Professor John M. Rist. The brilliant Catholic British historian of theology contacted me about my letter on the “filioque” question and proposed that I read his essay on the role of St. Athanasius at the 1st Ecumenical Council of Nicaea… I decided to send his paper out to you. This is the second of three parts…
Letter #89, 2025, Thursday, November 27: Rist, #2
November 24, 2025
Dear Robert,
Since you are apparently perpetuating in this piece [he is referring to my Letter #77, 2025, Monday, November 24: The Creed] some traditional mistakes about Nicaea, especially about what was almost the non-role of Athanasius, I attach a relevant paper on the subject I was asked to write for a Romanian Orthodox journal.
Best, JOHN RIST
***
After receiving this letter from Prof. John Rist, I decided to send out the “relevant paper” by Prof. Rist, in pieces.
I decided this especially because Peter Anderson, another thoughtful Catholic writer now in his 80s, thinks Pope Leo may move on the “filioque” (“and from the Son”) question, in order to reconstitute the original, united Catholic Church, which united Church was shattered in 1054, in the “Great Schism,” which saw the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople mutually excommunicate each other, partly due to disagreements about the appropriateness of the “filioque” addition to the Creed.
So, in the interest of a return to full reunion between Catholics and Orthodox, I will now serialize this long essay by Prof. Rist, on the question of what actually happened at the 1st Ecumenical Council in Nicaea in 325 A.D., under the rule of the Emperor Constantine.
I hope this may be a contribution to the final goal: to overcome and reverse the “Great Schism,” and reunite the Christian world, divided for nearly 1,000 years.
Here, and in other letters over the coming days, is the 2nd part of Rist’s compelling, complicated, illuminating discussion of Athanasius and Arius at the 1st Ecumenical Council.
—RM
Part #2
(Continued from Rist, #1, sent yesterday)
POLITICS AND THEOLOGY AT NICAEA.
CONSTANTINE, OSSIUS AND EUSEBIUS
OF NICOMEDIA
John M. Rist
Emeritus Professor of Classics and Philosophy
at the University of Toronto
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What exactly did Constantine want from his new Council at Nicaea? How far did he rely on Ossius?
How far did the majority of the assembled bishops themselves agree on what precisely should be proclaimed as a Creed which would secure that uniformity of belief which they all desired?
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It was certainly appropriate for a new Christian Empire, soon to have a new and idol-free capital to be named Constantinople, that a new Creed be developed, in purpose different from the many creeds which preceded it: indeed which inter alia might diminish the authority of those more local creeds. The assembled bishops certainly shared Constantine’s view that Christianity was to be Empire-wide and uniform, but what did uniformity mean, and how eventually was it to be enforced, not least on ‘deviant’ bishops?
We need to keep in mind that just as the ‘Arians’ were divided into more extreme and more moderate factions, so supporters of ‘orthodoxy’ did not all agree on what orthodoxy should be, some of the anti-Arians (as Marcellus of Ancyra and probably Eustathius of Antioch) seeming more ‘Sabellian’ than others. Again it should be emphasised that the Council of Nicaea was not called to defend ‘orthodoxy’ but to determine what orthodoxy is; orthodoxy was in the making, and the different factions – including those who supported Alexander and whose views would eventually be hailed as orthodox – were aware that they had yet to be securely recognised as such.
The Creed of Nicaea – with those synodal documents which followed in quick succession throughout the fourth century – was designed to ensure the orthodoxy of bishops, not of those (as were most earlier creeds) seeking to enter the Church by going down into the waters of baptism. It was intended to ensure that bishops taught the one faith without deviation: one Empire, one faith. One leader? That would depend on the still-uncertain matter of the relationship between the Emperor – ‘bishop’ of those outside, i.e. pagans, as Constantine was to describe himself (Eusebius, Vita Constantini 4, 24) – and the bishops of the already baptised. The number of Christians at this time is much disputed, but all agree that, as yet and for many years to come, the baptised were far fewer than the pagans.
At the time of the Council of Nicaea and for long after – indeed in the Eastern Empire to some degree throughout the Byzantine period – the Emperor’s will prevailed, at least in the sense that all disputing parties strove for his approval and feared to proceed against it.
