INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL COMMISSION
Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour
1700th anniversary of the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea
325-2025
Index
Preliminary note
Introduction: Doxology, theology and proclamation
Chapter 1:
The Symbol for salvation: doxology and theology of the Nicene dogma
1.
Grasping the immensity of the three divine Persons who
save us: ‘God is Love’ – infinitely
1.1
The greatness of the fatherhood of God the Father,
foundation of the greatness of the Son and the Spirit
1.2
A reflection on recourse to the expression
homoousios
1.3 The unity of the history of salvation
2.
Grasping the immensity of Christ the Saviour and his
saving act
2.1 Seeing Christ in all his greatness
2.2 The immensity of the act of salvation: its historical
density
2.3 The greatness of the act of salvation: the paschal
mystery
3.
Grasping the immensity of the salvation offered to human
beings and the immensity of our human vocation
3.1 The greatness of salvation: entering into the life of God
3.2
The immensity of the human vocation to divine Love
3.3
The beauty of the gift of the Church and of baptism
4.
Celebrating the immensity of salvation together: the
ecumenical significance of the faith of Nicaea and hope for a
common date for the celebration of Easter
Chapter 2:
The Symbol of Nicaea in the life of believers: ‘We believe as we
baptise and we pray as we believe.’
Introduction: Living out the faith we confess
1. Baptism and Trinitarian faith
2.
The Symbol of Nicaea as a confession of faith
3. Going deeper in preaching and catechesis
4. Prayer to the Son and doxologies
5. Theology in hymns
Chapter 3:
Nicaea as a theological and ecclesial event
1. The Christ event: ‘No one has ever seen God. The
one-begotten Son has revealed him’ (Jn 1:18)
1.1
Christ, the Incarnate Word, reveals the Father
1.2 ‘We have the mind (νοῦς) of Christ’ (1 Cor 2:16): analogy
of creation and analogy of charity
1.3 Entering into knowledge of the Father through the prayer
of Christ
2. The event of Wisdom: a new reality for human thought
2.1
Revelation enriches and expands human thought
2.2 A cultural and intercultural event
2.3
The Church’s creative fidelity and the problem of heresy
3. The ecclesial event: the Council of Nicaea, the first
ecumenical council
3.1
The Church enters into the event of Jesus Christ through
her nature and structures
3.2
The structural collaboration of the Church's charisms and
the road to Nicaea
3.3 The Ecumenical Council of Nicaea
Chapter 4:
Keeping the faith accessible for all God's people
Introduction: The Council of Nicaea and the conditions of
credibility of the Christian mystery
1.
Theology at the service of the integral character of
salvific truth
1.1
Christ, the eschatologically effective truth
1.2
Salvation and the process of divine filiation
2. The mediation of the Church and the inversion of the
dogmatic order: Trinity, Christology, Pneumatology, Ecclesiology
2.1
The mediations of faith and the ministry of the Church
2.2 Disagreement and synodality
2.3
The tongues of the Holy Spirit for forming and renewing
consensus
3. Safeguarding the deposit of faith: charity at the service
of the littlest
3.1
The unanimous faith of the People of God offered to all
3.2 Protecting faith before political power
Conclusion: Proclaiming Jesus our Salvation to everyone today
Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour
1700th anniversary of the Ecumenical Council of
325-2025
Preliminary note
In the course of its tenth quinquennium, the International Theological
Commission chose to carry out an in-depth study of the First Ecumenical Council
of Nicaea and its dogmatic relevance today. The work was carried out by a
special Sub-Commission, chaired by Fr. Philippe Vallin and composed of the
following members: Mgr Antonio Luiz Catelan Ferreira, Mgr Etienne Vetö, I.C.N.,
Fr. Mario Ángel Flores Ramos, Fr Gaby Alfred Hachem, Fr. Karl-Heinz Menke, Prof.
Marianne Schlosser, and Prof. Robin Darling Young.
General discussions on this subject took place both at the various meetings of
the Sub-Commission and at the plenary sessions of the Commission itself, held in
the years 2022-2024. This text was put to the vote and unanimously approved
in forma specifica by the members of the International Theological
Commission at the plenary session of 2024. The document was then submitted for
approval to its President, His Eminence Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández,
Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, who, after receiving the
favourable opinion of the Holy Father, Pope Francis, authorised its publication
on 16 December 2024.
Introduction: Doxology, theology and proclamation
1. On 20 May 2025, the Catholic Church and the whole Christian world remember
with gratitude and joy the opening of the Council of Nicaea in 325: ‘The Council
of Nicaea is a milestone in the Church’s history. The celebration of its
anniversary invites Christians to unite in a hymn of praise and thanksgiving to
the Holy Trinity and in particular to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, “consubstantial with the Father”, who revealed to us this mystery of love.’[1]
This has remained in Christian consciousness mainly through the Creed, that
Symbol which gathers, defines and proclaims faith in salvation in Jesus Christ
and in the One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Nicene Symbol professes
the good news of the integral salvation of human beings from God himself in
Jesus Christ. 1,700 years later, we are celebrating this event above all with a
doxology, a praise of the glory of God, since this glory has been
manifested in the priceless treasure of faith expressed by the Symbol: the
infinite beauty of the God who saves us, the immense mercy of Jesus Christ our
Saviour, the generosity of the redemption offered to every human being in the
Holy Spirit. We join our voices to those of the Fathers, like Ephrem the Syrian,
to sing this glory:
Glory to that One Who came
to us by His First-born.
Glory to that Silent One
Who spoke by means of His Voice.
Glory to that Sublime One
Who was seen by means of His Dawn.
Glory to the Spiritual One
Who was well-pleased that
His Child should become a body so that
through Him His power might be felt
and the bodies of His kindred might live again![2]
2. The light shed by the assembly of Nicaea on Christian revelation allows us to
discover an inexhaustible richness that continues to deepen over the centuries
and across cultures, and to show itself in ever more beautiful and fresh ways.
These different facets become current for today especially through the prayerful
and theological reading that the greater part of Christian traditions give to
the Symbol, each with a different relationship to the very fact of the existence
of a symbol. It is also an opportunity for them all to rediscover or even to
discover its richness and the bond of communion between all Christians which it
can constitute. ‘How can we not recall the extraordinary importance of such a
commemoration in the search for the full unity of Christians?’, asks Pope
Francis.[3]
3. The Council of Nicaea was the first council called ‘ecumenical’, because for
the first time the bishops of the entire Oikoumenē were invited.[4]
Its resolutions were therefore intended to have an ecumenical, that is to say
“universal” significance: they were received as such by believers and by
Christian tradition in the course of a long and laborious process. The
ecclesiological implications are crucial. The Symbol is part of the gradual
adoption by Christian teaching of the Greek language and forms of thought, which
were themselves, so to speak, transfigured by their contact with Revelation. The
Council also marked the ever-increasing importance of synods and synodal modes
of government in the Church of the first centuries, while at the same time
constituting a major turning-point: in line with the exousia conferred on
the Apostles by Jesus and the Holy Spirit (Lk 10:16; Acts 1:14-2:1-4), the event
of Nicaea opened the way to a new institutional expression of authority in the
Church, the authority of universal scope henceforth recognised in the ecumenical
councils, as much for doctrine as for discipline. This decisive turning-point in
the manner of thinking and governing in the community of the disciples of the
Lord Jesus will have thrown light on essential elements of the Church’s teaching
mission, and therefore of its nature.
