The Not At All Secret History of Nicaea

This year, and this month of this year, mark 1700 years since the Council of Nicaea. On May 20, AD 325, the Emperor Constantine opened the Council with an address to the 318 bishops assembled. He was not a bishop and thus not a voting member of the council, but it was he who had urged the bishops to come together to sort through what was becoming an urgent problem in his empire. 

He was 53 years old and had been on the throne for 19 years at this point, having been crowned—oddly—in the English city of York, 1600 miles from his birthplace in what is now Serbia. The Empire still stretched that far North and West, though it would not do so for much longer. The council itself was held closer to the empire’s heartland: Nicaea is now called Iznik, in Turkey, and, five years afterwards, Constantine would move the capital from Rome—which was feeling shabby and depopulated—to a city on the Bosporus Strait, the divide between Europe and Asia. He called that city New Rome; we call it Istanbul. For the 1600 years between its founding and 1930, it was called after him: Constantinople. 

Nicaea is 90 miles southeast of Constantiople, with its own imperial palace and a church designed in imitation of Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom; it was in this palace and church that the bishops met. Constantine paid for their travel and lodging; twelve years before, in the Edict of Milan, he had legalized the practice of Christianity and brought these men out of the catacombs and hidden places. 

It hadn’t been all catacombs and lions: persecutions had waxed and waned. But the final persecution before the Edict had been the bloodiest, the most vigorous: it had been kicked off in 303 AD by the Emperor Diocletian, and lasted for a decade. Nearly everyone at the council was a veteran of the persecutions to one degree or another: the edicts had come down one after the other that all subjects of the Emperor were to offer sacrifice to the traditional Roman gods or face death, torture, or exile. Bishops and presbyters and deacons had been ordered to hand over all copies of the scriptures; many had done so; many had not. 

What to do about those “traditores,” handers-over, who had during the persecution given up the sacred books to Diocletian’s soldiers, or who had otherwise betrayed their brothers and their calling as Christians, was a major problem: there was a party of hard-liners who held that such men could not be received back into the church. It had already been decided before the Council that the Gospel was such that even these traditores could be received back into the Church if, like St. Peter after his triple denial of Christ, they repented; Donatism, named for Donatus who was a leader of the hard-line party, had been repudiated. The dozen years since the ending of the persecutions had been a time of rapid growth and, as one might say, embourgeoisement of the church: now, you could be a Christian and also a full member of Roman society; you could study philosophy in Athens or read law in Rome and go to church openly every Sunday. 

The history of the church up until this point was quite public; we know in detail what they had been up to: celebrating the Eucharist and listening to the reading of the Hebrew Bible and the collection of writings of apostolic origin which are the New Testament. We know about their conversations and their disagreements and their dramas and their comedies.

The last of the apostles had died as long before the Council of Nicaea as the American Revolutionary War is before us. The canon was as clear and universally accepted as, say, the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and Declaration are with us, though with debates around the edges about the inclusion of eg the Apocalypse of St. John; the institutional continuity of bishop to bishop as traceable as our line of presidents or supreme court justices. There is nothing shadowy about the Church up to this point, illegal as it had been. And the touchstone of orthodoxy, of right teaching, was likewise clear: was this teaching from the apostles, and from those who they had chosen to continue in the same teaching: the bishops? It was the apostles who had been chosen by Christ and had spent three years with him, being his apprentices; it was they who had written or provided source material for the writings of the New Testament canon: it was the church founded on them, and not any other group, which had the authority to teach. No one was confused about who they were. 

I certainly went through quite a while not entirely getting this. If you read enough pieces in Time about the Gospel of Thomas and so on, or if you read Elaine Pagels, you get the sense that the “early church,” the time from say the year 100 when St John died to the year 313 when Constantine legalized it was a creature lost in the mists of history and apocryphal gospels.

This is simply not the case. We have (most readers will know this) an absolute ton of non-Biblical writings from the post-apostolic age of the institutional body that was the catholic orthodox church - and indeed from the time before St. John died; the Didache may have been written as early as 50 AD, Clement’s first Epistle was 95 or 96 AD; in any case both overlap with the lifetimes of the apostles. And so on.

One standard English translation collects the writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers in nine volumes of more than 10 million words total, with letters, sermons, liturgies, histories, catechisms, theology, and commentaries all represented. And that’s just the formal documents we have, which are the products of those in public, institutional, laying-on-of-hands succession from the Apostles. And not even all of them!