As we shall see, however, one unintended consequence of the struggle over Nicaea and its Creed was the
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emergence of the unprecedented claim of ‘pope’ Julius that the see of Rome had the right to oversee Eastern decisions: which claim can remind us that when the Empire collapsed in the West, the Roman bishop would be left as the undisputed theological authority in the Latin-speaking world.
***
Constantine originally intended his ecumenical Council to be held at Ancyra. The strongly anti-Arian bishop Marcellus may have suggested that his see would be an ideal location(18), and that he would play a leading role; however, an earthquake, plus a disingenuous claim that to get there would be easier for Western bishops – and perhaps a desire to seem impartial – induced Constantine to relocate to Nicaea, where the Council opened in 325, possibly on June 19(19), with some 300 bishops present. The local bishop was Theognis, whose views differed sharply from those of Alexander of Alexandria, the hardline superior and critic of Arius whose insubordination was supposed to be resolved at the Council. However, instead of Theognis – and disregarding the norm that the metropolitan of the area (in this case, Eusebius of Nicomedia) would preside – Constantine decided on Ossius, one of the few Western bishops present.
Since ‘Arianism’ was primarily at this stage a matter of dispute among Eastern bishops, it is perhaps surprising that Constantine
18 So A. H. B. LOGAN, ‘Marcellus of Ancyra and the Councils of A.D.325:Antioch, Ancyra and Nicaea’, in The Journal of Theological Studies 43 (1992), pp. 428- 446, at 438. H.A. DRAKE, ‘The Elephant in the Room: Constantine at the Council’, in Young Richard KIM (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021, 111-132, at 122 plausibly suggests that the move to Nicaea was suggested by Eusebius of Nicomedia.
19 Cf. J.N.D. KELLY, Early Christian Creeds, Longmans, London, 1952, p. 211. BARNES, Constantine, p. 234, adds a more sinister motivation for the change of venue: Constantine had just had Licinius strangled (probably together with his nine-year-old son) despite an earlier agreement to spare his life. In his letter to the bishops informing them that the Council would be held at Nicaea, Constantine had noted that he himself wanted to attend; that might be tendentious. Perhaps Constantine decided, after all, to attend the Council, as Barnes suggests, in part to distract attention from the recent killings. We shall see that on a later occasion, the Emperor’s ruthlessness – in this case with his own family – led to a more serious problem for the success of the Council of Nicaea and its Creed, or at least for its sequels.
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chose a Westerner to chair the proceedings: still, he was a Westerner himself and it seems Ossius had already shown himself a loyal and trusted minister – perhaps even a ‘father in faith’. In light of much subsequent and anachronistic comment on the Council, however, we may wonder why Constantine did not press into service the bishop of Rome who pleaded old age (Eusebius, Vita Constantini 3, 71), as he had earlier in dealing with the Donatists. In the event ‘pope’ Sylvester sent two legates in his place who were treated with all due respect but apparently took little active part in the proceedings.
It is an historical irony that the Roman bishop who was later supposed to have received the ‘Donation of Constantine’ was not pressed into running the first Ecumenical Council. Already in the East, the Roman bishop was recognised as primus inter pares – if to some undefined extent – though it is probable that Sylvester had little knowledge of the theology of Arius, unlike Ossius, who Constantine knew would serve him well, probably judging Sylvester lacking politically as well as theologically(20).
Thus, it was Ossius who took the chair, nor in doing so did he even represent the bishop of Rome; the legates sent by Sylvester were intended to fulfil that role. Ossius had already been chairman of a Council at Antioch earlier in the same year – seemingly under the watchful eye of the Emperor(21) – and acting as virtually a government minister had personally interviewed Narcissus of Neronias as a suspected heretic who was then suspended, while similar treatment was meted out to Eusebius of Caesarea and
20 By 339, if not earlier, the Roman bishop (now Julius) was more aware of the dispute; Athanasius (in Rome by mid-339) would have told him, and he subsequently took up the cause not only of Athanasius himself but also of the anti-Arian (and probably ‘heterodox’) Marcellus.
21 LOGAN, ‘Marcellus’, 439, plausibly suggests that Constantine’s ‘Good Friday Sermon’, the Oration to the Assembly of the Saints, was delivered at the Council of Antioch’s closing session, building on the arguments for the date of the Oration proposed by T.D. BARNES, ‘The Emperor Constantine’s Good Friday Sermon’, in The Journal of Theological Studies 27 (1976), pp. 414-423 and further developed by Robin LANE FOX, Pagans and Christians, HarperCollins, Harmondsworth, 1988, p. 638. Ossius’ theology before he came down in favour of Alexander has been much (but vainly) discussed; nor can it be determined by his activities after the Council had concluded; nor can he as yet be viewed as a representative of a ‘Western’ theological consensus.