4. A clarification is in order before going any further. We are basing ourselves
on the symbol of Nicaea-Constantinople (381) and not, strictly speaking, on the
one composed at Nicaea (325). In fact, it took about fifty years to accept the
vocabulary of Nicaea’s Symbol and to agree on the universal significance of the
first Council. The process of accepting the Nicene symbol continued during the
conflict with the Pneumatomachi between Nicaea and Constantinople, introducing
some significant textual changes, particularly in the third article. In the
opinion of the Fathers, however, this process, which culminated in the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol, did not involve any alteration of the Nicene
faith, but its authentic preservation. In this sense, the preamble to the
dogmatic definition of Chalcedon, which was preceded by the transcription of the
symbol of Nicaea and the symbol of Nicaea-Constantinople, ‘confirms’ what was
said in the symbol of the ‘150 Fathers’ (Constantinople), since its meaning
lies, in its own terms, in the specification of what concerns the Holy Spirit
against those who deny his lordship.[5]
The magnitude of what happened at Nicaea can be seen in the prohibition of the
Council of Ephesus against promulgating any other formula of faith,[6]
for in the period after Nicaea, the proponents of orthodoxy thought that the
discernment crystallised in the Nicene symbol would suffice to guarantee the
faith of the Church for all time. Athanasius, for example, said of Nicaea that
it is ‘the word of God that abides forever’ (Is 40:8).[7]
This living and normative process of Tradition continued between the fourth and
ninth centuries, with its adoption in baptismal liturgies, particularly in the
East, and then in Eucharistic liturgies. It should be noted that the Filioque,
which is found in the current Western versions of the Creed, is not part of the
original text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, on which this document is
based.[8] This point continues to be
a subject of misunderstanding between the Christian confessions, such that the
dialogue between East and West continues to this day.
5. So, in the first chapter, we shall propose a doxological reading of
the Symbol in order to draw out its soteriological and therefore Christological,
Trinitarian and anthropological resources. This will be an opportunity to
underline its significance and to receive from it a new impetus for Christian
unity. But welcoming the richness of the Council of Nicaea, 1,700 years on, also
leads us to perceive how the Council nourishes and guides everyday Christian
life: in a second chapter, with its patristic content, we shall explore how
liturgical life and the life of prayer were made fruitful in the Church after
the Council. Nicaea was such a turning-point in the history of Christianity
that, in the third chapter, we shall look at how the Symbol and the Council bear
witness to the event of Jesus Christ himself, whose irruption into history
offers unprecedented access to God and introduces a transformation of human
thought, in other words, an event of Wisdom. The Symbol and the Council also
bear witness to something new in the way the Church of Christ structures herself
and accomplishes her mission: they translate what was an Ecclesial event.
Finally, in the fourth chapter, we shall analyse the conditions of credibility
of the faith professed at Nicaea in a moment of fundamental theology, which will
revisit the nature and identity of the Church as the authentic interpreter of
the normative truth of the faith through the Magisterium, guardian of believers,
especially the smallest and most vulnerable.
6. ‘When a lamp is lit, it is not put under a bushel, but on the lampstand, and
it shines for all who are in the house’ (Mt 5:15). This light is Christ, ‘the
light from light’. To wonder at this light is also to find a new impetus to
present this good news with even greater strength and creativity in the Holy
Spirit. This light shines vividly on our times, which are plagued by violence
and injustice, filled with uncertainty and a complex relationship with the
truth, and in which faith and belonging to the Church seem to be under threat.
The light is all the more vivid and radiant when it is shared by all Christians
who can confess their faith in the same martýria, the same witness, in
order to help draw the men and women of today to Jesus Christ, Son of God and
Saviour:
What is essential, most beautiful, most attractive and at the same time most
necessary for us is faith in Jesus Christ. Together, God willing, we will
solemnly renew our faith in the forthcoming Jubilee, and each one of us is
called to proclaim it to every man and woman on earth. This is the fundamental
task of the Church.[9]
Chapter 1
The Symbol for salvation:
doxology and theology of the Nicene dogma
7. To celebrate Nicaea on its 1,700th anniversary is, first and
foremost, to wonder at the Symbol bequeathed to us by the Council and at the
beauty of the gift offered in Jesus Christ, of which it is like an icon in
words. We shall therefore begin our study of Nicaea by examining this Symbol in
order to bring out the extraordinary immensity of the Trinitarian faith,
Christology, and soteriology it expresses, as well as its anthropological and
ecclesiological implications, before concluding with its ecumenical
significance. It is, so to speak, an act of doxological theology. It does
not aim to go into depth on each theme of this ‘concentrate’ of
Christian faith that is the Creed – a task that would have been of little use
and in any case impossible within the framework of the present work – but it
does seek to draw out the richness of the statements and truths offered by the
Nicene Creed from a dogmatic point of view, particularly those that present the
greatest challenge and fruitfulness for this period in the history of the Church
and the world, at the very moment when we are celebrating the anniversary of
Nicaea.
1. Grasping the immensity of the three divine Persons who save us: ‘God is Love’
– infinitely
8. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol is structured around the affirmation of
the Trinitarian faith:
We believe in one God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible,
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten,
who was begotten of the Father before all ages, light from light,
true God from true God, begotten not created, consubstantial with the Father,
by whom all things were made; [...]
And in the Holy Spirit, who is the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the
Father,
who with the Father and the Son is co-adored and co-glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets [...].[10]
1.1 The greatness of the fatherhood of God the Father, foundation of the
greatness of the Son and the Spirit
9. The starting-point of the Nicene faith is the affirmation of the unity of
God. Christianity is fundamentally a monotheism, in continuity with the
revelation made to Israel. However, the Symbol does not first of all posit ‘God’
as such, and even less so the one divine nature, but rather the First divine
hypostasis, which is the Father. As ‘creator of heaven and earth’ (cf. Gen 1:1;
Ne 9:6; Rev 10:6), he is Father of all things.[11]
Moreover, Christ reveals God’s unheard-of intra-divine paternity, the foundation
of his paternity ad extra. If Christ is the divine Son in a unique way,
this implies that there is a generation in God: God the Father gives everything
he has and everything he is. God is not a poor and selfish principle: he is
sine invidia.[12] His
fatherhood, like his omnipotence, is the capacity to give himself entirely. This
paternal gift is not merely one aspect among others, but defines the Father, who
is entirely fatherhood.[13] God has
always been a Father, and has never been a ‘solitary’ God.[14]
This fatherhood of the One God is the first aspect of the Christian faith that
provokes wonder and whose immensity we must celebrate by rediscovering Nicaea
1,700 years on. Our aim is to explore the implications of this for our
understanding of the Trinitarian mystery.
10. Faith in the Father bears witness to the superabundant fullness of God. The
first article is not simply a definition of God, but first and foremost a praise
that is part of the doxological tradition of the Jewish liturgy and the first
Christian liturgies.[15] The
‘all-powerful (pantokratōr)’ God echoes various Old Testament
expressions, such as, for example, ‘Lord Sabaoth’, taken up in the New Testament
as part of the heavenly liturgies (Rev 4:8; 11:17; 15:3; 16:14; 19:6).
