple songs with catchy tunes and had them sung by dockworkers, travellers, and market traders across the East, knowing what every advertiser since has known: a phrase repeated often enough begins to sound true. Within a few years his theology was being whistled in the streets of half the empire.

His own bishop, St Alexander of Alexandria, saw immediately what was at stake and condemned the teaching at a local council. Arius appealed to influential friends among the bishops of the East, and what had begun as a quarrel in one city became a fire running through the whole Church.

Why a single word mattered so much

---

It is tempting to see this as a fight over philosophical hair-splitting. It was not. Christianity claims that God has done something for us that we could not do for ourselves: He has united our humanity to Himself so that we might share His life. St Athanasius would state it with brutal simplicity: God became man so that man might become god — that is, so that human beings might be filled with the uncreated life of God without ceasing to be human.

But only God can do that. If Christ is a creature — even the highest creature — then the bridge does not reach the far shore. Baptism would join us to a creature. The Eucharist would be communion with a creature. The Cross would be the heroic death of a very great man, not God laying down His own life for the world. And the worship that Christians had always given to Christ, from the earliest hymns onward, would be idolatry. Arius’ teaching did not merely misdescribe Christ; it emptied the Christian life.

The Emperor summons the bishops

---

Constantine, who had just reunited a shattered empire, was alarmed to find his newly favoured Church tearing itself apart. He first sent the aged Spanish bishop Hosius of Cordoba to Alexandria to make peace; when that failed, he did something unprecedented and summoned the bishops of the whole world to meet at his expense, using the imperial post to bring them, at Nicaea — a town near his residence at Nicomedia, easily reached by land and lake.

Tradition numbers them at 318. They came mostly from the Greek-speaking East, but also from Rome, from Gaul, from Persia beyond the imperial frontier. Many of them had been tortured under Diocletian barely a dozen years before and carried the evidence in their bodies: eyes put out, hamstrings severed, hands crippled by branding irons. The historian Theodoret says Constantine kissed the empty eye socket of one confessor. Among them, tradition remembers St Nicholas of Myra — the bishop whose name later travelled into Christmas folklore — and St Spyridon of Trimythous, a shepherd who owned nothing and confounded a philosopher not with argument but with a confession of faith. Alexander of Alexandria brought with him his young deacon Athanasius, who had no vote and would end up carrying the fight for the next forty-five years.

One word against the world

---

The Council debated through the early summer. The Arians presented their case and, according to the ancient accounts, were taken aback to see it rejected outright. But the fathers found that no phrase taken straight from Scripture would serve: every biblical title they proposed — “of God,” “the power of God,” “the true image” — the Arians cheerfully accepted, reading each in their own sense. Something more exact was needed.

So the Council did something bold. It took a word that is not in the Bible — the Greek homoousios, “of one essence,” “consubstantial” — and used it to fence in the biblical faith. Whatever the Father is, the Son is: not similar, not derived, not lesser, but the same one divine being. The word could not be twisted, and that was precisely the point. The Council was not adding to revelation; it was building a wall around it.

All but two of the bishops signed. Arius and his two remaining supporters were deposed and exiled.

What else the Council settled

---

Nicaea did more than define the faith. It set a common rule for the date of Pascha, so that the whole Church might keep the Resurrection on the same day rather than city by city. It healed the Meletian schism in Egypt. And it issued twenty canons on the ordinary order of church life — among them the recognition of the ancient standing of the sees of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch over their regions, the requirement that a bishop be consecrated by at least three others, restrictions on clergy moving from city to city for advancement, and the rule (canon 20) that Christians stand rather than kneel for prayer on Sundays and through the fifty days of Pascha, because those are days of resurrection. Orthodox Christians still keep that canon every Sunday of the year.

What the Council did not do

---

Nicaea is the most misrepresented meeting in Christian history, so it is worth saying plainly what did not happen there. The Council did not invent the divinity of Christ: Christians had been worshipping Jesus as Lord and God since the New Testament itself, which is exactly why Arius’ teaching caused such an uproar. The Council did not decide which books belong in the Bible — that subject was not on the agenda, and no ancient source says otherwise. It did not vote on the matter by a narrow margin; the vote was virtually unanimous. And it was not the emperor’s theology imposed on the bishops: Constantine convened and paid for the Council and pressed for peace, but within a few years he had turned in the Arians’ favour, which shows how little the definition owed to his personal preferences.

The long struggle afterwards

---

The victory of 325 was not the end of the crisis but the beginning of a sixty-year war of attrition. Arianism recovered its footing under later emperors, and bishops who held to Nicaea found themselves the persecuted party. Athanasius, who became Archbishop of Alexandria in 328, was driven from his city five separate times and spent some seventeen years in exile — hiding in the Egyptian desert with the monks, sheltering in Rome, hunted by imperial agents. His enemies had the palace, the police, and the fashionable opinion of the day. He had only the faith of the Council and a refusal to be moved, which is why the Church remembers the phrase Athanasius contra mundum — Athanasius against the world.

The word homoousios was finally vindicated not by force but by a generation of saints — Athanasius, and after him St Basil the Great, St Gregory the Theologian and St Gregory of Nyssa — who patiently explained what it did and did not mean, and won over most of those who had been afraid of it. The work they began at Nicaea would be completed at the Second Council in 381.

How the Church remembers Nicaea

---

On the seventh Sunday of Pascha, between the Ascension and Pentecost, the Orthodox Church keeps the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, singing of the fathers as “the lights of the world” who “wove the whole robe of Christ’s theology from on high.” We also remember Nicaea in a quieter and more constant way: every time the Creed is sung at the Divine Liturgy, every time it is said at a baptism, every time a child learns it by heart, the Church is repeating the words those maimed confessors hammered out beside a lake in Bithynia.

Why it still matters

---

Every generation meets a version of Arius — the suggestion that Jesus was a great teacher, an enlightened man, a spiritual master, anything except God in the flesh. It is a tidier religion, and a smaller one. The fathers of Nicaea refused it not because they loved controversy but because they knew what they had received: that the One who was born of the Virgin, who was crucified and rose again, is the very God who made the world, and that in Him the distance between God and man has been abolished for good.

That Creed is sung at every Liturgy at Saint Nina Mission. It is not a museum piece. It is the shortest complete answer the Church has ever given to the question of who Jesus Christ is — and it was written by men who had already proved with their bodies that they meant it.