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Theodotus of Laodicea. Further, while in Antioch, Ossius had orchestrated the appointment of the fiercely anti-Arian Eustathius to that important and factious see(22) and secured the passage of a strongly anti-Arian Creed. He later, at Nicomedia, according to Philostorgius (Historia ecclesiastica 1,7(23), had made a deal with Alexander to risk the word homoousios – first proposed, some think, by Marcellus(24), and soon to be favoured by the Emperor as well as Ossius.
Ossius was put in charge of the agenda at Nicaea, for the Council would follow the procedures of the Roman Senate whereby all debate had to be steered through the Chair(25): no motion from the floor could be made – meaning that a combination of the Emperor with Ossius determined what would be debated and when.
Many years later, Athanasius would be in more senses than one ‘on target’ in observing that Ossius ‘put forth the faith at Nicaea’(26), and from now on, I shall often refer to the hardline opponents of Arius as ‘the party of Ossius’, however varied in detail might be the views of its members.
The Creed which Ossius had orchestrated at Antioch anathematised those who held that the Son is a ‘creature’ or that he has come into being, or was ‘made’ and not truly begotten, or who believed that there was a ‘time’ (in some sense) when he was not. But though this is patently anti-Arian, it makes no mention of
22 OPITZ, Urkunde 18, 3; cf. LOGAN, ‘Marcellus’, p. 434.
23 HANSON, The Search, p. 139, rejects Philostorgius’ claim out of hand, though offering no arguments. M.J. EDWARDS, ‘The Creed’, in Y.R. KIM (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea, p. 148, thinks otherwise.
24 So LOGAN, ‘Marcellus’, pp. 436, 444, who may be right that among the opponents of ‘the Arians’ Marcellus (and Eustathius) should be separated from Alexander and others, though from the point of view of the politics at Nicaea it- self, the difference is unimportant. If it was Marcellus who first wanted to emphasise a single ousia, it was Ossius who accepted it and shepherded it through the Council. Logan is probably also right that it was due to the influence of Marcellus that the ‘Eastern’ phrase ‘begotten of the Father before all ages’, liable to Arian abuse, was dropped in the eventual Nicene Creed (though restored at Constantinople in 381).
25 Cf.R.MACMULLEN, Voting about God in Early Church Councils, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2006, p. 18.
26 ATHANASIUS, Historia Arianorum. Further evidence can be found at KELLY, Creeds, p. 251.
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such characteristically Nicene phrases as ‘of the substance (ousia) of the Father’, let alone homoousios. It more resembles the teachings of bishop Alexander of Alexandria as we find them in an earlier letter to Alexander of Byzantium(27).
However, such similarity indicates Ossius’ theological preferences – and those of the not entirely united party he would organise when chairing the Council at Nicaea. At the same time, he was the Emperor’s man, and although the view of homoousios in the Creed as almost exclusively Constantine’s work is certainly much exaggerated, the Emperor’s views mattered, not least in view of ecclesial unity (and therefore theology), whether or not his understanding of this non-Scriptural term was identical to that of Ossius.
That said, why did Ossius allow the opening debate of the Council – according to a fragment of Eustathius, the newly elected bishop of Antioch and a staunch opponent of Arius(28) – to revolve round the presentation of a very obviously ‘Arian’ text, apparently devised at some earlier time by Eusebius of Nicomedia who, in a letter to Paulinus of Tyre(29), had already repudiated the claim that the Son was derived from the substance (ousia) of the Father?
In this, Eusebius echoed Arius himself who in his Thalia (a poem composed in the vulgar Sotadean metre to be sung by Alexandrian dockers and mill-workers(30), but with more powerful supporters also in mind) urged that the Son is not equal to the Father nor for that matter of the same substance (homoousios)(31).
We note that Arius denied both alternatives; perhaps he understood them as alternative positions, not merely two ways of saying the same thing.
27 THEODORET, Historia ecclesiastica 1, 4; OPITZ, Urkunde 3, 14. Some prefer to identify the recipient as Alexander of Thessalonica.
