Anniversaries help us to remember and celebrate the gifts we have received: our life, milestones in our vocation and the most important events of history.
This Jubilee Year, we celebrate 1700 years from the First Council of Nicaea, which met from May 20th through August 25th in the year 325.
The Emperor Constantine, fresh from his victory over Licinius, making him the sole Roman Emperor, was keen to bring peace also to the Church, embroiled as it was in controversy. Though local synods had already addressed the teaching of the Egyptian priest, Arius, who taught that the Son had been created by the Father, Constantine enabled bishops to travel to Nicaea from throughout the Empire to address this divisive assertion, making this the first general or ecumenical council.
Constantine, who arrived a month into the proceedings, did address the gathered synod, but it was the bishops who came to a nearly unanimous consensus without his intervention: that the Son was eternally begotten from the very substance of the Father.
Jesus told the apostles, in giving them their great commission, to make disciples of all nations in order to teach them all that he had commanded (Mt 28:19-20). The Church received directly from Jesus the truth of who he is in relation to the Father and our call to enter into his divine life. If Jesus were a creature like us, we could not become partakers of the divine nature by having faith in him.
When we affirm the truth of the Creed that he is the eternal Son of the Father, we enter into his own relation to the Father. Jesus received the fullness of the Godhead (Col 2:9) from the Father and shares his filial relationship with us, calling us to give ourselves completely back to him in love, in imitation of his perfect sacrifice.
When we recite the Council of Nicaea’s Creed each Sunday (with additions from the First Council of Constantinople), we profess the truth that we have received from Jesus himself, handed down through each generation of the Church. Faith is not the expression of our own opinions. In fact, that’s the nature of heresy, which would rely on one’s own ability to understand, as Arius had wrongly done about Jesus.
Faith is supernatural, a gift that comes from the Holy Spirit, who moves us to assent to the truth proposed to us by another, the Church speaking on behalf of Jesus. St. Paul himself, who received a special revelation of Our Lord, still expressed his own teaching in relation to the living tradition of the Church: “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3).
The modern world has its own creed. It teaches us to put the “self” at the center of all things, trusting our own feelings and expectations for personal fulfillment above all else. Because of its individuality, this creed makes us susceptible to ideological manipulation and technological dominance, because we float in a sea of possibilities without a sure direction or rock upon which to stand.
Despite this susceptibility, this “creed of self” tells us to resist surrendering our freedom to any outside force, especially religion, which would put us into a kind of existential slavery. This way of thinking pervades our culture, effectively undermining faith and a serious pursuit of the Christian life.
We can recognize and counter this pernicious creed by reaffirming our faith in God, our Creator and Redeemer, who calls us into a loving communion with him. Faith lifts us out of existential stupor, enabling us to see reality clearly and in a much more complete and compelling manner than our techno-scientific paradigm that thinks only of temporary health and prosperity. We need the Creed to raise us above our own devices so that we can actually find God in the modern maze of over-saturated stimuli.
God has given us the means out of this trap, enabling us to put on the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16) rather than being conformed to this world (Romans 12:2). The Church’s clear teaching resolves confusion and contradictions that follow when we sit down on our own to figure things out, which only leads to a myriad of beliefs and divisions.
Resources
The anniversary of Nicaea calls us to study the Creed we profess every Sunday. There are a number of great resources to learn more about the history behind Nicaea and the meaning of the words we use to express our faith.
First, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission released a document: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour: 1700th anniversary of the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, 325-2025.” In its conclusion, it reflects on the opportunity of this consequential moment:
“The celebration of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea is a pressing invitation to the Church to rediscover the treasure entrusted to her and to draw from it so as to share it with joy, with a new impetus, indeed in a ‘new stage of evangelization’. To proclaim Jesus our Salvation on the basis of the faith expressed at Nicaea, as professed in the Nicene-Constantinople symbol, is first of all to allow ourselves to be amazed by the immensity of Christ, so that all may be amazed, to rekindle the fire of our love for the Lord Jesus, so that all may burn with love for him. Nothing and no one is more beautiful, more life-giving, more necessary than he is.” (§121).