11. The revelation in Christ of the fatherhood of God also manifests the
immensity of the Son and of the Spirit. If God the Father gives everything but
his fatherhood, this means that the Son and the Spirit are fully equal to the
Father in their divinity. In the Symbol, the Son is ‘one’, he is ‘Lord’ (Kyrios,
which translates the Tetragrammaton in the Septuagint), ‘Son of God’, ‘the only
begotten’ (ho monogenēs) in the Father’s intimacy, ‘God from God’, ‘light
from light’, ‘true God from true God’, consubstantial (homoousios) with
the Father. We should note, for example, that in the Fourth Gospel, the Son is
called theos several times: Jn 1:1; 5:18; 20:28. The Son is begotten
‘before all ages, which means in the Symbol that he is co-eternal with the
Father (cf. Jn 1:1). This is aimed at the positions of Arius, according to whom
‘there was a time when [the Son] was not’, ‘before he was born he was not’, and
‘he came to be from what was not’,[16]
or ‘the Son is from nothing’ by the ‘will and counsel’ of the Father.[17]
This is why the Son can be confessed as the one ‘through whom all things were
made’ (cf. 1 Cor 8:6; Jn 1:3). God is so great that the Father is able to beget
another who is equal to him in divinity. God exceeds all that we can conceive or
imagine, because his Unity assumes a real plurality that does not rupture the
Unity.
12. The Father also gives everything to the Spirit, who is defined in terms
specific and reserved to the divinity: ‘Spirit’, ‘Holy’ and ‘Lord’ (once again
recalling the Tetragrammaton). Just as the Father is the creator and the Son is
the Word through whom the Father creates all things, the Spirit is professed to
be the ‘giver of life’. Just as the Son is begotten of the Father, the Spirit
‘proceeds from the Father’. The statements on the Spirit intentionally echo the
article on the Son.[18]
Consequently, the Spirit can and must be worshipped with the Father and the Son
– this confirms the doxological character of the Symbol.
13. It is essential to maintain both the divinity of the Spirit as the ‘third’
in God and his bond with the Father, as well as with the Son. Indeed, even today
there are still difficulties in considering him as a divine Person in his own
right and not as a mere divine or even cosmic force. We sometimes pray to the
Father and the Son, omitting the Spirit, contrary to the prayer of the Church,
which is always addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.
One can recognise the rightful importance of the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary and
the Church, without realising how precious they are precisely because they are
given life by the Spirit.[19]
Conversely, others will give a central, even exclusive place to the Holy Spirit,
to the point of pushing the Father and the Son into the background, which
paradoxically amounts to a form of pneumatological reductionism, since he is the
Spirit of the Father and Spirit of the Son (Gal 4:6; Rom 8:9). The
superabundant greatness of the Holy Spirit expressed in the faith of Nicaea is a
protection against such reductionism.
14. Thus, from the fontal fullness of the fatherhood of God flows the
superabundant fullness of God the Father, Son and Spirit, semper major.
Now the fontal fullness of the Father implies a taxis (an order) in the
life of the Triune God. The Father is the source of all divinity.[20]
The second person is indeed God and light, but he is God from God and
light from light. While the Spirit is confessed to be equal in divinity
with the Son and the Father, he is presented in a rather different way from the
other two. We have just seen (cf. supra § 12) that he is presented with
divine characteristics and must be adored with the Father and the Son. Having
said this, the differences in expression are notable: what is said of the Father
and the Son as ‘one’ or of the Son as ‘consubstantial’ is not repeated with
regard to the Spirit. Without taking anything away from his co-divinity, the way
in which the Spirit is mentioned in the Symbol emphasises his personal
distinction. In this way, the Holy Spirit's uniqueness highlights the uniqueness
of each divine person. In a way, in God, ‘hypostasis’ or ‘person’ is an
analogous term, in the sense that each of the three divine ‘names’ is fully a
person, but is so in a unique way. This uniqueness also shows that equality, on
the one hand, and difference and order, on the other, do not contradict each
other. This too is the fruit of the Father's superabundant fatherhood. Receiving
Nicaea means receiving the richness of the divine fatherhood that establishes
equality but also difference and oneness.
1.2 A reflection on recourse to the expression homoousios
15. One of the central contributions of Nicaea is the definition of the divinity
of the Son in terms of consubstantiality: the Son is ‘consubstantial’ (homoousios)
with the Father, ‘begotten of the Father’, ‘that is, of the substance of the
Father’.[21] The generation of the
Son is something other than creation, because it is a communication of the
unique substance of the Father. The Son is not only fully God like the Father,
but of a substance numerically identical to his own, for there is no division in
the one God.[22] Let us repeat: the
Father gives everything to the Son, according to the logic of a divine life,
which is agapē and which always exceeds what the human mind can conceive.
16. For the first time, non-scriptural terms are used in an official and
normative ecclesial text - we shall come back to this in chapters III
and IV. The intention of the Council Fathers was not to introduce something new
into the apostolic faith, but to protect it by making explicit what generation
in God really is. This is why, in the symbol of 325, homoousios is
introduced by the expression ‘that is to say’: ontological Greek terminology is
at the service of traditional scriptural expressions.[23]
The term, of Gnostic origin and condemned by the regional synod of Antioch
(264-269), was hotly disputed in the decades following Nicaea. But from the 360s
onwards, the number of its adherents increased, until it was fully and
peacefully ratified at Constantinople (381). At that time, its role in
clarifying and protecting the faith was recognised, as was the creative capacity
of human reason, philosophy and culture in accepting Revelation. As with the
Sacred Scriptures, this underlines the fact that Revelation implies a dialogue
between God and humanity, a dialogue that takes place on both sides through
human words that are situated, limited, and therefore always to be interpreted.
Not only is divine life revealed as superabundance, but the very form of
Revelation, capable of being expressed in human words, and soon to be translated
into every language, is shown here to be semper major.
17. However, this expression is not the only one used in the symbol to express
the saving divinity of the Son. It is inserted among a series of terms of
scriptural and liturgical origin: ‘true God from true God’, ‘God from God’[24]
and ‘light from light’. No single term can exhaust the superabundant fullness of
Revelation. Faith needs the articulation of scriptural, philosophical and
liturgical expressions, concepts, images and divine names (Father, Son, Holy
Spirit) to express itself in the most accurate and complete way. The ways in
which the different Churches and ecclesial communities express themselves can be
mutually supportive in this rediscovery, as some place greater emphasis on one
or other: for example, the Eastern tradition emphasises the understanding of
Christ as ‘light from light’.[25]
The plurality of vocabulary certainly helps to make the faith it expresses
accessible in different cultures and according to the forma mentis of
each human being.
1.3 The unity of the history of salvation
18. To fully understand the significance of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan
symbol, it is necessary to understand the unity of the framework of salvation
history that informs the profession of faith. In fact, the attribution of
creation or the ‘gift of life’ to the three Persons underlines the unity between
the order of creation and the order of salvation. Divinisation begins with the
creative act, and salvation history begins with creation. Against Marcionism and
the various forms of Gnosticism, we must hold that it is the same God who
creates and saves, and the same created reality, good because willed by God,
which is restored in redemption. Thus, grace does not introduce a rupture but
offers a fulfilment, because it is already at work in the creation that is
ordered to it.
19. In the same way, the economy of salvation accomplished in Christ is
presented in its true and full meaning only if its fidelity to the revelation
made to the people of Israel is emphasised, without which the faith expressed at
Nicaea would lose its legitimacy and the fullness of its historical dimension.