28 THEODORET, Historia ecclesiastica 1, 8, 1-5; KELLY, Creeds, p. 212.
29 OPITZ, Urkunde 8; cf. G.C. STEAD, ‘Eusebius and the Council of Nicaea’, in The Journal of Theological Studies 24 (1973), pp. 85-100. Paulinus himself, of course, held strongly Arian views, as that Christ is a created thing, a second God.
30 Opponents of Arius (starting with ATHANASIUS, Oratio contra Arianos 1, 2; cf. PHILOSTORGIUS, Historia ecclesiastica 2, 2) have often censured him for employing such a ‘licentious’ metre, but perhaps he thought that the dockers could be induced to use the catchy rhythms with which they were familiar to more high-minded intent. For the metre of the Thalia, see M.L. WEST, ‘The Metre of Arius’ Thalia’, in The Journal of Theological Studies 33 (1982), pp. 98-105.
31 ATHANASIUS, De synodis 15.
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The logic of Ossius’ allowing the Eusebian document to be first on the agenda is clear, being in line with the fact that he had no way of preventing Eusebius, bishop of the imperial see and the local metropolitan, from welcoming Constantine to the episcopal assembly(32).
And he certainly knew that the Emperor had inherited something of Licinius’ high opinion of him. His motive in putting the Eusebian document to the Council was presumably tactical, driven by the suspicion that the Emperor, encouraged by Eusebius, would have wanted something at least acceptable to ‘Arians’ to be included in the final documents of the Council, since his wish was to include the greatest possible number of theologians and bishops within a single ecumenical ‘big tent’. Ossius will have known that Eusebius’ document would not be well received.
Nor in view of Constantine’s wishes, and after the castigation of the presumably Nicomedian text, is it surprising that a more moderately ‘Arian’ schema, this time authored by Eusebius of Caesarea, would soon have to make its appearance, unwelcome though it was (if less so) to Ossius and presumably also to Alexander.
At a fairly early stage in the proceedings, as Eusebius himself later relates in defense of his behaviour at the Council(33), he read out a creed which he said represented what he had always taught, noting – not implausibly – that it drew strong and directly expressed support from the Emperor. His immediate intent – though surely not his only motive – was to remove such suspicion attached to his name as had resulted in his temporary excommunication (along with Theodotus of Laodicea and Narcissus of Neronias) at the earlier Council of Antioch(34).
The creed Eusebius produced was probably an adapted or doctored version of the local baptismal creed from his own see of Caesarea. In it, ever careful not to overplay his hand, he avoided any use of ‘hypostasis’(35), a theological term he favoured and which meant ‘substance’ but which would arouse suspicion as
32 For Eusebius of Nicomedia’s role at the outset of the Council, see EUSEBIUS, Vita Constantini 3, 11.
33 For the text of Eusebius’ letter, see OPITZ, Urkunde 22.
34 For details, see KELLY, Creeds, p. 208.
35 For detailed discussion (though often unclarity) of the‘semanticconfusion’ in most of the early discussion of ‘Arianism’, see HANSON, The Search, pp. 181-202.
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having Origenist, or more generally subordinationist, implications. Accordingly, he spoke only of ‘the Father as in truth the Father, the Son as in truth the Son, the Holy Spirit as in truth the Holy Spirit’, adding that ‘our beloved emperor’ immediately pronounced the creed orthodox and urged the bishops to sign it with just one added word: an addition of which manifestly Eusebius himself did not approve, the word to be added being homoousios.
The reading of Eusebius’ document was far from the end of the proceedings.
At some stage, Constantine offered a partial clarification of his preferred terminology(36), but he concentrated (or Williams supposes was persuaded to concentrate) on the negatives(37): thus homoousios implied no material distinction between the Persons which are immaterial: palpably an attempt to ward off any suggestion of a Manichean-sounding thesis that God the Father is light and the Son a split-off version of that light: this bogey, raised by Arius against his critics, might attach to any sort of ‘material’ separation of the Persons.
Perhaps for Eusebius of Caesarea the word homoousios (as we shall see being ambiguous) might have been tolerable, but he went on to recall that at some later stage in the proceedings (again in the letter to his diocese explaining his actions at the Council) something, in his view, had gone seriously wrong. For, he wrote, ‘on the pretext’ (prophasei) of explaining consubstantiality, a series of words were added (presumably by Ossius on behalf of his party, but patently tolerated by Constantine).
