THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 069
A Tale of Two Nicene Creeds
5-3. A Tale of Two Nicene Creeds
Never was a more illogical conclusion. If the Lord's full deity is false, they had done wrong in condemning Arianism: if true, it must be vital. The one impossible course was to let every bishop teach or disown it as he pleased. So Athanasius and his friends were on firm ground when they insisted on revising the Caesarean creed to remove its ambiguity. After much discussion, the following form was reached :
We believe in one God, the Father all-Sovereign,
maker of all things, both visible and invisible: And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, an only-begotten —
that is, from the essence of the Father — God from God, Light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made,
being of one essence with the Father; by whom all things were made,
both things in heaven and things on earth;
who for us men and for our salvation came down and was made flesh, was made man, suffered, and rose again the third day, ascended into heaven, cometh to judge quick and dead: And in the Holy Spirit.
But those who say that "there was once when he was not," and "before he was begotten he was not," and "he was made of things that were not," or maintain that the Son of God is of a different essence, or created or subject to moral change or alteration — These doth the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematize.
It will be seen at once that the creed of the council differs a good deal from the "Nicene Creed" now in use, which is a revision of the catechetical creed of Jerusalem, made about 362. That is not the work of the Council of Constantinople in 381, but displaced the genuine Nicene Creed partly by its merits, and partly through the influence of the capital. A comparison of our "Nicene" Creed, first with the Jerusalem Creed, then with that of the Council, shews that it is the Jerusalem Creed with a few clauses from that of the Council, and differs entirely in structure from the latter. It even omits the central clause. However, it will be noted further that (apart from the anathemas) the stress of the defence against Arianism rests on the two clauses from the essence of the Father, and of one essence with the Father; to which we may add that begotten, not made contrasts the words which the Arians industriously confused, and that the clause was made man meets the Arian denial that he took anything human but a body.
Now the essence of a thing is that by which it is — whatever we are supposing it to be. It is not the general ground of all attributes, but the particular ground of the particular supposition we are making. As we are here supposing that the Father is God, the statement will be first that the Son is from that essence by which the Father is God, then that he shares the possession of it with the Father, so that the two together allow no escape from the confession that the Son is as truly divine and as fully divine as the Father. The existence of the Son is not a matter of will or of necessity, but belongs to the divine nature. Two generations later, under Semiarian influences, a similar result was reached by taking essence in the sense of substance, as the common ground of all the attributes, so that if the Son is of one essence with the Father, he shares all the attributes of deity without exception.
The conservative centre struggled in vain. The decisive word (of one essence with) is not found in Scripture. But there was no dispute about the Canon, so that the Arians had their own interpretations for all words that are found in Scripture. Thus to, The Son is eternal, they replied, "So are we, for we which live are alway" (2 Cor. iv. 11, delivered unto death). The bishops were gradually forced back on the plain fact that no imaginable evasion of Scripture can be forbidden without going outside Scripture for a word to define the true sense: and of one essence with was a word which could not be evaded.
No doubt it was a revolution to put such a word into the creed, but now that the issue was fairly raised by Constantine's summons, they could not leave the Lord's full deity an open question without ceasing to be Christians. Given the unity of God and the worship of Christ — and even the Arians agreed to this — there was no escape from the dilemma, of one essence with or creature-worship. So they yielded to necessity. Eusebius of Caesarea signed with undisguised reluctance, though not against his conscience. To his mind the creed was not untrue, though it was revolutionary and dangerous, and he was only convinced against his will that it was needed. The emperor's influence counted heavily in the last stage of the debates — for Constantine was too shrewd to use it before the question was nearly settled — and in the end only two bishops refused to sign the creed. These he promptly sent into exile along with Arius himself; and Eusebius of Nicomedia shared their fate a few months later. If he had signed the creed at last, he had opposed it too long and been too intimate with its enemies.
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