Obviously, the Trinitarian and Christological dimension of the Nicene faith is
not accepted by the rabbinic tradition but, from a Christian point of view, it
is understood in an essential way as a newness that is nevertheless in
continuity with the revelation entrusted to the chosen people. The doctrine
of the Trinity is certainly not intended as a relativisation, but as a deepening
of faith in the one and only God of Israel.[26]
We have already emphasised that references to God as ‘one’ and ‘creator of
heaven and earth’ echo the Old Testament, where God is revealed as the one who
creates out of love, enters into relationships out of love and calls to be loved
in return. God calls Abraham his ‘friend’, ‘the one he loves’ (Is 41:8; 2 Chr
20:7; Jas 2:23), and he speaks with Moses ‘face to face, as one speaks with
another’ (Ex 33:11). Similarly, the choice of homoousios is made
precisely to protect the monotheistic character of the Christian faith: in God,
there is no reality other than the divine reality. The Son and the Spirit are
none other than God himself, and not intermediary beings between God and the
world or mere creatures. Furthermore, the revelation made to Israel bears
witness to the Lord as the One and Only who commits himself, vows himself, and
communicates himself in the history of humankind. Christianity understands the
Incarnation as the unprecedented fullness of the way of acting (the economy) of
the God of Israel who descends and dwells in the midst of his people, realised
in the union of God with a singular humanity, Jesus.[27]
20. Moreover, the development of the Trinitarian faith as expressed at Nicaea is
not without a Jewish background. The Symbol is structured by a threefold
repetition: ‘We believe in one God the Father... and in one Lord Jesus Christ...
and in the Holy Spirit.’ Indeed, the emerging Trinitarian faith of the first
centuries developed the unity of the divine names, Father, Son and Spirit, from
the monotheistic faith of Israel expressed at the beginning of the Sh'ma
Israel, ‘the Lord our God is one’ (Dt 6:4), by repeating this central prayer
of Judaism, extending the attribute of the unity of the One God to the Son: ‘I
believe in one God... and in one Lord...’. This is already the
case in the early New Testament expressions of Trinitarian faith: ‘For us there
is one God, the Father, from whom all things come, and we are for him;
and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things exist, and we exist
through him’ (1 Cor. 8:6, emphasis added). These ‘binitarian’ formulae co-exist
with ‘trinitarian’ formulae: ‘There is one body and one Spirit [...];
there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism; there is one God and
Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all’ (Eph 4:4-6, emphasis
added; cf. also 1 Cor 12:4-6). Obviously, the content of the liturgy quickly
evolved towards conceptions that could not be accepted by the rabbinic
tradition, but the Christian faith developed from within Jewish liturgical
structures. We should also emphasise the polyhedral richness of Israel's
monotheism, as revealed in the Hebrew Bible and the writings of the Second
Temple period.[28] There is the
idea of a superabundant richness in God that does not contradict his unicity and
unity. This can be seen in the multiplicity of the figures of God, such as the
‘binitarian’ dimension, in a certain sense, that some specialists perceive in
the duality between the ‘Ancient of Days’ and the one who is ‘like a son of man’
(Dan 7:9-14).[29] This richness is
further manifested in the different figures of God employed during his action in
the world: the Angel of the Lord, the Word (dābār), the Spirit (rûaḥ)
and Wisdom (ḥākmâ).[30] Some
contemporary exegetes, moreover, maintain that there was an initial binitarian
stage in the Christian confession of faith, which naturally inscribed the
confession of faith in Jesus of Nazareth as Kyrios exalted after death,
with a properly divine rank, within the continuity of the monotheism expressed
in the Bible.[31] Thus, even if it
is vital not to project Trinitarian faith back onto the Old Testament, it is
nevertheless possible to perceive between the Old and New Testaments a process
of development, albeit non-linear, a form of bringing together these
different realities in two figures: the Son-Logos and the Spirit. When the
affirmation of two other divine persons was seen as an association
extrinsic to the one God, the recognition of the Christian idea of an intrinsic
fruitfulness of the Father within the one and indivisible substance of the three
co-eternal persons was missed.
2. Grasping the immensity of Christ the Saviour and his saving act
21. At the heart of the second article of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol
is the confession of the incarnation and redemptive act of the Son. After
professing the divinity of Christ, the Son of God, we also confess that:
[We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ]
who for the sake of us human beings and for our salvation came down from heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary[32] and became human,
was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried,
was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures and ascended into
heaven,
sits at the right hand of the Father and will come again in glory to judge the
living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
2.1 Seeing Christ in all his greatness
22. Nicaea allows us to ‘see Christ in all his greatness’.[33]
The two dimensions that make him the unique mediator between God and humanity
are marked by the mention of the two agents in the incarnation: “He became
incarnate of the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary.” He is fully God, coming
from a Virgin by the power of the Spirit of God; he is fully human, born of a
woman. He is homoousios with the Father but also with us, according to
the later double statement of Chalcedon[34]
- bearing in mind that the term homoousios cannot have a univocal meaning
when it comes to relating the incarnate Son to the Father and to human beings.
The Word made flesh is the Word of God itself, which assumes in a unique and
irreversible way a singular and finite humanity. It is because Jesus was
personally (hypostatically) identical with the eternal Son that he was able, by
suffering human death in a tragic way, to remain in a living relationship with
the Father and transform separation from God, sin and death (cf. Rom 6:23) into
access to God (cf. 1 Cor 15:54-56; Jn 14:6b). It is because Jesus was a true
human being – ‘in all respects like us, except for sin’ (Heb 4:15) – that he was
able to bear our sin and pass through death. This double consubstantiality means
that Christ alone can save. He alone can work salvation. He alone is
the communion of human beings with the Father.[35]
He alone is the Saviour of all human beings of all times. No other
human being can be this before him or after him. The unheard-of perfect
communion between God and humanity has been realised in Christ, beyond any form
of realisation that human beings themselves can imagine.
23. There is no disguising the current difficulty of believing in the full
divinity and humanity of Christ. Throughout the history of Christianity, and
even today, there is a real resistance to recognising the full divinity of
Christ. Jesus can more easily be seen as a master who initiates others into the
spiritual life or as a political messiah preaching justice, whereas in
his humanity he lives out his eternal relationship with the Father. But there is
also a great difficulty in admitting the full humanity of Christ, who can
experience fatigue (Jn 4:6), feelings of sadness and abandonment (Jn 11:35;
Gethsemane) and even anger (Jn 2:14-17) and who, mysteriously but truly, does
not know certain things (“only the Father knows the time...”, Mt 24:36). The
eternal Son chose to live all that he is because of the infinity of his divine
nature, which dwells in and through the finitude of his human nature.
24. It should be noted, however, that even if the part of the Creed devoted to
the second person is the most developed, the Christological perspective
contained in the Nicene faith is necessarily Trinitarian. Christ is semper
major precisely because where he is, there is always more than him: the
Father remains the Father, the ‘Holy One of Israel’. Of course, ‘he who has seen
[Christ] has seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9), but, as Jesus says, ‘the Father
is greater than I.’ (Jn 14:28) Arius himself saw this clearly when he quoted the
Gospel: “Only one is good.” (Mt 19:17)[36]
Moreover, Christ cannot be understood without the Father and the Holy Spirit:
before being conceived as the God-Man and the Bridegroom, he is presented in the
New Testament as Son of the Father and Anointed by the Spirit. In the same way,
he does not save people without the Father, who is the source and end of all
things - for he is filial union with the Father. He does not save people without
the Spirit, who makes them cry ‘Abba, Father’ (Rom 8:15) and whose interior
action enables human beings to be transformed and to enter actively into the
movement that leads them to the Father.
