The Creed and the Canons

Nicaea answered Arius with a creed confessing the Son to be “true God of true God, begotten not made, of one essence (homoousios) with the Father,” sealed by anathemas against the Arian slogans. It also issued twenty canons ordering the Church’s discipline and settled the date of Pascha against the Jewish reckoning — the practical business by which a council turns a definition into a common life.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Creed of Nicaea

The council’s central act was a creed. It was not composed from nothing but built on an existing Eastern baptismal creed (Eusebius of Caesarea offered his own Caesarean creed as a basis), amended at the crucial points to shut out the Arian reading (Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed., 1972, on the sources and drafting; Eusebius’s letter to his church reporting the process, in Athanasius, De Decretis, appendix; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4). The Creed of Nicaea (which is not verbatim the longer creed we recite at the Liturgy — that is the creed of 381; see The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed) confesses:

“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is, of the essence (ousia) of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one essence (homoousion) with the Father… who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate and was made man…”
(Creed of Nicaea, 325; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14)

To the confession the council appended anathemas naming and condemning the Arian formulas: “But those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not’; and ‘He was not before he was made’; and ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or ‘He is of another substance’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘The Son of God is created,’ or ‘changeable,’ or ‘alterable’ — they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church” (Creed of Nicaea, anathemas; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). The anathemas are as important as the confession: they pin the definition to the exact slogans it excludes, so that no one could sign the Creed while holding Arius’s doctrine.

The Word Homoousios

The decisive term was homoousios — “of one essence,” “consubstantial,” “of the same being” as the Father. It was deliberately chosen because it was the one word the Arians could not accept and could not evade by reinterpretation; the scriptural titles (“Son,” “Word,” “image,” “wisdom”) they were willing to grant, emptying each of full divinity, but homoousios barred the door (Athanasius, De Decretis 19–20, on why the non-scriptural word was necessary; Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 2004). The choice was bold, even risky, for two reasons. First, the word is not in Scripture, and its introduction into a creed was an innovation of terminology (though the council held, with Athanasius, that it only “collected the sense of the Scriptures”). Second, homoousios had a checkered past: it had been used by some Gnostics, and — most awkwardly — a council at Antioch in 268 had reportedly rejected the word when Paul of Samosata used it in a modalist or materialist sense (Athanasius, De Synodis 43–45, addressing this very objection; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1977). Athanasius and the later defenders had to explain that the sense condemned at Antioch and the sense confessed at Nicaea were different — the word forbids no real distinction of Father and Son but affirms their identity of being. The controversy over exactly this point drove the theology of the next half-century and was only fully resolved by the Cappadocians’ careful distinction of ousia (essence) and hypostasis (person), which let homoousios mean “one in being, three in person” without any taint of Sabellianism (see The Holy Spirit and the Cappadocians).

Almost all the bishops signed. Only two — Theonas and Secundus, Libyan supporters of Arius — refused and were exiled with him; Eusebius of Nicomedia and another signed the Creed but balked at the anathemas and were soon banished too, though the political tide would turn in their favor within a few years, opening the long Arian reaction (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.8–9; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). The near-unanimity of 325 did not settle the matter: it took the reception of the whole Church, and the labors of Athanasius and the Cappadocians across sixty years, to make Nicaea’s faith the Church’s own (see Ecumenicity and Reception).

The Twenty Canons

Beyond the Creed, Nicaea legislated for the Church’s order, issuing twenty canons that are among the foundation stones of Orthodox canon law (text in Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14, with commentary; The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings, 1957). Notable among them:

Canon 4 required that a bishop be ordained by all the bishops of the province, or at least three, with the metropolitan’s confirmation — the root of the metropolitan system and of the rule that bishops are made by bishops in synod, not by any single prelate (Nicaea I, canon 4; NPNF II/14).
Canon 5 ordered provincial synods to meet twice yearly, institutionalizing conciliar governance at the local level.
Canon 6 confirmed the ancient customary jurisdictions: “Let the ancient customs in Egypt, Libya and Pentapolis prevail, that the Bishop of Alexandria have jurisdiction in all these, since the like is customary for the Bishop of Rome also. Likewise in Antioch and the other provinces, let the Churches retain their privileges” (Nicaea I, canon 6; NPNF II/14). This canon is a key text in later debates over ecclesiastical primacy, because it grounds the standing of the great sees — Alexandria, Rome, Antioch — in ancient custom rather than in a single divinely-appointed universal see, and it says nothing of a Roman jurisdiction over the others (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979, on the pentarchic reading of canon 6).
Canon 7 recognized a special honor for the Bishop of Aelia (Jerusalem), while preserving the rights of the metropolitan of Caesarea.
Canon 8 provided for the reconciliation of the Novatianist schismatics (“Cathari”); canon 19 required the rebaptism of the followers of Paul of Samosata, whose baptism was judged defective.
Canon 13 laid down that no one in danger of death (in articulo mortis) should be deprived of the “last and most necessary viaticum” — the Eucharist — a canon of enduring pastoral force.
Canon 15 forbade the translation of bishops, priests, and deacons from one city to another; canon 16 forbade clergy to wander between churches.
Canon 20 ordered that prayers be said standing, not kneeling, on Sundays and throughout the fifty days of Pentecost, as a sign of the Resurrection — a rubric the Orthodox Church still observes.

Notably, the twenty genuine canons do not include the later, spurious canons sometimes attributed to Nicaea (the inflated collections circulated in the West and East); the authentic corpus is twenty, and Orthodox canonical tradition receives these (Percival, NPNF II/14, on the number and authenticity; The Rudder, trans. Cummings, 1957).

The Paschal Question

The council also settled a practical dispute that had troubled the Church for over a century: the date of Pascha (Easter). Some Churches, especially in the province of Asia (the “Quartodecimans”) and among certain Syrian communities, kept Pascha in dependence on the Jewish reckoning of Passover, on the 14th of Nisan; most of the Church kept it on the following Sunday, computed independently. Nicaea ruled for the universal practice: Pascha is to be celebrated by all on the same Sunday, calculated so as to fall after the vernal equinox and not with the Jews, freeing the Christian feast from dependence on the Jewish calendar (Constantine’s synodal letter on the Paschal question, in Eusebius, Vita Constantini 3.18–19; Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.9; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). Interestingly, the twenty canons themselves do not contain the Paschal rule; it is preserved in the council’s synodal letter and in Constantine’s circular, not as a numbered canon — a reminder that a council’s work is broader than its formal canons. The Nicene principle (a single Sunday Pascha, after the equinox, in concert across the Church) remains the basis of Orthodox Paschal reckoning to this day, though the later divergence of the Julian and Gregorian calendars means East and West now often keep it on different Sundays despite the shared Nicene rule.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. De Decretis Nicaenae Synodi 19–21; De Synodis 43–45. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4.
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Council of Nicaea I (325). Creed and Anathemas; Canons 1–20. In Percival, ed., The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine 3.6–20. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Creeds. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 1972; Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed., 1977.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.
The Rudder (Pedalion). Trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957.
Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History 1.8–9. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 2.