Council of Constantinople

History

Causes

The Council of Nicaea (325) had declared the Son “of one substance” (homoousios) with the Father, but it did not settle the question. For most of the next fifty years the emperors favored bishops who rejected or avoided that word. Under Constantius II and then Valens, the “Homoian” position, which said only that the Son is “like” the Father, was the official faith of the Eastern empire, and Athanasius of Alexandria spent years in exile for refusing it. Behind the Homoians stood more radical heirs of Arius, the Eunomians, who taught that the Son is unlike the Father in essence.

Two new problems grew inside this fight. The first was the Holy Spirit. Once the Son’s divinity was argued, the obvious next question was the Spirit’s, and a party later called the Pneumatomachi (“Spirit-fighters”) or Macedonians accepted the Son as God but treated the Spirit as a created, ministering power. Athanasius answered them in his Letters to Serapion (c. 359–361), and Basil of Caesarea in On the Holy Spirit (c. 375, New Advent), which defended giving the Spirit the same glory as the Father and the Son. The second was vocabulary. Greek and Latin speakers were talking past each other over “substance” and “person.” The Council of Alexandria in 362 (Tome to the Antiochenes) began to reconcile them, and the Cappadocian writers settled on the formula that became standard: one essence (ousia), three persons (hypostaseis).

The politics changed suddenly. Valens died at the battle of Adrianople in 378, and Gratian made Theodosius emperor in the East. Theodosius was a Nicene from the West. In February 380 he issued the Edict of Thessalonica, ordering all his subjects to hold the religion “which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter” and which Damasus of Rome and Peter of Alexandria professed (Theodosian Code 16.1.2, Fordham Sourcebook). When he entered Constantinople that November he expelled the Homoian bishop Demophilus and installed Gregory of Nazianzus, who had been preaching to a small Nicene congregation in the city. Gregory’s Theological Orations, given there in 380, include the fifth, on the Spirit (Oration 31), which says plainly that the Spirit is God and consubstantial with the Father. Theodosius then summoned a council to confirm the new settlement.

Proceedings

About 150 bishops met from May to July 381, all from the East. No bishop of Rome attended or sent legates. Meletius of Antioch presided at first and died during the sessions. Gregory of Nazianzus took over, and the council confirmed him as bishop of Constantinople. The church historians give the main events: Socrates (Church History 5.8), Sozomen (Ecclesiastical History 7.7–9) and Theodoret (Ecclesiastical History 5.8).

Socrates reports that 36 Macedonian bishops came and were urged to accept the Nicene faith; they refused and left. The council then broke apart over Antioch. Gregory wanted Paulinus, the rival Nicene bishop backed by Rome and Alexandria, recognized as Meletius’s successor so the local schism could end. The Meletian majority refused and chose Flavian instead, which prolonged the split. When the Egyptian bishops arrived late, they challenged Gregory’s appointment on the grounds that the canons of Nicaea forbade moving a bishop from one see to another. Gregory resigned and gave a farewell sermon (Oration 42). The council replaced him with Nectarius, a senator and former official who had not yet been baptized.

What the council produced, according to its letter to Theodosius, was a confirmation of the Nicene faith, a set of condemnations, and canons (text, New Advent). The first canon anathematized the Eunomians, the Arians, the Pneumatomachi, the Sabellians, the followers of Marcellus and Photinus, and the Apollinarians. Others limited bishops to their own regions, declared the consecration of Maximus the Cynic (a rival claimant to Constantinople) invalid, and gave Constantinople a rank of honor. The emperor ratified the decisions in a law of 30 July 381.

Aftermath and influence

A synod in Constantinople the following year wrote to the Western bishops explaining the faith of 381: “one Godhead, Power and Substance of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” in “three perfect persons,” and a Christ who was not “soulless nor mindless” (Theodoret 5.9). That last phrase was aimed at Apollinaris, who had taught that the divine Word took the place of a human mind in Jesus. The question it raised, how God and man are joined in Christ, became the next great dispute, at the Council of Ephesus (431) and the Council of Chalcedon (451).

The council’s lasting fame comes from its creed. At Chalcedon the “creed of the 150 fathers” was read out alongside the Nicene creed of 325, and from then on it spread as the creed of the whole church. It is the creed most Christians recite today under the name “Nicene,” in the Eastern liturgy and the Western Mass alike, and the main common text of Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and many Reformed churches. With Nicaea, 381 closed the main Trinitarian argument of the Early Church. Arianism survived for another two centuries mostly among the Gothic peoples, not inside the empire’s churches.

Key ideas and contributors

The Spirit is Lord and worshipped with the Father and the Son. The creed’s third article is the council’s distinctive contribution. It calls the Holy Spirit “the Lord and 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” (text). The phrase “proceeds from the Father” echoes John 15:26. The creed never calls the Spirit “God” or homoousios outright. Most historians read this as deliberate restraint, following Basil’s method of confessing the Spirit’s divinity through equal worship, in the hope of winning over the Macedonians. Gregory of Nazianzus, who had used the bolder language in public, wanted more (Oration 31).