2.2 The immensity of the act of salvation: its historical density
25. The greatness of the Saviour is also revealed in the superabundant fullness
of the economy of salvation. Nicaea presents the realism of the work of
redemption. In Christ, God saves us by entering history. He does not send an
angel or a human hero, but comes himself into human history by being born of a
woman, Mary, into the Jewish people (‘born of a woman, born under the law’, Gal
4:4), and by dying in a specific historical period, ‘under Pontius Pilate’ (cf.
1 Tim 6:13; see also Acts 3:13).[37]
If God himself entered history, the economy of salvation is the place of his
Revelation: in history, Christ authentically reveals the Father and the Spirit
and gives full access to the Father in the Spirit. Moreover, because God enters
into history, it is not just a question of a teaching to be put into practice,
as in Marcionism or the ‘lyingly named’ gnosis, but of an effective action by
God. The economy will be the place of God's saving work. We confess that a
historical event has radically changed the situation of all human beings. We
confess that the transcendent Truth is present in history and acts within it.
This is why the message of Jesus cannot be dissociated from his person: he is
for all of us ‘the way, the truth and the life’ (Jn 14:6) and not just
another teacher of wisdom.
26. Despite its emphasis on history, the Symbol does not explicitly mention or
refer to much of the content of the Old Testament or, in particular, the
election and history of Israel. Obviously, a Symbol is not intended to be
exhaustive. However, it is worth pointing out that this silence in no way means
that the election of the people of the Old Covenant has lapsed.[38]
What the Hebrew Bible reveals is not merely a preparation, but is already the
history of salvation, which will continue and be fulfilled in Christ: ‘The
Church of Christ recognises that the beginnings (initia) of her faith and
her election are already to be found, according to the divine mystery of
salvation, in the patriarchs, Moses and the prophets.’[39]
The God of Jesus Christ is the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, the ‘God of
Israel’. Moreover, the Symbol discreetly emphasises the continuity between the
Jewish people and the people of the New Covenant by mentioning ‘the virgin
Mary’, which places the Messiah in the context of a Jewish family and a Jewish
genealogy, and which also echoes the Old Testament text (Is 7:14 LXX). This
creates a bridge between the promises of the Old Testament and the New, as will
the expression ‘he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures’ in
the remainder of the article, where ‘Scriptures’ means the Old Testament (cf. 1
Cor 15:4). The continuity between the Old and New Testaments is seen again when
the article on the Spirit states that he ‘has spoken through the prophets’,
which perhaps represents an anti-Marcionite note.[40]
Be that as it may, to be fully understood, this Symbol born of the liturgy takes
on its full meaning when it is proclaimed in the liturgy and articulated
together with the reading of the whole of the Holy Scriptures, Old Testament and
New Testament. This places the Christian faith within the framework of the
economy of salvation, which naturally and structurally includes the chosen
people and their history.
2.3 The greatness of the act of salvation: the paschal mystery
27. The realism and Trinitarian dimension of salvation in Christ find their
culmination in the Paschal Mystery. The Son, the light of God and true God,
becomes incarnate, suffers, dies, descends into hell and rises again. This is
another unprecedented innovation. Arius' difficulty concerned not only the unity
of God as incompatible with the generation of a Son, but also the understanding
of his divinity as incompatible with Christ’s passion. Yet it is precisely in
Christ and only in Christ that we understand what God is capable of in his own
right, beyond all the limits of our pre-comprehension. We must take seriously
the cry of Jesus as the cry of the Son of God, expressed in the sweat of blood
and in fear: ‘Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me’ (Mt 26:39b).
The word homoousios itself helps us to realise the unheard-of nature of
the kenosis of the Incarnation: only the affirmation that the Son is
‘consubstantial’ with the Father makes it possible to realise the radical nature
and depth of what this same Son consented to by assuming the human condition. In
a sense, we could say that the Son, semper major, truly becomes a
minor, and that the Most High God descends to the lowest depths in Jesus
Christ (cf. Phil 2:5-11). Now, even if Christ alone is born, suffers the Passion
and dies, we can say that ‘unus de Trinitate passus est’.[41]
The whole Trinity is involved, each person singularly, in the saving
passion of Christ. In this way, the Passion reveals to us the truly divine
meaning of ‘omnipotence’. The omnipotence of the Triune God is identical with
self-giving and love. The crucified Redeemer is therefore not a concealment, but
a revelation of the Father's omnipotence.
28. The fullness of Christ's redemptive act is only fully manifested in his
resurrection, the fulfilment of salvation, in which all aspects of the new
creation are confirmed. The resurrection bears witness to Christ's full
divinity, which alone is capable of passing through and overcoming death, but
also to his humanity, since it is the same humanity, numerically identical to
that of his earthly life, that is transfigured and glorified. This is not a
symbol or a metaphor: Christ is resurrected in his humanity and in his body. The
resurrection transcends history, but took place at the heart of the history of
human beings and of this human being Jesus. Moreover, it is profoundly
Trinitarian: the Father is its source, the Spirit is its life-giving breath, and
the glorified Christ lives – still in his humanity – within the divine glory and
in unalterable communion with the Father and the Spirit. Let us note that it is
the resurrection of Christ, ‘first-born from the dead’ (Col 1:18; cf. Rom 8:29),
that reveals the eternal begetting of the Son, ‘first-born of all creatures’
(Col 1:15). Thus, divine fatherhood and sonship are not primarily developments
of human models, even if they are expressed in culturally marked human words,
but are sui generis realities of the divine life.
29. The Symbol emphasises that the resurrection of Jesus Christ continues until
the end of time, when Christ ‘will come again in glory to judge the living and
the dead, and his kingdom will have no end’. With the resurrection, victory is
definitively won, but it must be fully realised in the Parousia. Christian hope
is plenary: it is based not only on the ephapax of the Passion and
Resurrection, or on the present gift of grace, but also on the ‘to come’ of
the glorious return of Christ and his Kingdom. It should be noted that this
aspect of the faith of Nicaea is better understood and receives greater force if
it is also read in a context in which the Church listens to the Old Testament
and to the faith of the Jewish people of today. The current messianic
expectation of the people of Israel highlights the completeness of the messianic
promises of peace on all the earth and justice for all in a completely renewed
world (Is 2:4; 61:1-2; Mi 4:1-3), which Christians await with the Parousia. This
can and must awaken Christian hope for the return of the Risen Lord, because
only then will his redemptive work be fully visible.[42]
3. Grasping the immensity of the salvation offered to human beings and the
immensity of our human vocation
30. To celebrate Nicaea is not only to wonder at the superabundant fullness of
God and of Christ the Saviour, but also at the superabundant greatness of the
gift offered to human beings and of the human vocation revealed therein. The
mystery of God in its immensity is the revelation of the truth about the human
being, who is also semper major. The aim here is to develop the
soteriological and anthropological implications of the Trinitarian and
Christological affirmations of the Nicene symbol, but also to take into account
the teaching at the end of the third article on the Holy Spirit, which presents
faith in the Church and in salvation:
[We believe] in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
We confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins;
we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to
come. Amen.
