Although church history has bequeathed many famous heroes to posterity, few people have ever heard the name of Cadmus of Bosporus. Even the most knowledgeable church historians would be hard pressed to place him. He was an obscure bishop from the Crimean Peninsula along the coast of the Black Sea. His contributions to church history remain entirely unknown to us except for one thing: his signature. In the ancient manuscript lists for the Council of Nicaea, Cadmus (or Kadmos in Greek) appears as the final signatory—number 220—who put his name to the Creed of Nicaea.
When the ink of Cadmus’s signature had dried on the parchment and all the bishops went home after the summer of 325, it’s tempting to believe the Trinitarian controversy had been solved forever. We like our history in neat packages. We tell ourselves that once the council had done its job, orthodoxy reigned forever after. The good guys had won the day. The bad guys—the instigator Arius and two recalcitrant Libyans who joined him—had been crushed underfoot like heretical snakes. Greek Orthodox icons still depict Arius groveling at the feet of the triumphant councilmen. Some icons even show St Nicholas of Myra—the inspiration for the later figure of Santa Claus—giving the rebellious heretic a well-deserved slap to the face. The deity of Christ had triumphed, never again to be questioned. All of this sounds great to our ears—except it’s not what happened. The real events that unfolded in the decades after the council were much more messy.
The Fate of Arius
Though Arius had been excommunicated, he didn’t disappear into the dustbin of history. He hung around Palestine and the eastern Roman Empire, where his theological ideas found widespread support even if few people attributed them to their ostensible founder. Among those who sympathized with Arius’s type of thinking was the great church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea. To complicate matters, another prominent supporter of Arius—perhaps the most powerful bishop of his age—also bore the name Eusebius. His church at Nicomedia was a see in one of the main imperial capitals, so this second Eusebius was well connected to the political world. He was a close confidante of Emperor Constantine’s sister, Constantia. Through her, he had access to Constantine himself. In fact, he was distantly related to the imperial family.
Even after the Council of Nicaea rejected Arius, Eusebius of Nicomedia continued to support the exiled cleric. This action angered Constantine, who wasn’t particularly committed to any particular form of Trinitarian theology but wanted ecclesiastical unity above all else. He sent Eusebius away for continuing to stir the Arian pot. Though Eusebius had put his name on the Nicene Creed, it was widely recognized that he had “agreed to subscribe with hand only, not heart.”[1] And he refused to sign his name to the condemnations of Arius.
1. Rufinus of Aquileia: Historia Ecclesiastica 10.5. Translated by Philip R. Amidon, The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia: Books 10 and 11 (Oxford: 1997). Online excerpt here.
Constantine wanted his impressive council to put a final end to the debate and bring the empire back into theological agreement. But when a few years passed and it became obvious that “Arian” kinds of thinking (more on that term in a moment) would continue to proliferate, Constantine found himself open to compromise. Since the Arian perspective hadn’t faded away but only grew stronger, Constantine decided the best path to unity would be to fudge the language of Nicaea in ways that all parties—or at least the main ones—could live with.
Eusebius of Nicomedia saw his chance at restoration. He humbly—though perhaps not entirely honestly—told a council of churchmen, “If you should now think fit to restore us to your presence, you will find that we agree with you on all points, and agree fully in your decrees.”[2] Since the emperor regarded this recantation as satisfactory, Eusebius found himself ushered back into the hallways of the imperial palace and the churches of the tetrarchic capital. He began to advocate for Arianism in impactful ways that a minor prelate like Arius never could have achieved.
2. Letter of Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicaea to a Council 5. Translated by Glen Thompson on the excellent website, Fourth Century Christianity.
In the end, Arius faded off the stage of church history, but not before going out with a bang. His cataclysmic demise was preceded by seeming success. With help from his supporters, he managed to get himself reinstated into church fellowship at a Jerusalem council in 335. He was even granted an audience before Constantine where he swore allegiance to the Nicene Creed. But in stating his personal faith, Arius only affirmed that God’s Son was begotten of God “before all ages,” not that he was—and here is the crucial Nicene point—eternally begotten and thus always existent. Arius left open the possibility that there was a time when Christ “was not.”[3] Nevertheless, his creedal affirmation was good enough for Constantine, who sent Arius back to Alexandria in good standing.
3. Technically, the ancient discussion wasn’t about “Christ,” but about the Logos, or Word, who became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. The term “Christ” functions in this article as a shorthand way to refer to the second person of the Trinity.
Controversy immediately broke out in Egypt because the city’s young bishop, Athanasius, knew about Arius’s theological duplicity and refused to accept him into fellowship. Nicaea’s vital and inviolable doctrine taught that Christ was consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, which Arius actually denied no matter what Constantine believed. The complex politics of the times, which were intertwined with theology, caused Athanasius to be exiled. Yet Arius was also summoned back to Constantinople (newly established as the main imperial capital) to account for his problematic doctrine and the ongoing church strife.
