The Living Tradition An Orthodox Archive of the Church Fathers and Early Church

Study path

The seven ecumenical councils

What each council faced, what it confessed, how it was received, and what it cost.

  • Dogmatic definitionDefined by an ecumenical council or otherwise confessed by the Church as binding doctrine. Not every sentence a council wrote is a definition: its acts, letters and disciplinary canons are different things.
  • Historical consensusBroadly agreed among historians working from the surviving evidence. Consensus can shift when the evidence or the method changes.

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Seven councils are received by the Orthodox Church as ecumenical. This path takes them in order, with a lesson first on what makes a council ecumenical at all — which is not the emperor, the numbers, or the council's own claim about itself.

Each lesson is short and sends you to the full council guide, where the council's own documents are archived: creeds, definitions, letters, acts and canons, kept as separate things because they are separate things.

Lessons

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  1. What makes a council ecumenical Before the seven: how the Church decides that a council speaks for it. 7 min — Not yet read
  2. Council 1: Nicaea, 325 The Son of one substance with the Father, the date of Pascha, and twenty canons. 5 min — Not yet read
  3. Council 2: Constantinople, 381 The Holy Spirit confessed, and the Creed we still recite. 5 min — Not yet read
  4. Council 3: Ephesus, 431 The Theotokos confessed, Nestorius condemned, and the first lasting division. 5 min — Not yet read
  5. Council 4: Chalcedon, 451 Two natures in one person, and a division that has lasted fifteen centuries. 6 min — Not yet read
  6. Council 5: Constantinople, 553 Chalcedon read in Cyrilline terms, the Three Chapters, and a policy that failed. 5 min — Not yet read
  7. Council 6: Constantinople, 680-681 Two natural wills in Christ, and a Confessor vindicated after his death. 5 min — Not yet read
  8. Council 7: Nicaea, 787 Holy images restored, and the distinction that makes the question tractable. 5 min — Not yet read

The councils that met after 787 — the council of 879 to 880, and the Palamite councils of 1341 to 1351 — are received with authority in Orthodoxy without a universally agreed numbering. This site names them rather than numbering them.

Sources for this page

  1. Tier C The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church Henry R. Percival (ed.); Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (series eds.) The Seven Ecumenical Councils annotated edition of conciliar texts The principal primary source behind this path; individual lessons cite more specifically. Source record

Tiers are explained in the methodology. No page on this site has been reviewed or approved by any bishop, priest, synod or seminary.