3.1 The greatness of salvation: entering into the life of God
31. Because Christ saves us, the Nicene faith confesses the ‘forgiveness of
sins’ and ‘the resurrection of the dead’. The Symbol mentions sin because we
need to know from what evil we have been delivered. Sin, in the strict
theological sense, is not only the vice or fault that offends against the
Creator’s intentions in the creature (cf. Rom 2:14-15), but also a deliberate
rupture with God within a ‘theologal’ relationship with him. In this full sense,
sinners become aware of their sin in the light of God's merciful love: sin must
be ‘discovered’ by the work of grace itself so that it can convert hearts.[43]
Thus, the revelation of sin is the first step in redemption and must be
confessed as such.
32. With the exorbitant claim of the resurrection of the dead, the Nicene faith
professes that salvation is full and complete. Humanity is freed from all evil,
including the ‘last enemy’, which must be destroyed by Christ so that everything
is submitted to God (cf. 1 Cor 15:25-26). Faith in the resurrection implies not
simply the survival of the soul, but victory over death.[44]
Moreover, human beings are saved not only in soul but in the body itself.
Nothing that makes up a human being’s identity and humanity remains outside the
new creation offered by Christ. Finally, this gift will be acquired for ever,
because it unfolds in ‘the life of the world to come’, the eschăton fully
realised. Since Easter, no sin has the power to separate sinners from God - at
least if they grasp the hand of the Risen Crucified One, who reaches out to the
depths of the abyss to offer himself to the lost sheep: ‘Neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to
come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, will be able to
separate us from the love of God made manifest in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom
8:38-39).
33. Because Christ saves us as true God, the resurrection means for us entry
into divine life, humanisation and divinisation at the same time, as Jesus’
commentary on Psalm 81:6 in John 10:14 testifies: ‘You are gods’.[45]
And because he saves us as Son, begotten of the Father, this divinisation is
adoptive filiation and conformation to Christ; it is entry by the Holy Spirit
into the Father's love. We are loved and regenerated by the very love with which
the Father eternally loves and begets the Son. This is the soteriological
implication of the fatherhood of God professed by Nicaea. Finally, because
Christ saves us as Son, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, this
filiation is a real immersion into the Trinitarian relations. This is why the
Symbol is born of the Trinitarian profession of baptismal faith, and why baptism
is performed ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Spirit.’ The immensity of the gift thus revealed is realised in the mystery of
Christ's Ascension: ‘he ascended into heaven’, showing that Christ himself is
‘our heaven.’[46] The exalted Son
will send the promised gift of God, the Spirit of Pentecost. Any more restricted
vision of salvation would not be truly Christian.
3.2 The immensity of the human vocation to divine Love
34. All of the above cannot fail to have consequences for the Christian vision
of the human being. The human being is also revealed in the superabundant
greatness of his or her vocation as homo semper major. The Nicene symbol
does not include an anthropological article in the strict sense, but human
beings, in their vocation to divine filiation in Jesus, could be described as an
object of faith. In accordance with the Sacred Scriptures, their true
identity is revealed by the mystery of Christ and the mystery of salvation as a
mystery in the strict sense, analogous to that of God and Christ, even if
they surpass it incomparably.
35. This great mystery is linked first and foremost to that of the Triune God
and of Christ. The revelation of the fatherhood of God is the revelation of the
mystery of fatherhood itself: ‘I bow my knees before the Father, from whom all
fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named.’ (Eph 3:14) The revelation of the
Only-begotten Son, particularly in John, is the manifestation of filiation in
the proper sense, which flows ontologically from the First Begetting and points
to the mystery of the Trinity itself. In a kind of inversion of the relationship
of understanding, it is Trinitarian paternity and filiation that illuminate and
purify human paternity, maternity, filiation and fraternity, which are
culturally situated and marked by sin. First of all, divine paternity shows that
filiation is the most profound characteristic of human beings: each one is a
gift given to himself or herself by God the Father and called to receive himself
or herself from God and, in Him, from others and from the created world around
them in order to become ever more themselves. For this reason, their identity
and vocation are particularly revealed in Christ, the Incarnate Son, the
‘perfect human being’ who, ‘in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father
and of his love, fully reveals human beings to themselves and makes clear to
them the sublimity of their vocation.’[47]
On the other hand, human beings are also called to participate in the mystery of
fatherhood by being fathers and mothers in flesh and spirit. In the image of
divine fatherhood, human fatherhood and motherhood imply self-giving, a full
equality between parents and children, between those who give and those who
receive, but also a difference and a taxis between them. Finally, there
is no truly Christian anthropology that is not pneumatological. Only the Spirit
‘who gives life’ fully humanises human beings, making them sons and daughters,
fathers and mothers. Analogously, we can undoubtedly speak of a form of
co-spiration of the Spirit, or of a conjoined inspiration,[48]
because our most fruitful actions and words are commensurate with the
cooperation they offer to the Spirit, who through them consoles, elevates and
guides. In this way, the truth and meaning of human fatherhood, filiation and
fecundity must be revealed, because they are not just natural or cultural
realities, but a participation in the way of being of the Triune God. They
cannot be understood in depth without Revelation, nor can they be exercised
without grace. This is yet more good news to be rediscovered today from Nicaea.
36. In a sense, the homoousios itself can have an anthropological
significance. A human being has given access to God. Of course, Christ says in
his own unique way: ‘He who sees me sees the Father’ (Jn 14:9), because of the
mystery of the hypostatic union. However, this unique union in him is consistent
with the mystery of the human being ‘created in the image and likeness of God’
(Gen 1:27). In this sense, every human being truly reflects God, and makes God
known and accessible. Pope Paul VI expressed this paradox by emphasising that
‘to know the human being, the true human being, the integral human being, we
must know God’, but also that ‘to know God, we must know the human being.’[49]
These words must be taken in their fullest sense: not only does every human
being show us the image of God, but it is not possible to know God without going
via the human being. Moreover, as we saw above (§ 22), the Church will use the
expression homoousios to express the community of nature of Christ as a
true human being, ‘born of a woman (Gal 4:4), the Virgin Mary, with all human
beings.[50] The two sides of this
double ‘consubstantiality’ of the Incarnate Son reinforce each other to provide
a profound and effective foundation for the fraternity of all human beings. We
are, in a sense, brothers and sisters of Christ in the unity of the same human
nature: “So he had to make himself like his brothers in every way.” (Heb 2:17;
cf. 2:11-12) It is this bond in humanity that enables Christ, consubstantial
with the Father, to draw us into his Sonship with the Father, and to make us
children of God, his own brothers and sisters, and, consequently, brothers and
sisters to one another in a new, radical, and indestructible sense.
37. The mystery of humanity in its great dignity is also illumined by the
eschatological dimension of the Nicene symbol. Faith in the ‘resurrection of the
dead’, also called the ‘resurrection of the flesh’,[51]
affirms the beauty of the body and the beauty of what is lived in the world
through the body, despite human fragility and limitations. It affirms the value
of this concrete personal body, which will be raised up and transfigured, but
will remain numerically identical.[52]
It thus makes an ethical demand: if the genuine acts of love performed in and by
the body in this life are in some way the first steps of the risen life, respect
for the body implies living everything that touches it uprightly and with
purity. It should be noted that Christologies that do not posit the full
humanity of Christ run the risk of importing a conception of salvation as an
escape from the body and the world, rather than as our full humanisation. Yet
this anchoring in the world and the body, created good and fulfilled by the new
creation, is one of the hallmarks of Christianity. Here we find the deep link
between creation and salvation: all the human traits of Jesus received from
Mary, his mother, are good news, and they invite every human being to consider
what makes his or her own humanity concrete as good news.