The local bishop at Constantinople, Alexander, adhered to Nicene Trinitarianism, so he rejected Arius just like the leaders in Egypt had done. He refused to admit Arius to communion. But over in Nicomedia, Eusebius was pulling strings to get Alexander deposed from church office. In response, Alexander doubled down, not into logical arguments and politicking, but prayer and fasting. He shut himself in the Constantinople’s greatest church, Holy Peace, and prostrated himself before the altar, adding a flood of tears to his prayers for several days and nights. His petition was simple. If Arius’s views were right, Alexander prayed he wouldn’t have to witness the day appointed for their discussion; but if the Nicene view was correct, Arius should suffer God’s righteous punishment for heresy.
Soon enough, Alexander was proven right in a dramatic way. According to the church historian Socrates Scholasticus (not the same man as the philosopher of similar name), a divine judgment struck Arius the day before he was to be admitted to communion at Constantinople. Socrates records that
a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius, and with the terror a violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore enquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine’s Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died.[4]
4. Socrates Scholastics, Ecclesiastical History 1.38. Translated by A.C. Zenos in Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Series 2, 2:35. Online here.
In Socrates’s day, passers-by would still whisper and point at the dreadful latrine where the arch-heretic had met his ghastly end.
The original account of these events came from the pen of Arius’s mortal enemy, Athanasius. He interpreted the scene biblically, equating it with the death of the traitor Judas who “fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out” (Acts 1:18 NIV). But it’s debatable whether these events happened to Arius exactly like the ancient historians described. Exaggeration and over-spiritualization characterize the narratives. Some modern scholars have even suggested an alternate theory: instead of divine judgment, Arius might have been poisoned by his opponents.
Whatever the case, Arius had been suddenly removed from the stage. Shortly thereafter, Bishop Alexander died, and so did Emperor Constantine (though not before being baptized on his deathbed by Eusebius of Nicomedia). As the decade of the 340s began, the views of Arius had been invigorated with new life despite the death of their namesake. It was time for the next generation of orthodox theologians to rise up and defend Nicaea. The energetic Athanasius was ready to go to war against the adherents of “Arianism.” But what exactly did that term mean?
Athanasius against “Arianism”
Athanasius found it convenient to lump all his opponents together and brand them with the name of the heretic who had died such an ignominious death. His four-volume broadside Against the Arians takes his enemies to task without remorse. But modern scholars aren’t keen to use “Arianism” as a catch-all term. For one thing, the various outlooks differed from one another, as well as from Arius’s own views. Sometimes, the groups mutually condemned each other. Furthermore, the adherents of these views didn’t necessarily trace themselves to Arius as some sort of honorable founder. They derived their views from the pages of Scripture and what they considered long-standing Christian principles that pre-dated the rise of Arius.
Nevertheless, one key element bound these views into a single category: their shared opposition to Nicaea’s term homoousios (the Greek word homos means “one, same” and ousia means “substance”). The various anti-Nicene parties viewed that repugnant term as a form of Sabellianism (today often called modalism) which collapsed the Trinity into a unity that wrongly conflated the three persons as a single being. Although that wasn’t Nicaea’s intent, its opponents thought it did precisely that. Their collective denial of consubstantiality between the Father and Son made Athanasius view them as a single “Arian” enemy, like a hydra with many snarling heads but the same essential body. For the sake of convenience, we’ll use the term “Arianism” to describe the anti-Nicene views that Athanasius spent his life combatting.
Because of all the political intrigue that went along with the theological wrangling, Athanasius was kicked out of his Alexandrian church five different times. The emperors either commanded that he leave or local threats made it too dangerous for him to stay. Sometimes, he managed to escape to the Egyptian countryside or the remote deserts of the Upper Nile, where the ascetic monks took him in and gave him shelter. Other times, Athanasius was exiled all the way to the western empire, to Rome or even as far away as Trier in Germany.
Athanasius being gone from his church gave Arianism the freedom to gain more ground. One eyewitness of those times, the great biblical scholar Jerome, remarked that despite the seeming victory at Nicaea, a few years later, Arianism had triumphed in its place. When an Arian creed was published at another council as an attempted replacement for the one from 325, Jerome could scarcely believe it. “The Nicene Faith stood condemned by acclamation,” he lamented. “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.”[5]
5. Jerome, Dialogue Against Luciferians 19, in NPNF2, ed. Philip Schaff, 6:319. Online here.
For many years, Bishop Athanasius represented a lone voice striving to preserve the doctrine of the Trinity against those who would water it down by making Christ in some way inferior to his Father. Despite such fierce opposition from every direction, Athanasius took his stand on the full deity of Christ and would not budge. Because of his dogged determination to defend the Trinity, church history has described him with the slogan Athanasius contra mundum. This Latin phrase means “Athanasius against the world”—and in a very real sense, during the middle decades of the fourth century, that was true. Almost everyone had taken up a different view from Nicaea.