But recently a new set of teachings had come in. These teachings, associated with Arius, a presbyter/priest properly ordained in the universal, or catholic, church, had been kicking around since the 260s or so, but they had begun to grow in popularity beginning by 318. Briefly, the beliefs were neoplatonist: there was a single unknowable high God, who had created all things; Jesus was one of the things he had created, an “emanation” of him. 

Even the word “emanation” will probably clue you in to where this new set of teachings may have been drawing from: it was, it seems to me, a sort of Christianized version of the Gnosticism that had begun to be popular by 200 AD. Say you went to a Gnostic meeting – this would have been in about AD 260, because there’s no hint of Arianism before that – and heard all about Sophia and the Pleroma and the Logos as an emanation of the Father, and all the things the Demiurge got up to, and the Aeons, and so on (you can find out about all of this, conveniently, on the Internet as well!) And say this sounded pretty great to you, and intriguing. But say you were also a Christian, and went to church and had been baptized. In church, what you would hear was that the Most High God had become a human baby. This seemed… vulgar. Surely there was a more refined way to understand it all. And you weren’t Jewish so you had no real hangups about worshiping only the God of Abraham. Was there a way you could… like… maybe inform your Christian faith with some of the ideas of your Gnostic friends? 

Thus, Arianism. This idea, which was largely an attempt to rationalize the much more mysterious idea of the Trinity (the word was beginning to be in use by this point; the idea was as old as the church itself), was appealing precisely because it was more rationalist, making a version of Christianity that would be acceptable to the neoplatonic philosophy of the schools. It sidestepped the scandal of the Incarnation—in the Arian system, it was not God, the one God, who was made man, but one of his creations. 

If, again, you read a bunch of Elaine Pagels et al, you will run very frequently into the word “kerygma.” You - by which I mean I - might get the impression that the word “kerygma” means something like “vibe.” The “kerygma” of the “Jesus movement”: this is the kind of thing you hear when you dig into the books mentioned in the annual Time magazine pieces on Lost Christianities which breathlessly suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene etc. I had always pictured this as a kind if ineffable aura, the message that calls forth a sense of welcome and joy; perhaps the sense of welcome and joy itself. 

Now of course hearing the Gospel often does call forth a sense of welcome and joy. But “kerygma” is once again very much not a matter of Jesus movement vibes. The word means proclamation; it has a technical meaning. You might think of this kerygma as the data points of Christian teaching; the key things that the Apostles and their successors had to say about the Father, Jesus, the Spirit, and the church, and so on.

The Trinitarianism that this new Gnostic-influenced teaching sought to supplant was a matter of this kerygma, a series of assertions and negations, a sort of list of realities, truths, witnessed to in Scripture and taught by bishops in a line back to the apostles. That traditional list went something like this:

• There is only one God: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Who made Heaven and Earth. 
• Jesus is God.
• God, the Father, begot Jesus, his Son; they are not the same person, but interact both with us and with each other.
• The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, is also distinct; “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” are rightly spoken of in a triplet phrase that sets them in parallel to each other.
• We worship all three of these as God.
• We do not give divine worship, we do not offer sacrifice, to any who is not God.
• Remember, there is only one God.

This was the “faith once delivered to the saints.” In this, St. Paul had written to the Thessalonians, they were to “stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.”

What there was not was a set of philosophical terms that could try to make sense of the list. And there was a certain hesitation among the bishops—there always had been—about introducing such terms; it was so easy to go wrong. The main thing they wanted to avoid, these men, was novelty. Homoousios, “same nature,” was a term that some theologians had been experimenting with; others, though they held to the same list of realities, the same data points, were nervous about it, because it seemed somehow too precise, at risk of going beyond the tradition. 

But then another set of teachers came along, and they didn’t just deny the term: they denied a couple of the data points as well. It was all very simple. There was one God. Jesus was a creation of the unknowable Father; though his first and highest creation, far higher originally than a mere human, still, he did not share God’s nature, his God-ness. You could call Him God, though! And worship Him. He was homoiousios: of a similar nature. He resembled God. 