One essence, three persons. The council did not write a technical definition, but its condemnations and the 382 letter assume the Cappadocian formula. The three are distinct persons and one God, neither merged into one (the error charged to Sabellius and Marcellus) nor divided into ranks of greater and lesser being (the Arian and Eunomian error). This became the shape of Trinitarian teaching in East and West, and the background of Classical Theism.

The Nicene faith confirmed. The first canon says the faith of the 318 fathers of Nicaea “shall not be set aside.” The creed keeps Nicaea’s core claim that the Son is “of one substance with the Father” and adds that his kingdom “shall have no end,” a line usually read as aimed at Marcellus of Ancyra.

Christ fully human. By condemning Apollinaris, the council insisted that the Word took a complete human nature, mind included. Gregory of Nazianzus put the principle in a famous letter: what was not assumed was not healed (Letter 101, to Cledonius, c. 382; not linked here).

Constantinople as New Rome. Canon 3 says that “the Bishop of Constantinople, however, shall have the prerogative of honour after the Bishop of Rome; because Constantinople is New Rome” (NPNF2-14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils, CCEL). It ranked the imperial capital above Alexandria and Antioch on political grounds, not apostolic ones.

The main contributors were the Cappadocians. Basil (died 379, before the council) shaped its theology of the Spirit. Gregory of Nazianzus presided for a time and gave the theology its most quoted form. Gregory of Nyssa attended and wrote against Eunomius. Theodosius gave the settlement the force of law.

Key controversies

Did the council write the creed? No record of the creed survives from 381 itself. The council’s letter mentions only a confirmation of Nicaea, and the creed is first quoted in the acts of Chalcedon seventy years later. A similar creed appears in Epiphanius’s Ancoratus (374), though many scholars now think that text was later conformed to the conciliar creed. J. N. D. Kelly, in Early Christian Creeds (1950; 3rd ed. 1972, secondary), argued that the council took an existing baptismal creed and approved it, not that it drafted one from scratch; Adolf Martin Ritter’s study of the council (1965, secondary) reached a similar view. The question matters because the creed’s authority rests on its link to 381 (summary: Wikipedia, secondary).

Was it ecumenical? No Western bishop was present, and Rome took little notice of the council for decades. It became “ecumenical” by reception: Chalcedon honored it in 451, and Rome eventually counted it among the four great councils, while still refusing its third canon. The case is often used in discussions of Conciliarity to argue that a council’s authority comes from the church’s later acceptance, not from who attended.

The rank of Constantinople. Canon 3 began a long quarrel over church order. Alexandria resented being demoted, and Rome objected to a ranking based on a city’s political status. When Chalcedon’s canon 28 expanded Constantinople’s privileges in 451, Pope Leo I rejected it and dismissed the earlier canon as “the written assent of certain bishops given, as you allege, 60 years ago, and never brought to the knowledge of the Apostolic See” (Leo, Letter 106). The dispute fed later arguments over Papal Primacy and the Great Schism.

The Filioque. The creed says the Spirit proceeds “from the Father.” Western churches, beginning in Spain at the Third Council of Toledo (589) and influenced by Augustine’s teaching that the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son, added “and the Son” (filioque). The phrase spread through the Frankish church and entered the creed sung at Rome in 1014. Eastern churches objected on two counts: the Council of Ephesus had forbidden composing a different creed, and the addition was seen as distorting the Father’s role as sole source within the Trinity. This is the dispute over the Filioque and Procession from the Father Alone, still unresolved between Orthodox and Catholics. A 1995 clarification from the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, The Greek and Latin Traditions regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit, conceded that the original Greek text has a sense the Latin does not (secondary, not linked here).

The Spirit’s divinity in the creed’s wording. The Macedonians rejected the council outright, and they disappeared as a party within a generation. A quieter debate concerns the creed’s caution. Some read the absence of “God” and homoousios for the Spirit as a weakness, and Gregory himself thought the council too timid. Others see it as a model for confessing doctrine in biblical and liturgical language (Matthew 28:19) without forcing a single technical term.

Imperial power. The council was summoned by an emperor who had already decided the outcome by law and who enforced it on dissenters. Critics, from the defeated Homoians to modern historians and Anabaptist and free-church writers, point to 381 as a moment when Nicene orthodoxy became state religion. Defenders answer that the council’s theology was worked out over decades by bishops, often against emperors, and that Theodosius ratified a consensus he did not create.

What remains unresolved

The theology of 381 is accepted almost everywhere. Its open questions are about authority. Christians disagree over whether a council without the bishop of Rome could speak for the whole church, whether the West had the right to change the creed it produced, and how far the emperor shaped what bishops decided. Each of those questions still separates churches that recite the same creed every week.