What were those erroneous views? Three main forms of Arianism developed in the mid-fourth century:
- Homoeans: Christ is “similar” to the Father, yet nothing is said about his essence or substance.
- Homoiousians: Christ’s essence (ousia) is “similar” (homoi-) to the Father’s yet not exactly equivalent (homo-), and therefore is inferior.
- Anomoeans: the prefix an- turns “similar” into “dissimilar.” This was the most radical Arian view, stating that Christ was fundamentally dissimilar to the Father and therefore a lesser divine being.
Whatever the nuances of these outlooks, Athanasius viewed them as a common enemy. He rightly understood the Christian gospel required a Savior who was one with God in every way, yet also fully human. Only then could Christ bind himself to the people of salvation, internalize them into his very being, and elevate them back to the divine life from which he had come. In Peter’s terminology, Christians would become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4 ESV). Or as Jesus himself had declared to his Father about believers, “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one” (John 17:22 NIV). Athanasius understood that only a fully consubstantial Son of God could achieve “so great a salvation” (Hebrews 2:3 NIV).
Labors of the Three Cappadocians
Bishop Athanasius, the courageous yet often lonely torchbearer of Nicaea, finally received some heavy-duty theological assistance during the last ten years of his life. Two brothers and one of their friends burst onto the church scene, offering their substantial intellectual firepower to the Nicene cause. They were Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390); Basil of Caesarea (330–379); and his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa (335–395). Because the cities where they ministered were all located in Cappadocia, these three men are often grouped together based on their home region. Down in Egypt, the beleaguered Athanasius definitely appreciated this newfound source of support!
And it came just in time. A group of non-Nicene theologians had emerged with a problematic doctrine about the Holy Spirit. They are known to history as the Pneumatomachians (pronounced “new-matto-MOCK-ians”), which means the “Spirit Fighters”—not that they fought against the Spirit himself, but only his deity. Their main leaders didn’t accept the homoousios term from Nicaea. On the other hand, they weren’t extreme Arians who called Christ a creature. Instead, they accepted the homoi– prefix that allowed Christ to be “similar” to the Father, possessing a lower kind of deity. But when it came to the Holy Spirit, the Pneumatomachians denied his deity altogether. The Spirit was even less similar to God than Christ—a high-level being, yet in the distant third rank. He wasn’t to be worshiped or glorified equally with the Father.
The Three Cappadocians took it upon themselves to engage the Spirit Fighters and refute their low view of the Holy Spirit. Along with Athanasius, the Cappadocians articulated a doctrine of the Spirit’s full and equal deity to that of the Father and Son. Due to these combined efforts, the Arians and Spirit Fighters found themselves pushed back in ways they hadn’t been for decades. Even when Athanasius died in 373, the Cappadocian fathers continued their Trinitarian work. At last, the theological balance seemed to be tipping in favor of Nicaea and the homoousios clause. The ecclesiastical world was ready to apply this term to all three Trinitarian persons. And at that very moment, as the sovereign timing of God would have it, things were beginning to change in the political realm as well.
Triumph of Nicene Orthodoxy
In the year 379, six years after the death of Athanasius, a man came to power in the eastern half of the empire whose religious policies the Alexandrian bishop surely would have appreciated. Contemporary accounts portray Theodosius the Great as a strong Christian, but like Constantine before him, today’s historians debate how authentic his piety may have been. There are good reasons to think he grew up in Spain in a theologically conservative environment that affirmed the creed of Nicaea as orthodox. So when Theodosius came to power, that was the kind of Christianity he wanted to see established.
He immediately got busy. His so-called Edict of Thessalonica (380) decreed that all his subjects must follow the faith held by the bishops of Rome and Alexandria. The edict declared that
we shall believe in the single Deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity. We command that those persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of Catholic Christians.[6]
6. Theodosian Code 16.1.2, in The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions: A Translation with Commentary, Glossary, and Bibliography, trans. Clyde Pharr (Princeton University Press, 1952), 440.
At this historical moment, the Roman Empire legally embraced Nicene, “catholic” Christianity as its official replacement for paganism.
Upon his arrival in Constantinople, Theodosius summoned its Arian bishop and asked him to recant. When the man refused, Theodosius banished him, then selected an orthodox substitute: Gregory of Nazianzus, the leader of the Three Cappadocians. With Gregory as the official civic bishop, the churches of the eastern imperial capital would be under the supervision of a staunch Nicene Christian, just like at the great cities of Rome and Alexandria.
