The First Council of Constantinople

Date

381

Location

Constantinople

Convoked by

The Emperor Theodosius I

Attendance

Traditionally the 150 Fathers

Overview

Fifty-six years after Nicaea, the Church was still arguing. The Nicene confession of the Son had largely prevailed in the East, but a new question had opened: if the Son is God, what of the Holy Spirit? Some who accepted Nicaea on the Son stopped short of saying the same of the Spirit.

The council that met at Constantinople in 381 answered by confessing the Holy Spirit as 'the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified'. The formula is careful: it does not simply repeat homoousios, but it assigns to the Spirit the worship due to God alone, which settles the question in the way that mattered most.

The Creed that emerged from this council — the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed — is the one recited in Orthodox worship. When people speak of 'the Nicene Creed' today they almost always mean this text, not the shorter confession of 325.

The controversy

The party the council opposed is usually called the Pneumatomachi, the Spirit-fighters, or the Macedonians after Macedonius of Constantinople. Their position was that the Spirit is a ministering creature, ranked below Father and Son. Some of them accepted the Nicene teaching on the Son and drew the line at the Spirit.

Basil of Caesarea's treatise On the Holy Spirit, written in the 370s and archived here, is the fullest surviving argument on the other side. Basil's method is worth noticing: he argues largely from how the Church prays and baptises rather than from speculation, on the principle that the Church's worship shows what the Church believes.

The council also had to settle the disputed see of Constantinople itself, where Gregory of Nazianzus had been serving. He presided for a time and then resigned rather than prolong the conflict — an episode his own poetry treats with considerable bitterness.

The positions in play

The Nicene party

By 381 the dominant group in the East, shaped by the Cappadocians: one ousia in three hypostasis, with the Spirit worshipped together with Father and Son.

The Pneumatomachi or Macedonians

Accepted much of the Nicene teaching on the Son but denied that the Spirit is God. A group of them attended the council and withdrew.

Continuing Arian and Homoian groups

Still present, especially among the Goths, and still enjoying support in some quarters; the council's first canon anathematises several of them by name.

What the council issued

The council's Creed expands the confession of 325, above all in its third article. It also drops the closing anathemas of 325 and adds clauses on the Church, baptism, the resurrection and the age to come.

The precise relationship between the text of 381 and the text of 325 is a genuinely disputed historical question. The acts of this council do not survive in full, and the Creed is first quoted as this council's at Chalcedon in 451. Some historians hold that the council adopted an existing baptismal creed rather than composing one; others that it revised the Nicene text directly. The Church's reception of the Creed does not depend on which reconstruction is right, but a page that pretended the question was settled would be misleading.

Canons

The council issued 7 canons in this edition. Percival prints seven canons. The first four are generally accepted as belonging to the council of 381; canons V, VI and VII are widely held to come from later Constantinopolitan synods and to have been attached to this collection afterwards, and his edition carries an express warning to the reader before canon VII.

Read the canons

Who was there

Meletius of Antioch presided at the opening and died during the council. Gregory of Nazianzus succeeded him in the chair and then resigned the see of Constantinople. Nectarius, an unbaptised civil official at the time of his election, was chosen to replace him — an irregularity the council evidently thought worth accepting for the sake of peace.

Gregory of Nyssa was present, and Cyril of Jerusalem, whose earlier association with parties opposed to Nicaea had been held against him. Basil of Caesarea, whose work had done most to make the council's confession possible, had died in 379 and did not live to see it.

Reception

This council is the clearest illustration in the whole tradition that reception, not convocation, makes a council ecumenical. It was summoned as an Eastern council, it had no Western participation, and it was not called ecumenical at the time. Rome did not recognise it as ecumenical for a considerable period, and objected to its third canon.

What established it was that the Church came to confess its Creed. By the Council of Chalcedon in 451 the Creed of 381 is read out as the faith of the Fathers alongside the Creed of Nicaea, and from that point its authority is not seriously in question in either East or West.

Its third canon, giving the bishop of Constantinople precedence after the bishop of Rome because Constantinople is New Rome, was not accepted at Rome. The reasoning is worth noticing: the canon grounds precedence in the city's civil standing, not in apostolic foundation.

Reception outside the Eastern Orthodox Church

Oriental Orthodox churches

Receive this council as the second ecumenical council and confess its Creed.

Assyrian Church of the East

Receives this council and its Creed.

Roman Catholic Church

Receives it as the second ecumenical council, while reciting the Creed with the filioque added and not accepting canon III as this council framed it.

Consequences

The Church acquired the confession it still uses at baptism and at the Liturgy, and the Trinitarian question was substantially settled: whatever else was disputed afterwards, the full divinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit was no longer the point at issue.

Canon III began a long realignment of the Church's honorific order, and set up the disagreement that would resurface at Chalcedon in canon XXVIII and, in a different form, in the estrangement between East and West.

Liturgical commemoration

The Fathers of the first six ecumenical councils are commemorated together in July, and the Creed of this council is confessed at every Divine Liturgy — which is a more constant commemoration than any feast.