These brought the text close to the later document we know as the Nicene Creed, the details of the drafting of which are unknown, though it is widely agreed that the core material (apart from the specifically anti-Arian additions) has a Palestinian or Syrian tone to it. Whatever precise or imprecise sense Constantine himself attached either to homoousios or to the explanatory additions as a whole is not immediately clear, though the intention of Ossius and his party in adding them was indeed clear (and unwelcome) to Eusebius of Caesarea and doubtless to several others.
36 See KELLY, Creeds, p. 246.
37 WILLIAMS, Arius, p. 70, though there is little reason to suppose that Constantine’s approach was guided by Eusebius of Caesarea.
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The expanded text not only included the homoousios beloved of the Emperor and which Ossius himself approved and had probably agreed on with Alexander before the Council began (though being non-Scriptural it was not ideal), but also the explanatory material of which Eusebius strongly disapproved, and the significance of which he tried to play down.
The relevant added words tell us that Jesus Christ was ‘begotten from the Father (that is from the substance (ousia) of the Father), God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made’: in sum, that is, in the word the Emperor so clearly approved, of one substance (homoousios) with the Father.
Three points should be noted about this formulation: first that ‘from the Father’ (being susceptible of an Arian reading) is glossed by ‘from the substance of the Father’; second that ousia, not hypostasis, is used to denote substance, and thus would seem to rule out any subordination among hypostaseis such as is allowed between the divine Plotinian hypostaseis of the One, Nous and Soul, and similarly by Origen and many of his followers, including Eusebius himself. Third and most important is that no earlier credal document had referred to the Son’s ‘substance’ as consubstantial with that of the Father(38).
When the text of the Creed was finally approved, it would seem that both Ossius and Constantine had what they wanted. The anathemas make clear much of what was rejected: ‘Those who say “there was a time when He did not exist” and “Before being begotten He did not exist” and that he came into being from non-existence, or who claim that the Son of God is of another hypostasis or ousia, or is alterable and changeable, these the Catholic and Apostolic Church condemns’. As I have already hinted, how-
38 The ‘shocking’ originality of this language is rightly emphasised by HANSON, The Search, pp. 166-170, for even if Eusebius had been a supporter of Alexander’s earlier theology, this would have surprised him. Hanson comments in particular (pp. 66-67) on how different the Nicene claim about ousia is from the normal usage (as of Origen). Origen teaches that the Son is ‘different from the Father in substance’ (heteros kat’ousian, by which he means only that the Son is an entity distinct from the Father. In the early fourth century there is always a problem (in the light of later orthodoxy) about the relationship between hypostasis and ousia (see below): hence some may surmise that when Ossius (for example) seems to have denied that there is more than one hypostasis, he is therefore (so Hanson) some sort of Sabellian.
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ever, the word homoousios is in fact ambiguous: this Constantine, I suggest, will have appreciated, though he was prepared to accept the explanatory phrases under Ossius’ guidance.
Perhaps Constantine thought that most bishops would be happy to sign something ambiguous without much scrutiny – as turned out to be the case; apart from Arius himself and Euzoius, an Alexandrian deacon who later would become an Arian bishop, only two hard-core Libyan bishops, Secundus of Ptolemais and Theonas of Marmarica, held out and were abruptly exiled(39). Decades later, Ambrose (De fide 3, 15) claimed to know that the Council added homoousios to the Creed precisely because the Arians could not accept the unscriptural word (though their objections would be over more than mere language).
But Ambrose’s explanation, while applauding Ossius and Alexander, will not necessarily indicate the view of the Emperor, nor did it accurately describe what happened at the Council.
Thus, although seventeen bishops hesitated before signing up(40), almost all eventually did so, and Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicaea (as well as Eusebius of Caesarea) even attached their names to the anathemas, which were clearly aimed at Arians in general and condemned anyone who asserted that the Son is of a different hypostasis or ousia(41), drawing the line only at a specific condemnation of Arius himself, who was viewed as having been interpreted in malam partem.
