6-17. A Tale of Two Nicene Creeds
Very similar were the proceedings which established the "autocephalous" character of the island church of Cyprus. The Cypriots too began by renouncing the communion of the Arian bishops of Antioch: they too espoused the cause of Cyril against John at the Council of Ephesus, and were rewarded accordingly: and just as the Empress Helena's discovery of the Cross served the claims of the church of Jerusalem, so the discovery of the coffin containing the body of Barnabas the Cypriot, with the autograph of St Matthew's Gospel, was held to demonstrate finally the right of the Cypriots to ecclesiastical isolation.
With this evidence before us, it is hard to deny that the history of the generations which first experienced the "fatal gift" of Constantine supplied only too good ground for St Gregory's complaint of contentions and strivings for dominion among Christian bishops But though these contentions disturbed the work of councils, councils did not create them and Gregory was hardly fair if he laid on councils the responsibility for them : rather, in this direction lay the remedy and counterpoise, seeing that councils represented the parliamentary and democratic side of church government — stood, that is to say, in idea at least, for free and open discussion as against the untrammelled decrees of authority, and for the equality of churches as against the preponderance of metropolitan or patriarch or pope. No more grandiloquent utterance of these principles could indeed possibly be found than the words with which the Council of Ephesus concludes its examination of the Cypriot claim. "Let none of the most reverend bishops annex a province which has not been from the first under the jurisdiction of himself and his predecessors; and so the canons of the fathers shall not be overstepped, nor pride of worldly power creep in under the guise of priesthood, nor we lose little by little, without knowing it, that freedom which our Lord Jesus Christ, the Liberator of all men, purchased for us with his blood."
And councils really were, at any rate in two main departments of their activity, the organ through which the mind of the federated Christian communities did arrive at some definite and lasting self-expression, namely in the Creed and in the Canon Law. In both directions, it is true, East and West moved only a certain part of the way together: in both too, while the impulse was given by councils, the influence of the great churches added something to the completeness of the work: in the case of the Creed, what became a universal usage in the liturgy was at first only a usage of Antioch and Constantinople; in the case of the Canon Law the collective decisions of councils were supplemented by the individual judgments of popes or doctors before the corpus of either Western or Eastern Law was complete. Nevertheless it remains the fact that it was from and out of the conciliar movement that Church Law, as such, came into being at all; that the canons of certain fourth and fifth century councils are the only part of this Law common to both East and West; and that again the only common formulation of Christian doctrine was also the joint work of councils, which for that very reason enjoy the name of oecumenical, Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon.
1. The origins of the Christian Creed or Symbolum are lost in the obscurity which hangs over the sub-apostolic age. We know it first in a completed form as used in the Roman church about the middle of the second century. Prom Rome it spread through the West, taking the shape ultimately of our Apostles’ Creed; and one view of its history would make this Roman Creed the source of all Eastern Creeds as well.
But a summary statement of Christian belief for the use of catechumens must have been wanted from very early times, and it is possible that what St Paul "handed over at the first" to his Corinthian converts (1 Cor. xv 3) was nothing else than a primitive form of the Creed. Anyhow, from whatever source it was derived, a common nucleus was expanded or modified to meet the needs of different churches and different generations, so that a family likeness existed between all early Creeds, but identity between none of them.
At the Council of Nicaea the Creed was for the first time given an official and authoritative form, and was at the same time put to a novel use. The baptismal Creed of the church of Palestinian Caesarea, itself a much more technically theological document than any corresponding Creed in the West, was propounded by Eusebius: out of this Creed the Council constructed its own confession of faith, no longer for baptismal and general use, but as the "form of sound words" by acceptance of which the bishops of the churches throughout the world were to exclude the Arian conception of Christianity. The example of the Creed of Nicaea on the orthodox side was followed in the next generation by numerous conciliar formularies expressing one shade or another of opposing belief. When the Nicene cause finally triumphed, the Nicene Creed was received all the world over as the expression of the Catholic Faith; and the Council of Ephesus condemned as derogatory to it the composition of any new formula, however orthodox.
The Council of Ephesus represented the Alexandrine position: at Constantinople, however, a new Creed was already in use, which was like enough to the Nicene Creed to pass as an expanded form of it, and was destined in the end to annex both its name and fame. This Creed of Constantinople had been developed out of some older Creed, probably that of Jerusalem, by the help of the test phrases of the Nicaenum, and of further phrases aimed at the opposite heresies of the semi-Sabellian Marcellus and the semi-Arian Macedonius. It may be supposed that this Creed had been laid before the fathers of the council of 381: for at the Council of Chalcedon, where of course Constantinopolitan influences were dominant, it was recited as the Creed of the 150 fathers of Constantinople, on practically equal terms with the Creed of the 318 fathers of Nicaea.
In another fifty years the two Creeds were beginning to be hopelessly confused, at least in the sphere of Constantinople, and the Constantinopolitan was introduced into the liturgy as the actual Creed of Nicaea. In the course of the sixth century it became not only the liturgical but also the baptismal Creed throughout the East. In the West it never superseded the older baptismal Creeds — except apparently for a time under Byzantine influence in Rome — but as a liturgical Creed it was adopted in Spain on the occasion of the conversion of King Reccared and his Arian Visigoths in 589, and spread thence in the course of time through Gaul and Germany to Rome.
To obtain a deluxe leatherbound edition of THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE, subscribe to Castalia History.