38. Moreover, the hope of the resurrection, like that of ‘eternal life in the
world to come’, attests to the immense value of the individual person, who is
called not to disappear into nothingness or into the whole, but to an eternal
relationship with the God who chose each person before the foundation of the
world (cf. Eph 1:4). The election of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the
irrevocable covenant with the people of Israel already reveal the covenant that
God wishes to make with all nations and every human being in indestructible
fidelity. In the same way, the incarnation of the eternal Son in a single human
being confirms, establishes and fulfils the inalienable dignity of the person as
a brother or sister of Jesus Christ.
39. Our world today has an immense need to rediscover those aspects of the
mystery of man that present him in his greatness, without ignoring his misery:
‘The human being infinitely surpasses the human being,’ said Blaise Pascal.[53]
This Christian conviction challenges all forms of anthropological reductionism.
Faith in the paternity, filiation and fruitful (‘pneumatic’) inspiration of
human beings underpins and guides every authentic conception of human autonomy,
freedom and creativity. These are rooted in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
for whom omnipotence, wisdom and love are one in the gift of self. Conversely,
the loss of faith in the resurrection and eternal life will lead to a refusal to
give the body its rightful place and to the sacred value of each individual in
his or her uniqueness and transcendence. Yet the Creator has revealed his
intentions to us: ‘You wanted them to be a little less than gods, crowning them
with glory and honour.’ (Ps 8:6)
3.3 The beauty of the gift of the Church and of baptism
40. The various threads woven so far are tied together in the ecclesiological
and sacramental affirmations of the Creed. The faith of Nicaea also means
believing in the Church ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’ and in baptism ‘for
the forgiveness of sins’. The Church and baptism are to be celebrated as gifts
that are also semper majora. Because they confirm and manifest the
superabundant fullness of all that is set out in the rest of the Symbol, they
are the paradoxical objects of faith: it is a question of recognising in them
much more than can be seen. The Church is one beyond her visible
divisions, holy beyond the sins of her members and the errors committed
through her institutional structures, catholic and apostolic beyond
divisions of identity or culture and the doctrinal and ethical turmoil that
constantly agitates her. In this sense, both ecclesiological ‘monophysitism’ and
‘Arianism’ must be avoided: the former underestimates, or even obscures, the
human dimension of the Church, while the latter overlooks the divine dimension
of the Church in favour of a purely sociological and functional vision.
Similarly, in the faith, baptism is understood as the source of new life and
purification from sin beyond what is visible in the imperfect lives of the
baptised themselves which are sometimes distant from God. It unfolds and
elevates the inviolable dignity of every human being by conforming them to
Christ, priest, prophet and king.
41. To ‘believe’ in the Church and to ‘confess’ a single baptism is to receive a
gift of faith which makes it possible for believers to discern at the very heart
of their human and fragile dimension the active and sanctifying presence of the
Holy Spirit. The Spirit makes the Church one, holy, catholic and apostolic, and
gives baptism its efficacy. To ‘believe’ in the Church and in baptism is also to
perceive in and through the Church the saving action of Christ. Just as Christ
is the fundamental sacrament of God, his real and active presence in the real
symbol of his humanity, so the Church is the ‘universal sacrament of salvation’.[54]
Finally, to ‘believe’ in the Church and in baptism is to discern in them the
presence of the Triune God. The Church is semper major, for she finds her
source and her foundations in the Triune God, and in her live the Father, the
incarnate Son and the Spirit. In her, the faith of Nicaea is proclaimed and
celebrated – through baptism and the other sacraments: ‘Glory to you, Father and
Son with the Holy Spirit in the holy Church.’[55]
42. At the crossroads between soteriology and anthropology, believing in the
Church and confessing a single baptism confirms and unfolds the immensity of
salvation and the mystery of the human being. Salvation is not simply an
individual process, but a communal and supernatural one, received through the
cooperation of other people who are our neighbours, and producing spiritual
fruit for others who are also our neighbours.[56]
This sheds light on the nature of the human being, who is not an isolated monad
but a social being, inserted into a family, a nation, a community of faith, and
into the whole of humanity.[57]
Consequently, faith in the Church and in baptism implies that redemption is
worked out in visible acts and structures, linked to the corporeal dimension of
the individual and the social body, which unfold in history. These are the locus
of the life-giving and inspiring Spirit, who works between and beyond their
limits to reach every human being. At bottom, by bearing witness to the link
between the individual and the whole, between corporeality and inscription in
history, the Church is part of the work of Christ who ‘fully reveals human
beings to themselves.’[58] In a
particular way, as the ‘sacrament of unity’,[59]
the Church professed by the faith of Nicaea is the sign and instrument of the
unity of all these aspects of the human person and of humanity as a whole: the
Christian vision of humanity explodes the narrowness of all reductionisms that
reject either the community in favour of the individual or the individual in
favour of the collective, and that do not tend towards unity.
4. Celebrating the immensity of salvation together: the ecumenical significance
of the faith of Nicaea and hope for a common date for the celebration of Easter
43. The faith of Nicaea, in all its beauty and grandeur, is the common faith of
all Christians. All are united in the profession of the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol, even if not everyone gives the Council and its
decisions the same status. The year 2025 is therefore an invaluable opportunity
to emphasise that what we have in common is much stronger, quantitatively and
qualitatively, than what divides us: together, we believe in the Triune God, in
Christ as truly human and truly God, and in salvation through Jesus Christ,
according to the Scriptures read in the Church and under the guidance of the
Holy Spirit. Together, we believe in the Church, baptism, the resurrection of
the dead, and eternal life. The Council of Nicaea is particularly revered by the
Eastern Churches, not simply as one Council among many or the first in a series,
but as the Council par excellence, which promulgated the confession of
faith of the ‘318 Orthodox Fathers’.
44. Consequently, the year 2025 is an opportunity for all Christians together to
celebrate this faith and the Council that gave it expression. Theological
ecumenism rightly focuses its attention and efforts on the unresolved knots of
our differences, but it is undoubtedly just as fruitful, if not more fruitful,
to celebrate together, in order to move towards the re-establishment of
full communion between all Christians, so that the world may believe. We have
already emphasised how the insistence of the different Christian traditions
makes it possible to highlight the richness of the text of the Symbol (cf.
supra § 17). The common celebration of Nicaea could be an ecumenical journey
of mutual enrichment that will offer, along the way, a better understanding of
the mystery, greater communion between ecclesial traditions, and a stronger
attachment to the common profession of the Christian faith.
45. One of the aims of Nicaea was to establish a common date for Easter to
express the unity of the Church throughout the Oikoumenē. Unfortunately,
there is still no unanimous agreement on a common date. The divergence of
Christians over the most important feast in their calendar creates pastoral
damage within communities, even to the point of dividing families, and causes
scandal among non-Christians, thus affecting the witness given to the Gospel.
This is why Pope Francis, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, and other Church
leaders have repeatedly called for a common date for celebrating Easter. It so
happens that in 2025, Easter is celebrated on the same date in both East and
West. Would this not be a providential opportunity to continue celebrating the
Passion and Resurrection of Christ, the ‘feast of feasts’ (Byzantine Matins of
Easter), in communion across all Christian communities? There are a number of
realistic enough proposals for an undivided date. On this question, the Catholic
Church remains open to dialogue and to an ecumenical solution. Already in the
appendix to the Constitution
Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican
Council did not oppose the introduction of a new calendar, but stressed that
this should be done ‘with the consent of those to whom this question is of
importance, especially of the brethren separated from communion with the
Apostolic See’.[60] Note the
importance attached by the Eastern world to the elements laid down in the
aftermath of Nicaea to determine the date of Easter: Easter is to be celebrated
‘on the first Sunday following the full moon that follows or coincides with the
vernal equinox’.[61] Sunday evokes
the resurrection of Christ on the first day of the week, while the full moon
following the spring equinox recalls the Jewish origin of the festival, 14
Nissan, but also the cosmic dimension of the resurrection, since the spring
equinox evokes the moment when the length of day prevails over that of night and
nature comes back to life after the winter.