This rationalized yet trippy version of theology was getting very popular, especially among the army. And the bishops were having none of it. No, they said, you couldn’t be a priest and talk this way. No, you cannot be baptized into the catholic church if this is what you assert. Finally, Arius, a priest under the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt—an elderly man helpfully called Alexander—was a bit too loud and insistent in his discussion of these doctrines, and Alexander set up a debate, in which he articulated the apostolic doctrine once again. Arius declined to agree, continuing to teach his jingle: “There was a time when the Son was not.” (Apparently it’s very catchy in Greek.) 

Alexander was not one of the early church’s great theologians, or a great mystic like Antony of the Desert; he was simply a bishop who had been taught what the Apostles taught and who taught that to his flock, and ordained presbyters, and consecrated the Eucharist and distributed it, and had enough paperwork to need a secretary. And surely—he had been very fond of Arius—surely Arius was not saying that the Logos, the Word of God, had come into being at some point in the past? Surely he was not saying that our Lord Jesus was a creature, was other than the God of Abraham? That is not how Christians talked, that is simply not the faith of the fathers.

But Arius was saying that. Once Alexander fully understood this, he commanded Arius to leave aside these novel teachings. 

Arius refused to do so. And so did four of his fellow presbyters in the diocese of Alexandria, and so did five deacons. We know their names. We know all of this. None of this happened in a corner. 

Alexander, in grief, excommunicated Arius.

And that’s when the Emperor heard of it. His calling of the council of Nicaea was the act of an exasperated man: these Christians had seemed, when he legalized their faith twelve years earlier, when he had seen the sign before the battle at Milvian bridge and, himself, sort of converted, to be a wonderful source of unity and strength. And now they were quibbling about words. Was it for this that he had left behind the old gods? Roman paganism had at least been more relaxed than this. So, at his summons, Arius and Alexander and as many other bishops and priests who could make it showed up at Nicaea, in that May of 325. 

His letter to the bishops was a masterfully economical document. Here it is:

I believe it is obvious to everyone that there is nothing more honorable in my sight than the fear of God. 

Though it was formerly agreed that a council of bishops should meet at Ancyra in Galatia, it seemed to us for many reasons that it would be better for the council to assemble at Nicaea, a city of Bithynia, because the bishops from Italy and the rest of the countries of Europe are coming, because of the excellent temperature of the air, and in order that I may be present as a spectator and participant in what will be done. Therefore I affirm for you, my beloved brothers, that you should all promptly assemble at the said city, that is at Nicaea.  

Let every one of you therefore, as I said before, keep the greater good in mind and hurry to gather without any delay, so that each may be physically present as a spectator of those things which will be done. 

May our God keep you, beloved brothers.

And he set a day.

This letter makes it clear that everyone, or most people, involved had been in fairly close correspondence in the time leading up to it. That was in fact the case. There was quite a good public courier service/road network, the cursus publicus; it had been going for centuries and was why the New Testament epistles had been able to be sent along reliably, why the Church had been able to remain tightly knit and send and receive canon lists and texts, judicial decisions, notifications of new ordinations and so on.

Bishops came from across the known world, from every country where Christianity had spread. Eusebius Pamphilius mentions

Cilicians, Phœnicians, Arabs and Palestinians, and in addition to these, Egyptians, Thebans, Libyans, and those who came from Mesopotamia. At this synod a Persian bishop was also present, neither was the Scythian absent from this assemblage. Pontus also and Galatia, Pamphylia, Cappadocia, Asia and Phrygia, supplied those who were most distinguished among them. Besides, there met there Thracians and Macedonians, Achaians and Epirots, and even those who dwelt still further away than these, and the most celebrated of the Spaniards himself took his seat among the rest.

Persia and Scythia were both, notably, outside the Roman Empire; though it had been initiated by Constantine, it was not a meeting of or for politicians of the Roman Empire, but clergy of the Christian church. Constantine gave opening remarks, but had no vote, and did not preside. That job was taken by “the most celebrated of the Spaniards himself,” Hosius, the Bishop of Cordoba, who was close to both Constantine and to Sylvester, the primus inter pares Bishop of Rome. Hosius’ signature, as president, was first on the list of signatories to the doctrinal formula ultimately affirmed at Nicaea. Vincent and Victor, two presbyters, came afterwards, writing before their signatures that they signed “for the venerable man, our holy Pope and bishop, Sylvester… believing as written above.” (Sylvester himself was too old to travel.) 

