Constantine at Nicaea

Constantine’s role at the First Ecumenical Council (325): he convened it, paid for the bishops’ travel, presided at its opening as an unbaptized layman, and pressed for concord — and, on Eusebius’s report, commended the word homoousios — but he did not define the faith. That was the work of the assembled Fathers. This file sets out the emperor’s ecclesial role exactly as the Seven Ecumenical Councils collection frames it, neither inflating nor diminishing it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Church He Inherited

When Constantine became sole ruler in 324, he inherited with the East a Church already torn by the Arian controversy — the dispute, broken out at Alexandria around 318, over whether the Son of God is truly God or the first and highest of creatures (see The Arian Crisis). Constantine, who had hoped to make the Church a bond of imperial unity, at first badly misjudged the gravity of the quarrel: he sent his ecclesiastical adviser Ossius (Hosius) of Cordova to Alexandria with a letter urging Alexander and Arius to reconcile over what the emperor called a “trifling and foolish” question of words (Constantine’s letter, in Eusebius, Life of Constantine 2.64–72; trans. NPNF II/1; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 10). When that failed, he did what no emperor had done: he summoned the bishops of the whole oikoumenē to a general council, offering the imperial post to bring them (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.6–7).

What Constantine Did at the Council

The council opened at Nicaea in Bithynia, near his residence at Nicomedia, most probably on 20 May 325, and concluded its main business by 19 June (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.10–13; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). Constantine’s part in it was that of convener, host, and patron of concord — a role real and weighty, and precisely bounded:

  • He convened the council and gathered the bishops at imperial expense, using the machinery of the state to assemble the Church’s episcopate for the first time on a universal scale (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.6–9).
  • He presided at the opening in imperial splendor — entering the hall, on Eusebius’s famous description, “like some heavenly angel of God,” clad in gold and jewels — and delivered an address urging peace and unity; yet he did so as a layman, and one not yet baptized, seated before the assembled bishops whom he honored as the judges of the faith (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.10–13; the scene is analyzed in Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 10, and in the Councils collection’s account).
  • He honored the bishops — receiving them, according to the sources, with marked reverence, and reportedly kissing the scars of the confessors who had suffered in the persecution (the detail is in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.11; trans. NPNF II/3).
  • He urged the decisive word. According to Eusebius of Caesarea’s own letter to his church, explaining his subscription, it was the emperor who put forward the term homoousios (“of one essence”) — though on the counsel of his theological advisers, above all Ossius, and its dogmatic content was the bishops’ (Eusebius of Caesarea, Letter to his Church at Caesarea, preserved in Athanasius, De Decretis, appendix, and Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.8; trans. NPNF II/4 and II/2; Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 2004, on the word’s provenance).
  • He enforced the result, ratifying the council’s decisions with the force of law and sending the deposed Arius and his unyielding supporters into exile — the state’s coercive power placed behind the Church’s judgment (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.9; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981).

What Constantine Did Not Do

The distinction that governs the whole Orthodox reading of Nicaea is the distinction between convening a council and defining its faith, and Constantine stands firmly on the near side of it. He did not define the doctrine. The Creed of Nicaea, the word homoousios in its dogmatic sense, the twenty canons, and the Paschal settlement were the work of the assembled Fathers — the traditional 318 of them (a figure with the scriptural resonance of Abraham’s 318 servants, Genesis 14:14, and best treated as the received number rather than an exact count) — with the aged Alexander of Alexandria among them and, in his retinue, the young deacon Athanasius, who would spend his life defending what the council confessed (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.8; Athanasius, Ad Afros 2; and see The Creed and the Canons, and St. Athanasius). Even the emperor’s commendation of homoousios was, in substance, the ratification of a term the theologians supplied and the council received; and Eusebius of Caesarea, no friend of the strict Nicene party, subscribed only with reservations he felt obliged to explain to his flock. The faith of Nicaea was defined by the Church and secured, after a sixty-year struggle, by the reception of the faithful and the labor of confessors like Athanasius — not by imperial fiat. This is exactly the framing the Seven Ecumenical Councils collection sets down, and this compendium follows it without deviation.

The Precedent and Its Ambiguity

Constantine’s role at Nicaea created the enduring Byzantine pattern: the emperor convenes the ecumenical council, provides for it, honors it, and gives its decrees the force of law, while the bishops judge the faith. This is the germ of symphonia (see The Byzantine Church). But Nicaea also displayed the pattern’s inherent tension, which Constantine’s own later conduct would expose: an emperor who can summon a council and enforce its result can also be worked upon to summon another and enforce the opposite. The strict Nicene settlement of 325 did not hold in Constantine’s lifetime; within a few years imperial favor swung toward the Arianizing party, Arius was recalled, and the champions of homoousios were driven into exile (see The Arian Aftermath and the Deathbed Baptism). That reversal is the strongest evidence that the emperor was not the guarantor of the faith — for the faith of Nicaea survived his own vacillation and that of his sons, vindicated at last not by the throne but by the Church at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381 (see The Byzantine Church). Constantine’s greatness at Nicaea is that he gathered the Church to speak; her greatness is that what she spoke there outlasted him.

See Also

References

  • Athanasius of Alexandria. De Decretis Nicaenae Synodi; Ad Afros 2. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4.
  • Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
  • Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325–787). Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine 2.64–72; 3.6–13. Trans. NPNF II/1; and Cameron and Hall, Oxford: Clarendon, 1999.
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. Letter to his Church at Caesarea (in Athanasius, De Decretis, and Socrates 1.8). Trans. NPNF II/4, II/2.
  • Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History 1.8–9. Trans. NPNF II/2.
  • Theodoret of Cyrus. Ecclesiastical History 1.11. Trans. NPNF II/3.