Such behaviour may be read as unprincipled servility toward the Emperor(42) or that at least some bishops realised that despite appearances, the game was not over, the Emperor still hoping for the ‘big tent’ (with Arius in it) and that therefore his favoured language must be treated respectfully. Any response to it should be
39 PHILOSTORGIUS, Historia ecclesiastica 1, 9.
40 RUFINUS, Historia ecclesiastica 10, 5; SOZOMEN, Historia ecclesiastica 1, 20, 1.
41 The explicit identification of the two terms is important, hypostasis, as I have noticed, often being understood as distinct from ousia and allowing for subordination. At this point, the party of Ossius wished to identify them. The ‘correct’ relation between them was only finally clarified at a synod in Alexandria in 362, thus paving the way for the one ousia, three hypostaseis of Constantinople (381).
42 As implied by Henry CHADWICK, ‘Faith and Order at the Council of Nicaea’, in Harvard Theological Review 53 (1960), pp. 171-195, at p. 175.
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pragmatic; we can come back to fight another day – as turned out to be the case.
In later times, a story, put out on behalf of Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis and retailed by Philostorgius (Historia ecclesiastica 1, 9), claimed that the text they signed read nothomo-ousios but homoiousios: similar in substance. Though certainly false as stated, the tale may indicate an alternative ‘reading’ of the text which Eusebius and Theognis held in pectore – and Constantine wished to allow(43).
That said, Eusebius and Theognis did not come off scot-free. Constantine was embarrassed that they refused to sign the anathema against Arius, even when offered time to do so. They were duly exiled to Gaul, the Emperor writing a furious letter to the church at Nicomedia (Opitz, Urkunde 27, 14(44), lashing out at Eusebius for his behaviour in the times of Licinius and for more or less treasonably acting now against imperial wishes.
One can conclude that Constantine, volatile and inclined to bluster, was at this point gravely disappointed in the man in the imperial see of Nicomedia whom he might hope would be a more pliant successor of Ossius as imperial minister of religious affairs(45).
***
That broad outline is the story as I see it, though it leaves questions unanswered.
Why did Constantine insist on the word homoousios (noxious to many)?
Why did those Eastern bishops, less inclined to be sympathetic to Arius than Eusebius of Nicomedia though still suspicious of the word homoousios, profess themselves happy to go along with it? It is possible that they did not really understand what was going on (as can happen at ecclesiastical meetings).
But perhaps another answer can be given to both these questions.
Perhaps the word homoousios could be stretched to signify a position quite different from that of the party of Ossius, though distinct also from that of Arius.
43 WILLIAMS, Arius, p. 71 too abruptly dismisses this possibility out of hand on the ground that homoiousios is a later term: perhaps, but in any case, an idea often predates a technical word.
44 Cf. LOGAN, ‘Marcellus’, p. 430.
45 HANSON, The Search, p. 28, uses this incident to emphasise (against moderns who might calumniate Eusebius as a mere time-server) that on a number of occasions in dealing with emperors, he showed considerable courage.
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St Basil tells us that Hermogenes, a Cappadocian and later bishop of Caesarea, produced the original version of the eventual Creed of Nicaea(46): a document differing, as we have seen, in its targeted audience from the earlier baptismal creeds on which in outline it was modelled.
The wish of the supervising bishops that it be composed entirely in Scriptural language had proved impossible when it appeared that any scriptural formulation could be given an Arianizing twist.
Hence those working behind the scenes – not only the Emperor but Ossius himself, Eustathius of Antioch and bishop Alexander of Alexandria (along with his deacon Athanasius) – introduced homoousios, as some of them had planned, and despite its being unscriptural adding the explanatory clauses to prevent it from being, as Ossius and Alexander would have seen it, ‘perverted’. Concerns about language could be forgotten if the Emperor agreed, and possible difficulties could be forestalled by added explanations.
So we return to the earlier question: if homoousios has to be used, what are its disadvantages (and advantages) – and for whom?
And what was Constantine’s understanding of it?
Adequate attention is not always paid to homoousios being no new coinage, for it appears before Nicaea in a number of pagan, Gnostic and ‘orthodox’ texts(47).
It had been applied by Paul of Samosata to the relationship between the Father and the Son, the latter of whom he described as a ‘mere man’(48).
The word often suggests that two items compared are essentially of the same sort, though to be essentially of the same sort would not necessarily imply that they are substantially identical.