Yet one task remained unfulfilled. Law courts and government edicts couldn’t properly explain sound doctrine; only the church could do that. Theodosius understood that while the Council of Nicaea’s authority should remain unquestioned, the precise meaning of its creed needed clarification. Not only did it have the awkward anathemas attached to it, the creed also didn’t spell out Trinitarian pneumatology with enough specificity. It was time for a second great council to address these matters and entrench Nicene orthodoxy once and for all.
According to ancient tradition, over three hundred church fathers had gathered at Nicaea for the original council in 325. Five and a half decades later in 381, the number of attendees was half as large. The second convocation of bishops was also less worldwide than the first. No one came from the western empire, not even from Rome, and even some of the easterners had to leave early. Nevertheless, the Council of Constantinople is considered the second of the seven greatest councils in all of church history. Its creed is the one that Christians recite today as the “Nicene Creed.”
Unfortunately, we know even less about the actual proceedings of the second council than we do the first. No single venue housed the council meetings; apparently it convened in various churches across the eastern capital. Its main, overriding purpose was to reaffirm the faith that had been laid down at Nicaea.
At some point, a creed was put together. The traditional view of its formulation, held through many centuries of church history, claims the new creed was just an expansion of Nicaea’s original version. But in modern times, attentive scholars have questioned this. Out of the 178 Greek words in the Nicene Creed, only thirty-three can be attributed to the earlier version from the first council. The word order varies as well. Apparently, the council members at Constantinople used a different confession of faith to put together the second version of the creed.
One of the most obvious differences from the 325 version is the omission of the anathemas at the end. Those curses had arisen in the highly polarized context of the first council. But the second council, consisting of already-convinced Nicene delegates, didn’t feel the need to include any such denunciations. Today’s Christians can be grateful for that. Churchgoers who recite creeds want to confess their faith in common with the saints of the ages, not call down divine judgment on heretics.
The Nicene Creed’s first article about the Father differs from the 325 version only in its wording, not its content. Just like before, so here, God the Father is identified as the maker of everything that exists. All ancient creeds began with a statement about the Creator God.
The second article on the Son contained more variance from the 325 version. Many of these differences amounted to nuances of wording or noncontroversial expansions. The new references included Christ’s crucifixion “under Pontius Pilate,” his burial, his resurrection “according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:4 NIV), his seat “at the right hand of the Father” and his return “in glory.” The claim that the incarnation happened “by the power of the Holy Spirit” and “from the Virgin Mary” was nothing more than a clarification based on Luke’s account of the Annunciation in his gospel. These Christological adaptations didn’t change anything essential from the original Nicene formula. They were long-standing confessions of the ancient church that appeared often in other baptismal creeds.
Yet there were some meaningful changes as well. The assertion in the 325 version that Christ exists “out of the substance [ousias] of the Father” was omitted in 381. Probably, this was because the homoousios clause already covered that ground, so there was no need to repeat it.
The most significant expansion between the creeds of 325 and 381 occurred in the third article. The original creed had simply said, “We believe in the Holy Spirit.” But since that time, the Spirit Fighters had come on the scene and the Three Cappadocians had engaged them with a theological counteroffensive. In the end, the creed affirmed that the Holy Spirit is to be worshiped and glorified with the Father and Son. Yet the text didn’t call the Spirit consubstantial—a potential shortcoming of the Nicene Creed.
A final important change to the pneumatological third article was its inclusion of some assertions about the church and the end times. The new wording affirmed that there is “one holy catholic and apostolic church.” The council fathers also stated, “We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”[7] With these new affirmations clearly laid out, the final version of the Nicene Creed was ready for use in the Christian centuries to come.
7. “The Nicene Creed,” Book of Common Prayer Online.
The Trinity as the Gospel
Why does all this matter? Was it just pointless wrangling about theological minutiae? Not at all. The essential distinction between Nicene Trinitarianism and any type of Arianism hinges on one key question: Does the Son share equally in the deity of the Father? If the two of them are consubstantial and coeternal—as Athanasius and the Cappadocians insisted—it means their deity is entirely equal. But if the Son is only “similar” to the Father, or perhaps even “dissimilar,” it demotes the Son’s deity so he falls short of being fully God. While a glorified creature could serve as a moral example in a system of works salvation, a grace-based gospel requires the Son’s full deity.
Athanasius and the Nicene fathers stood firm on their belief—against the whole world, when necessary—that the biblical gospel proclaims a Savior who is God in the flesh, come down to us for the sake of our salvation. The full impact of the Son’s descent can only be appreciated when we recognize how far he came: all the way down from a place of equality with God (Phil. 2:6–11). Any God so loving as to condescend like this can also be trusted to take his people into his bosom, unite them to himself, and grant them the abiding gift of eternal life.