Side note: Also present was Nicholas, the bishop of Myra, a town on the Turkish Mediterranean coast 400 miles from Nicaea; he, like many there, had been caught up in Diocletian’s persecution, had refused to turn over the holy books or sacrifice to the gods of the Empire. He was just the same age as Constantine, 53, but would long outlive him. It is sadly probably not true that he slapped Arius in the face during the course of the proceedings, but that does not stop people from resurrecting, every December 6th, the rumor of Santa Claus smacking Arius and getting briefly jailed by Constantine for it.  

But the person who emerged as a startling force during the council was a young man, probably twenty-nine at the time, Alexander of Alexandria’s secretary, called Athanasius.

There is a popular version of this story. The popular version goes like this: up until Constantine, the Christian church was a series of independent congregations following the path of the Carpenter from Nazareth, with varied beliefs about who and what he was; there was no canon law, no structure, no church hierarchy; mostly they didn’t think about theology. Then Constantine noticed the religion and decided that with some tweaking it could be made to be the spiritual substructure of a renewed centralized empire, and it was he who invented the idea of Jesus as an imperial God; he who established the list of books of the Canon, he who insisted on a defined creed and a hierarchical church government. 

Or: perhaps, before Nicaea, there was an alternate version of Christianity that, because it was unfavorable to imperial power, Constantine tried to stamp out, and which has since then been hidden. 

Some combination of these two ideas make up the story that Dan Brown tells in The Da Vinci Code; it is a story that many spiritual-but-not-religious folk and (with some variation) some fundamentalist low church protestants share (of course the fundamentalists for some reason nevertheless accept the deity of Christ.) 

There is a harder-core version of this story, which was put forth in an organized way a generation later, in an essay published in the year 363. In that story, Jesus, a simple holy man from Nazareth, had had his message of universal peace corrupted by the nefarious Paul, and then by John, who wrote Christ’s divinity into the gospel that bore his name. The true, simple, ethical message of the man Jesus was, in this story, lost almost immediately after the crucifixion. 

The person who wrote the essay had been raised a nominal Christian, in a family which favored Arianism. He had studied the pagan philosophers in Athens under the Neoplatonist rhetoricians Himerius (a pagan who would later become an initiate of Mithras) and Prohaeresius (a Christian). His two best friends at this point were fellow students who were, like him, Christians from Cappadocia: Basil and Gregory. They were part of the first thoroughly post-persecution generation; one of Basil’s maternal grandparents had been martyred under Diocletian; his paternal grandmother, Macrina, and her husband had been exiled; but that was a long time ago. As Christians studying with pagan and Christian professors and alongside pagan friends and fellow-students at the heart of the philosophical world, the three young men had taken part in many symposia, many late-night debates. Gregory wrote movingly about their time there, many years later when he was preaching at Basil’s funeral: 

We were sent by God and by a generous craving for culture, to Athens the home of letters. Athens, which has been to me, if to anyone, a city truly of gold, and the patroness of all that is good. For it brought me to know Basil more perfectly…

Basil went on to become Bishop of Caesarea; we call him St. Basil the Great. Gregory went on to become Bishop of Nazianzus and then, later, Archbishop of Constantinople; he is called Gregory Nazianzen.   

Their friend Flavius Claudius Julianus was Constantine’s nephew. He had barely survived his cousin Constantius’ purge of potential political rivals; his father had not survived, being executed by his own nephew. The essay was titled Κατὰ Γαλιλαίων, Against the Galileians, and it was, it goes without saying, fabricated whole cloth. He wrote it during the final year of his life, just after he was acclaimed Emperor and before his death at age 31; it was part of his larger project to return the Empire to a sort of philosophically highbrow version of the worship of the old gods. Not many years after those late-night Athenian debates with Gregory and Basil, he (reportedly) had had himself rebaptized in the blood of bulls, in order to nullify his Christian baptism. What is certain is that he dedicated himself to the god Helios under his title of Sol Invictus. We call him Julian the Apostate.

The story of these times, of the First Council of Nicaea and of its aftermath, is not just not what, for example, Dan Brown claimed: it’s literally the opposite. First of all, the issue of the Canon of Scripture never came up at the Council; second of all, Constantine didn’t interfere at the council on behalf of what is now orthodoxy. If anything he was sympathetic to Arianism, but mainly he was against a creed that would exclude the Arians: he wanted everyone to stop fussing. 