Second, I heartily recommend Jared Ortiz and Daniel Keating’s The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical, and Theological Commentary (Baker Academic, 2024). It offers a compelling meditation on the reality of faith and how the creed transmits it to us, weaving together the testimony of the Bible and early Church Fathers as well as the personal significance of this testimony today. The book engages, of course, one of the most significant and controversial aspects of the Nicene Creed in its use of the word homoousios, “of the same being.”
Noting that this term does not appear in Scripture, and had been misused previously, Ortiz and Keating note that it was chosen “to decisively refute Arius’s teaching that the Son was a creature. This nonscriptural word secured the belief that the Son was not made—like a creature—but was of the same ‘being’ as the Father. In short, the confession that the Son was homoousios with the Father was intended to seal the fundamental affirmation of the Creed, that the Son was God and in no sense a creature.” This is the kernel of Nicaea’s legacy that continues to guide our expression of faith in who Jesus truly is.
Finally, the Institute of Catholic Culture offers an array of free resources to study the faith, including talks, Gospel reflections, and entire courses. I was blessed to lead a course on the creed, which is now a part of their online library, offering 20 sessions that walk through the articles of faith.
Related at CWR:
• The Nicene Creed is “a medicine for our times” (Sept 17, 2024) by Carl E. Olson and Jared Ortiz
• Death and Life in the Nicene Creed (May 19, 2025) by Dr. Jared Ortiz
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A very fine article, in which we read that “anniversaries help us to ‘remember’ and celebrate the gifts we have received [and that at Nicaea] “the bishops…came to a nearly unanimous ‘consensus’…that the Son was eternally begotten from the very substance of the Father.”
Three points:
FIRST, even more than a “consensus”, Nicaea (A.D. 325), itself, was firstly a remembrance, not unlike the remembrance involved in “do this in remembrance of Me.” Of influence was St. Athanasius (then a deacon) who earlier had already written De Incarnatione Verbi Dei (probably in A.D. 317) which, more than a new consensus, is essentially a remembrance and “a statement of the traditional faith of the Catholic Church” (C.S. Lewis, introduction to “St. Athanasius on the Incarnation,” St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, 1944/1982, p. 20).
SECOND, were Nicaea only a consensus about the nature of GOD, then today Nicaea might be reframed today as a only a first step in a more ambulatory and tautological synodality on synodality—by which truths about MAN might now still restated, but then contradicted in separated, consensual, and pastoral practice.
THIRD, the rupture from the duplicitous Fiducia Supplicans comes to mind, but together with steadfast non-consensus from continental Africa (the so-called “special case”) but also Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Peru, the Coptic Church, and parts of Argentina, Spain and France. While Amoris Laetitia (Chapter 8)/Fiducia Supplicans is not a heresy like Arianism, it “enables” heresy. Cardinal Mueller, the former Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [now demoted to one dicastery among many], addressed this question: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/02/does-fiducia-supplicans-affirm-heresy
SUMMARY: Not a consensus alone (nor “backwardism”!), is the remembrance of the whole incarnate “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8).
It took years into my priesthood to realize the miracle of love that was the God man Jesus of Nazareth. That began to occur when Philip asked Show us the Father, and Jesus said to the effect don’t you recognize me? In very human features, movements, facial expressions, actions and words we see God.
Nicea made it certain for all eternity on earth and in heaven that Jesus of Nazareth is God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God. Glorious Paul attested to the divine nature with profound theology, commitment and love. Alexandrians Athanasius and Cyril added to our knowledge of the one person Christ sharing both complete divine and human natures. Importantly, it’s in this completeness of his human nature, including a human free will that God creates the means to reveal himself to us. How so?
We can turn to a less heralded source for this outstanding reality. The Roman centurion who was chief officer and observer of the crucifixion. What the centurion saw and perceived was a man who suffered so greatly, abused and despised with such venom, his own mother watching suffering her own crucifixion – yet he uttered not one harsh word, cry of injustice – rather spoke words of compassion for his tormentors.
For the centurion, an intelligent watchful observer this was more than any mere human would be able to endure and respond as did Christ. When at last he dies and surrendered his spirit to God, the darkness and tumult that followed he was first to acknowledge that Surely, this was the son of God.