The Creed and the Rule of Faith

The Creed is Tradition’s most compact symbol — the whole faith confessed in a few lines, professed at baptism and sung in the Liturgy. This file traces the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed and its ancient predecessor, the “rule of faith” (regula fidei), as the concentrated expression of Holy Tradition; the meaning of the Creed as a symbolon; and the filioque — the one clause whose unilateral alteration became the great symbol of the East–West divide over who may touch the common confession.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Rule of Faith before the Creed

Before there was a conciliar Creed there was the “rule of faith” (Latin regula fidei, Greek kanon tes pisteos or kanon tes aletheias, “rule of truth”) — the concise summary of the apostolic message that the early Church used to teach catechumens, to profess at baptism, and to test interpretation. St. Irenaeus and Tertullian both appeal to it, and both give sample statements of its content: the one God the Father, creator of heaven and earth; the one Lord Jesus Christ, incarnate, crucified, risen, and coming again; and the Holy Spirit (Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.10.1; Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum 13; trans. ANF I and III). The rule of faith was not yet a fixed verbal formula binding on all — its wording varies from writer to writer — but a stable pattern of the apostolic preaching, the framework within which the Scriptures were rightly read (see The Church as the Interpreter). It was Tradition in its most concentrated early form: the whole faith in a sentence, handed on and confessed.

The rule of faith performed two functions that the Creed would inherit. It was the touchstone of interpretation, the pattern by which the true reading of Scripture was distinguished from the heretical (Irenaeus’s mosaic of the king; see The Church as the Interpreter). And it was the baptismal confession, the faith into which the convert was baptized, so that to become a Christian was to receive and profess this rule. The Creed grew directly out of this baptismal and catechetical soil.

The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed

The Creed the Orthodox Church confesses is the “symbol of faith” of the first two Ecumenical Councils — the creed promulgated at Nicaea in 325 against Arianism and expanded, especially in its article on the Holy Spirit, at Constantinople in 381 against the Pneumatomachians: the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 20–23, 27–28; and the topical article The Nicene Creed). It confesses one God the Father Almighty; one Lord Jesus Christ, “true God of true God, begotten not made, of one essence (homoousion) with the Father”; the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and second coming; the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified”; and “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church,” one baptism, and the resurrection of the dead (Creed of 381, in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, 1990). This Creed is the touchstone of Orthodox dogma, sung at every Divine Liturgy and professed at every baptism, and — uniquely among the outward forms of Tradition — held to be untouchable in its wording, a point that becomes decisive in the filioque controversy below.

Symbolon: The Creed as a Sign of Communion

The Greek word for creed, symbolon, is illuminating. A symbolon was originally a token — a coin or a tablet broken in two, whose halves could be fitted together to prove identity or partnership. The Creed as symbolon is thus a sign of belonging: to confess it is to show oneself a member of the one Body, and the shared confession is the token by which the faithful recognize one another across space and time (Pelikan, Credo, Yale University Press, 2003, on the meaning of symbolon and the function of creeds; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, p. 202, on the Creed as the badge of Orthodox identity). The Creed is therefore not merely a checklist of doctrines but a compact of communion — the whole Tradition folded into a form short enough to be memorized, professed, and sung by every believer, and functioning as the common measure of the faith. In it the vast Tradition becomes portable: the child learns it, the martyr dies with it, the council presupposes it, the Liturgy is built around it.

This is why the Creed is treated with such gravity in Orthodoxy. It is the rule — the kanon — in its perfected conciliar form; to alter it is not to edit a document but to touch the common confession that binds the whole Church. And that is exactly what made the filioque the neuralgic point it became.

The Filioque and the Integrity of the Common Confession

The filioque (“and the Son”) is the clause, absent from the original Creed of 381, that came in parts of the Latin West to be added to the article on the Holy Spirit, so that the Spirit was confessed to proceed “from the Father and the Son (ex Patre Filioque).” It first appears in a local Spanish context (associated with the councils of Toledo) and spread through the Frankish realms; it was resisted at Rome for centuries — Pope Leo III famously had the Creed inscribed without the addition around 810 — before eventually being adopted at Rome in the eleventh century, and it became one of the principal issues in the estrangement of East and West (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 51–53, 58, 213–218; and the topical article The Nicene Creed). The Orthodox objection has always been double: a theological objection to the doctrine of a double procession of the Spirit, and — for the doctrine of Tradition, the point that concerns this file — a canonical and ecclesiological objection to the manner of the change: that a part of the Church unilaterally altered the common Creed of the Ecumenical Councils, which no local church has authority to change (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 213–218; St. Photius, Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, on the procession; see St. Photius the Great).

[Disputed: the filioque dispute between Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic and much of the Protestant West runs on two distinct levels; the Orthodox confession itself is settled — the Church has never received either the doctrine or the addition — but the state of the debate must be reported accurately. (a) On the doctrine: the Orthodox tradition, following the Greek Fathers and St. Photius's *Mystagogy*, confesses the procession of the Spirit from the Father alone (the Father as sole *arche*/source in the Trinity); Western theology, following a strand from Augustine, understood the Spirit to proceed from the Father and the Son (or, in a formula proposed as a reconciliation, "from the Father *through* the Son"). Some modern Catholic and Orthodox theologians have argued the difference is partly one of terminology and complementary emphases; others hold it a substantive dogmatic divergence. (b) On the manner: Orthodoxy holds that the unilateral insertion into the conciliar Creed was itself illegitimate regardless of the doctrine's merits, since the Creed is the common symbol that no local church may alter alone — a point on which recent Roman Catholic practice has partly met the concern (e.g., reciting the Creed without the *filioque* in Greek liturgical contexts, and the 1995 Vatican clarification distinguishing the Greek and Latin senses of "procession"). This compendium reports the Western positions accurately in their own terms and states the Orthodox confession as the teaching of the Church (METHODOLOGY §4.1); see [St. Photius the Great](../../st-photius-the-great/README.md) and [The Nicene Creed](../../orthodoxy/03-dogmatic-theology/nicene-creed.md).]

The Creed as the Whole Tradition in Little

For the doctrine of Tradition, the Creed is exemplary in a further way. It shows how the vast, comprehensive reality of Holy Tradition — the whole life of the Church in the Spirit — can be truly, if not exhaustively, expressed in a fixed and shareable form without being reduced to it. The Creed does not contain the whole of Tradition (no formula does; the Liturgy, the Fathers, the sacraments, the ascetic experience all overflow it), yet it faithfully expresses the heart of it, and it functions as the common measure by which the faith is confessed and communion recognized. It is the small-t symbol par excellence, borne by and pointing beyond itself to the capital-T life it confesses. To recite the Creed with understanding is not to master Tradition but to stand within it — to profess, in the words the councils gave, the one faith that the whole Tradition hands on.

References

Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Ed. Norman P. Tanner. Vol. 1. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990. (The Creed of Nicaea 325 and Constantinople 381.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The Creed; the filioque, its history and the Orthodox objection, pp. 20–23, 27–28, 51–53, 213–218.)
Pelikan, Jaroslav. Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. (The Creed as symbolon; the function of creeds.)
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies I.10.1. Trans. ANF vol. 1. (The rule of faith.)
Tertullian. De praescriptione haereticorum 13. Trans. ANF vol. 3. (The rule of faith.)
Photius of Constantinople. Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. (The procession from the Father alone.) See St. Photius the Great.