The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed

The creed associated with Constantinople I — the “Nicene Creed” said at every Orthodox Liturgy — expanded Nicaea’s confession, above all with a full article on the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father.” The council also issued canons, of which the third, ranking Constantinople second after Rome, would echo through centuries of ecclesiastical dispute — as, later, would the Western insertion of the Filioque into the very article on the Spirit.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Creed the Church Recites

The creed universally called the “Nicene Creed” is more precisely the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed — the symbol traditionally attributed to the Council of Constantinople of 381, which took the faith of Nicaea and expanded it, most importantly by completing the third article on the Holy Spirit. This is the creed confessed at every Orthodox baptism and sung or recited at every Divine Liturgy (Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed., 1972, on the creed and its attribution; see Orthodoxy: The Nicene Creed). Its text first appears explicitly quoted in the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which set it beside the creed of Nicaea 325 and confessed both; on the traditional and majority scholarly view it is the creed the 150 Fathers of 381 endorsed, though its exact relationship to the council’s own act has been debated, since the Acts of 381 do not survive in full (Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 1972, on the “riddle” of the creed’s origin; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). What is certain is the Church’s reception: from Chalcedon onward this is the creed of the Church.

Its opening and central articles reproduce and refine Nicaea — “of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made… and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man” — and add the historical clauses of the saving economy: “crucified for us under Pontius Pilate… rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures… and his kingdom shall have no end” (Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, 381; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14).

The Article on the Holy Spirit

The creed’s decisive expansion is the third article. Where Nicaea 325 had ended almost abruptly — “and in the Holy Spirit” — the creed of 381 gives the Spirit a full confession that enshrines the Cappadocian defense of the Spirit’s divinity (see The Holy Spirit and the Cappadocians):

“And in 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, who spoke by the prophets.”
(Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, 381; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14)

Every phrase is doctrinally weighted. “The Lord” (to kyrion) applies to the Spirit the divine title; “the Giver of Life” confesses the Spirit as author of sanctification and deification — the very work that only God can do, which was Basil’s central argument; “who proceeds from the Father” (to ek tou Patros ekporeuomenon), echoing John 15:26, names the Spirit’s mode of origin, distinct from the Son’s “begetting”; and “who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified” (syn-proskynoumenon kai syndoxazomenon) accords the Spirit the equal worship due to God alone, precisely the point the Pneumatomachi denied (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.66, on the co-worship of the Spirit; Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 1972). The creed thus completes the Trinitarian confession: one God worshipped in three co-equal, co-eternal persons.

The Canons of 381

The council issued canons — four in the received Greek collection, with three further canons (5–7) usually reckoned to belong to a slightly later session or to a synod of 382 (Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14, on the number and dating; The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings, 1957):

  • Canon 1 reaffirmed the faith of Nicaea and anathematized the heresies by name — Eunomians/Anomoeans, Arians/Eudoxians, Semi-Arians/Pneumatomachi (Macedonians), Sabellians, Marcellians, Photinians, and Apollinarians (Constantinople I, canon 1; NPNF II/14).
  • Canon 2 forbade bishops to intervene in dioceses beyond their own bounds, ordering that the affairs of each civil “diocese” (regional grouping of provinces) be governed by its own synod — an important structuring of the Church’s regional autonomy against interference, aimed especially at Alexandrian intervention in the East.
  • Canon 3 is the historically explosive one (below).
  • Canon 4 annulled the irregular consecration of Maximus “the Cynic,” a rival claimant to the see of Constantinople.

Canon 3 and the Rank of Constantinople

Canon 3 reads: “The Bishop of Constantinople shall have the prerogative of honour after the Bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is New Rome” (Council of Constantinople I, canon 3; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). The canon raised the see of the imperial capital — which had no apostolic foundation and had ranked as a mere suffragan of Heraclea — to second place in the universal order of honor, immediately after Rome. Its stated ground is decisive for Orthodox ecclesiology: Constantinople’s precedence is justified because it is New Rome, that is, on the basis of the city’s civil and political dignity as the seat of the empire, not on any apostolic pedigree (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979, on the political grounding of the canon and its ecclesiological significance). This principle — that the order of the great sees follows, in large part, the order of the empire’s cities — would be pressed further at Chalcedon in canon 28 (see The Definition and the Non-Chalcedonians) and resisted by Rome, which grounded its own primacy on the Petrine apostolate rather than on imperial geography. Canon 3 is thus a foundation text of the tension between two theories of primacy — apostolic versus imperial-conciliar — that runs through the whole history of East and West.

The Later Filioque Controversy

The creed’s article on the Spirit became, centuries later, the site of the gravest dogmatic dispute between East and West. The original and conciliar text confesses that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father” (ek tou Patros ekporeuomenon). In the Latin West, first in Visigothic Spain (from the local councils of Toledo, sixth–seventh centuries) and gradually spreading through the Frankish realm and, much later, at Rome itself (early eleventh century), the word Filioque — “and the Son” — was added, so that the Latin creed confesses the Spirit to proceed “from the Father and the Son” (Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 1972, on the history of the interpolation; Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy, 2010). The Orthodox objection is twofold. First, canonically: an ecumenical council (Ephesus 431, canon 7) had forbidden the composition or imposition of any creed other than that of the Fathers, and the unilateral Western alteration of the ecumenical creed violates the conciliar principle that the creed of the whole Church cannot be changed by one part of it (see Theotokos and the Council on canon 7). Second, dogmatically: the Orthodox Church confesses that the Father alone is the single source (monarchia) within the Trinity, and that to make the Son a co-principle of the Spirit’s procession confuses the persons’ distinct relations of origin (Photius, Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit; see The Photian Council 879–880; St. Photius the Great). The Filioque dispute is not, strictly, the work of the Second Council; but it is a dispute about the Second Council’s creed, and the council’s canon-3 assertion of the two theories of authority and its creedal article on the Spirit are the two hinges on which it turns.

See Also

References

  • Council of Constantinople I (381). The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed; Canons 1–4. In Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
  • Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 27.66. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
  • Council of Chalcedon (451), Session (quoting and confessing the creed of the 150 Fathers). NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
  • Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
  • Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Creeds. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 1972.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.
  • The Rudder (Pedalion). Trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957.
  • Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.