Again, given that the Council of Nicaea figures in popular accounts of the origins of Christianity as something mysterious and conspiratorial, a sort of Bilderberg of the Bishops, I do want to point out that we have three (3) separate accounts of what happened written by people who were there, and took notes (and who were on opposite sides of the debate) (that is, Eusebius, Athanasius, and Constantine himself), and seven (7) more by church historians of that and the next generation or so who interviewed those who were there and examined records and so on and did normal historical work to describe the events. There were minutes taken! This was not Game of Thrones! Or even Arthurian England! These were Roman citizens! With plenty of paper and ink! They knew how to have meetings!

Anyway, Constantine. He was complicated, but probably at least at this point in his life one thing he wanted was a Christianity that was a popular religion to tie together the empire and provide continuity with paganism. He would also have been happy if somehow that religion brought in the popular military cult of Sol Invictus, the Unvanquished Sun. He wanted minimal theology, because minimal theology means that bishops aren’t excommunicating priests and fighting with each other over vowels. He wanted a sort of syncretistic/neoplatonist vibes-based and yet unifying religion that he had control over.

That is what he didn’t get.

It’s not that he didn’t try to interfere theologically. He tried, though not at the council itself. At the council he seemed resigned to accept the essentially unanimous decision of the bishops, writing afterward to the church at Alexandria that 

[a]t the command of God, the splendor of truth has dissolved all the poisons so deadly to unity: dissensions, schisms, commotions, and the like. We all now worship the One by name, and continue to believe that he is the One God. 

All points which seemed ambiguous or could possibly lead to dissension have been discussed and accurately examined. May the Divine Majesty forgive the unfortunately huge number of the blasphemies which some were shamelessly uttering against the mighty Savior, our life and hope, as they declared and confessed things contrary to the divinely inspired Scriptures. 

More than three hundred bishops, remarkable for their moderation and intellectual keenness, were unanimous in their confirmation of one and the same faith, a faith which has arisen in agreement with the truths of the Law of God. Arius alone had been misled by the devil, and was found to be the only one set on promoting this unholy mischief, first among you, and afterwards among others as well. 

But several years later, after Arianism had grown in popularity especially among the army, he commanded Athanasius, who had been Alexander’s secretary and who was now himself Bishop of Alexandria, to rescind Alexander’s anathematization of Arius. 

“If a decision was made by the bishops,” Athanasius responded,  

what concern had the emperor with it? . . . When did a decision of the Church receive its authority from the emperor? Or rather, when was his decree even recognized? There have been many councils in times past, and many decrees made by the Church; but never did the fathers seek the consent of the emperor for them, nor did the emperor busy himself in the affairs of the Church. . . . The Apostle Paul had friends among those who belonged to the household of Caesar, and in the writing to the Philippians he sent greetings from them: but never did he take them as associates in his judgments.

In other words, Constantine was, for at least part of his life, really trying to be in a Dan Brown novel. Like, his level best. Not the part about deciding what books were in the Bible, but the part about patching together an imperially helpful compromise syncretistic religion.

That religion would have been Arianism: a platonic high God with a Jesus who was a sort of highest in the created order Sol Invictus divine son. The Arians, confusingly, were willing to call Christ God, and to say that he should be worshiped. It’s just that what they meant by God was not the one eternal creator of all things: you could call a created being God, and worship him, and that was fine. 

The one thing that ethical monotheism had taught, over the 2500 or so years since Abraham set his face to the West, away from his father’s tents, away from the old city of Ur, was that properly speaking there is only one God, and only that one God is to be worshipped. To affirm Arianism would have been, then, of course, to lose Christianity’s Judaism altogether. 

Still, this religion would have been amenable to all kinds of both gnostic and demi-pagan developments: you could bolt on an emanation or two; old gods could sneak back in as Arian “saints” to be worshiped. Because if you could worship a created being in Jesus, why not worship other lesser created beings? As a treat? 

But that is precisely what was rejected, as a bizarre innovation, at and after Nicaea. One God. Christ Jesus, the man, is God. Consubstantial with the Father. There was no time when He was not, even if it’s catchy to say that in Greek.