Put otherwise, the ousia in the word homoousios need not refer to the primary substance of Aristotle’s Categories: the whole word may merely connote a
46 BASIL, Epistula 81.
47 A number of these are discussed by KELLY, Creeds, pp.243-247. For Origen (clearly somehow a source of the tradition to which Arius, however erratically, belongs), see WILLIAMS, Arius, pp. 131-137. Williams too refers to ‘the whole range of meanings covered by homoousios’ (p. 223), though I would hesitate to describe Arius’ position as ‘post-Plotinian’ (pp. 224, 230) in other than in a very general sense, for his voluntarism is far from Plotinus, though perhaps intended in part to solve similar problems. On the unlikeliness of serious neo-Platonic influence on Arius, see G.C. STEAD, ‘Was Arius a Neoplatonist?’, in Studia Patristica 33 (1997), pp. 39-52. There is little reason to believe much ‘Middle Platonic’ influence either.
48 This would certainly have been unacceptable to Arius.
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generic sameness. Kelly cites a text of Plotinus (Enneades 4, 7, 10) and another of Porphyry (De abstinentia 1, 19) which illustrate this well, Plotinus saying that the separate soul and the higher hypostaseis are of the same kind, Porphyry that the souls of animals are similar in substance to our own.
Such implications of similarity but not identity are also suggested by Origen as a reasonable understanding of homoousios (Epistula ad Hebraeos, PG 14, 1308): yet substantial identity is what the party of Ossius wanted when they urged the word be introduced into the Creed: that is, identity of nature, not necessarily identity in every respect, for if that were the case, their theology would look more or less Monarchian. Constantine – as also some of the bishops – may have liked the word as being elastic enough to include similarity of kind as well as identity of nature.
When introducing homoousios, Ossius understood it as sameness of nature (which would not rule out a significant diversity of Persons), while the behaviour of Constantine after the Council seems to confirm that he preferred to understand the word in a much vaguer way: that the Father and the Son are homoousios but of similar or comparable, but not necessarily identical, substance or nature.
Indeed, while allowing the explanatory clause in the Creed, Constantine perhaps wanted to have it ‘ecumenically’ both ways, satisfying both his immediate minister Ossius and Ossius’ opponents, especially Eusebius of Nicomedia whom, as we have seen, the Emperor also appreciated.
This worked more or less for a while, and so homoousios it had to be.
Given the ambiguity the term allowed, we should note at least some approaches to the problem of the relationship between Father and Son, which were certainly deemed inadequate or ruled out altogether.
One such would be merely to identify the similar or identical power of Father and Son; another, more informatively, would be to employ the language used by bishop Alexander himself before the Council in repudiation of Arius, language now deemed open to misinterpretation, for Alexander then evoked(49) the Son’s ‘likeness in all regards’, and His being ‘the image of the hypostasis of the Father’.
49 Michel René BARNES, Augustine and Nicene Theology, James Clarke, Cambridge, 2023, pp. 63-64.
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The insertion of homoousios was intended to make the Creed more restrictive than anything tolerated by the Synod of Antioch.
There, the bishops had taught that the Son was ‘begotten from the unbegotten’, which allowed for the position that he was solely ‘of the hypostasis of the Father’.
But identity of ousia asserts that the Son is at the very least comparable in nature to the Father, and not merely a being who comes forth from a prior being (i.e. the Father).
It also rules out Arius’ beliefs that the Son is immortal by the perfect act of his will (rather than by his nature and substance) and that he is the image merely of the will of the Father.
We note that at Nicaea, hypostasis (as well as ‘image’) has disappeared, for at this period, it cannot but allow for the possibility of a more or less perfect – Plotinian-style – divine substance. All such implications are to be eliminated by a proposed identity of ousia.
So the Council came to an end, and it seemed that Constantine, Ossius, and especially Alexander had cause to rejoice.
Indeed, among the canons of the Council with which its business was concluded, there were three which, if not instigated by the bishop of Alexandria, at least looked like rewards for his theological heroism.
Canon 6 confirmed the authority of his see (similar to that of the see and bishop of Rome) over adjacent sees.
Canon 16 condemned the practice of bishops moving from one see to another: Alexander had already reproved Eusebius of Nicomedia on this account, suggesting that being close to power was the motive for his move from Berytus.
Canon 1 denied the priesthood to those who castrated themselves; seemingly, the practice was not unusual, but bishops (including Alexander) could not but have had in mind the case of Origen, high-priest of Alexandrian subordinationism.
While it is not clear whether Origen castrated himself, many in Alexandria believed that he did.
(…)
(to be continued)