All the saints who we honor, Mary herself, are simply not consubstantial with the Father. They’re not God. That is not and has never been orthodoxy. And this has always been entirely public and clear.

In other words, there was, in reality, an earliest primitive version of Christianity that long predated Constantine, a version inimical to his attempt to co-opt it for imperial unity and glory, a version that he, and still more his successor Constantius, tried their very best to stamp out. 

That version was what we call the catholic and orthodox faith. 

The possibility of a paganized and syncretized religion presented itself, then: as long after the death of the last apostle as we are after the American Revolutionary War. It tried its best. It looked very much like it was going to win. Not at the Council - all but two of the 318 bishops who attended the council rejected Arianism. But tremendous pressure was put on Athanasius after the council, by Constantine and Constantius, to renege and declare that it was fine to regard Jesus as other than truly the God of Abraham. 

If Athanasius had caved, that would mostly have been a matter of good propaganda for the Arians: the council had spoken, after all. And Athanasius had no particular authority other than as a bishop. But he was the public face of Trinitarianism, of the stubborn catholic position. He was banished, and brought back, and banished again; at one point, Julian melted down at him, and in one last decree of banishment said that he was “a contemptible little fellow, unfit to be a leader, hardly a man at all, only a little manlet.” 

This was the time of Athanasius contra mundum. 

Whenever he was banished, he went into the desert to hang out with the monks who had raised him; when his banishment was lifted, he would go back to Alexandria and take up his episcopal duties again. Shortly after that last decree of banishment, Julian died, at age 31, stabbed by his own men during an attempt to do regime change in Iran. Athanasius came back to Alexandria and lived another decade, dying at age 75.

The new religion, the Arian religion, this Christian-flavored semi-Gnostic Neoplatonism, was wildly popular among the Army and those connected to the imperial court. And after the Council there were plenty of priests and some bishops who kept hold of it as well. Why not just go with it? Of course that religion would have lost Christianity’s Judaism, but it might have been a lot more helpful empire-building wise. Super easy to skootch any pagans you run into into the Arian “Church.”  Indeed, the Goths and other Germanic tribes who populated the Army and took up imperial offices, over the course of the next few centuries, loved it. Not, as has been implied in the past, because they were particularly barbaric but because they were particularly into being civilized and therefore Hellenistic and therefore philosophical, and they were very impressed by the imperial court. 

But what Athanasius, and the 316 orthodox bishops of the council, said to Constantine and Arius was this: Yes I see what you mean, that would be a more straightforward religion and make things easier politically. But that is not what the apostles taught. That is a new thing. And we have no authority to change what we have been taught. What we can do is describe it: God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made.

Ὁμοούσιος τῷ Πατρί 

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance [ek tes ousias] of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father [homoousion to Patri], through whom all things were made both in heaven and on earth; who for us men and our salvation descended, was incarnate, and was made man; suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended into heaven and will come to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Ghost. 

Those who say: There was a time when He was not, and He was not before He was begotten; and that he was made out of nothing [ex ouk onton]; or who maintain that he is of another hyposasis or another substance [than the Father], or that the Son of God is created, or mutable, or subject to change, [them] the Catholic Church anathametizes.

This is what is called the Nicene Symbol: a σύμβολον, symbolon, was half of a broken object which, when fitted to the other half, verified the bearer's identity. It was fit for purpose: to articulate the old list of assertions in a way that would not permit an Arian to affirm it. But it was not a full creed. That would take another 56 years: it was at the Ecumenical Council held in 381 in Constantinople that this document was fleshed out into something fuller: again, not by way of adding new doctrines, but by way of mentioning what it is that had been handed down, lest there be any confusion. 

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who for us men for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church; I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. 

Amen.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Sources

Constantine, Edict of Milan

Galerius, Edict of Toleration

Athanasius, Life of Antony

Athanasius, On the Incarnation

Athanasius, The Monk’s History of Arian Impiety

Socrates, Ecclesiastical History

Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History

Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History

Canons of the First Council of Nicaea

Julian, To the Athenians

Julian, Against the Galileians

Excellent huge Fourth Century online sourcebook which has links to at least partial translations of most of the Nicene documents and relevant correspondence.

Secondary Sources

John Henry Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century

Rob Bennett, The Apostasy that Wasn’t

Susannah Roberts, “St Macrina the Younger”