46. It should be noted that it was at the Council of Nicaea that the Church
decisively chose to separate itself from the date of the Jewish Passover. The
argument that the Council wanted to distance itself from Judaism has been put
forward, based on the Emperor Constantine's letters as reported by Eusebius,
which include anti-Jewish justifications for the choice of an Easter date not
linked to 14 Nissan.[62] However, a
distinction must be made between the motivations attributed to the Emperor and
those of the Council Fathers. In any case, nothing in the Council's canons
expresses this refusal of the Jewish way of doing things. We cannot ignore the
importance for the Church of the unity of the calendar and the choice of Sunday
to express faith in the resurrection. Here today, as the Church celebrates the
1,700th anniversary of Nicaea, are once again some aims for
reflecting on the date of Easter. Besides the question of the calendar, it would
be desirable always to better underline the relationship between Easter and
Pesaḥ in theology, in homilies as well as in catechesis, in order to reach a
broader and deeper understanding of the meaning of Easter.
47. At Easter vigils and in every baptismal liturgy, the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol is proclaimed in its most solemn form, which is
dialogue. This profession of faith, which is the foundation of individual
Christian life and the life of the Church, will find its whole strength if it is
rooted in the revelation made to our ‘elder brothers’ and our ‘fathers in the
faith’[63] and lived in visible
communion by all Christ’s disciples.
Chapter 2
The Symbol of Nicaea in the life of believers:
‘We believe as we baptize and we pray as we believe.’
Introduction: Living out the faith we confess
48. The faith professed at Nicaea has a rich dogmatic content that was decisive
in establishing Christian doctrine. However, the challenge of this doctrine was
and is still to nourish and guide the life of the believer. In this sense, it is
possible to highlight a real spiritual treasure of the Council of Nicaea and its
Creed, a ‘source of living water’ from which the Church is called to draw today
and always. It was to protect access to this living water that Saint Anthony
agreed to leave his hermitage to testify against the Arians in Alexandria.[64]
This treasure is directly manifested in the way in which the Nicene faith was
born of the lex orandi and nourished by it.[65]
Moreover, the synods never intended to limit their debates to the speculative
domain of statements of faith. On the contrary, the participants in these synods
were keen to discuss the whole of ecclesial life, the best way to imbibe and
practise the truths of the faith on a daily basis and, conversely, to regulate
their teaching on liturgical, sacramental and even ethical orthopraxis.[66]
The bishops, in short, spiritually brought with them to the councils the members
of the body of the Church, with whom they shared the life of faith and prayer,
and with whom they sang the praise and glory of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit, one God. To grasp the spiritual and theological significance of the
Nicene dogma, we need to explore how it was received in the liturgical and
sacramental practice, catechesis and preaching, prayer and hymns, of the fourth
century.
1. Baptism and Trinitarian faith
49. Even before the doctrine of the Trinity was developed theologically,
faith in the Trinity was at the foundation of the Christian life
celebrated in baptism. The profession of baptismal faith pronounced in the
sacramental formula of baptism did not simply express a theoretical mystery but
the living faith that referred to the reality of salvation given by God, and
therefore to God himself. Baptismal faith provides a ‘knowledge’ of God that is
at the same time an access to the living God. Thus, the apologist Athenagoras
asserts: ‘There are [...] human beings [...] who allow themselves to be guided
solely by the desire to know the true God and his Word, to know what is
the unity of the Son with the Father, what is the communion of the Father with
the Son, what is the Spirit, what is the union and distinction of the three
persons thus united, the Spirit, the Son and the Father.’[67]
50. This is why the baptismal formula, in which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit
are placed on an equal footing, constitutes the central argument against Arius
and his followers, much more than recourse to theological reasoning. This is as
true of Ambrose[68] and Hilary[69]
as it is of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Ephrem the Syrian.[70]
Likewise, Athanasius insists that the Son is named in the baptismal formula not
because the Father is insufficient, nor simply by chance, but because:
He is the Word of God and God’s own Wisdom and, being his radiance (apaugasma),
he is always with the Father. For this reason, when the Father dispenses
grace, he can give it only in his Son, for the Son is in the Father as the
radiance of light [...] He whom the Father baptizes, the Son also baptizes, and
he whom the Son baptizes is sanctified in the Holy Spirit.[71]
51. That said, for Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers, it is not simply a
matter of pronouncing the Trinitarian formula, but baptism presupposes faith in
the divinity of Jesus Christ. Thus, the teaching of right faith is necessary and
forms part of the proper practice of baptism. Athanasius cites as a basis the
formulation of the precept in Mt 28:19: “Go ... teach ... and baptise.”[72]
This is why Athanasius – like Basil and Gregory of Nyssa[73]
– denies all efficacy to Arian baptism, because those who consider the Son to be
a creature do not have a correct conception of God the Father: he
who does not recognise the Son does not understand the Father either and does
not ‘possess’ the Father, because the Father never began to be Father.[74]
2. The Symbol of Nicaea as a confession of faith
52. Not only is the Nicene confession of faith the expression of baptismal
faith, but it may have come directly from a baptismal symbol of the Church of
Caesarea in Palestine (if we believe what Eusebius says[75]).
Three additions would have been made: ‘...that is, of the substance of the
Father’, ‘begotten, not created’, and ‘consubstantial with the Father (homoousios)’.
In this way, it is established with overwhelming clarity that the one who ‘took
flesh for us human beings ... and suffered’ is God, homoousion tō Patri.
Yet while he is ‘of the substance of the Father’ (ek tēs ousias tou Patros),
he is distinct from the Father insofar as he is his Son. Through him, who
‘became human for our salvation’, we know what it means that the Triune God ‘is
love’ (1 Jn 4:16). These additions are essential and mark the proper originality
and decisive contribution of Nicaea, but at the same time it must be constantly
emphasised that the Symbol, as a symbol of faith, is originally rooted in the
framework of the liturgy, which is its vital environment and therefore the
framework in which it takes on its full meaning. It is certainly not a
theoretical exposition but an act of the baptismal celebration, which is
enriched by the rest of the liturgy and in turn enlightens it. Our
contemporaries may sometimes have the impression that the creed is a highly
theoretical statement because they are unaware of its liturgical and baptismal
roots.
53. In this sense, the faith of Nicaea remains a ‘symbolon’ (‘ekthesis’,
‘pistis’), i.e. a confession of faith. It can be distinguished from an
interpretation or a more precise technical theological definition designed to
protect the faith (‘oros’, ‘definitio’), as proposed, for
example, by the Council of Chalcedon. As a symbol, the Nicene Confession is a
positive formulation and clarification of biblical faith.[76]
It does not claim to be a new definition, but rather an evocation of the faith
of the apostles: ‘Christ gave this faith, the apostles proclaimed
it, the Fathers of all our Oikoumenē gathered at Nicaea handed it
on (paradosis).’[77]
54. In the same way, it is because of its status as a confession of faith and
precisely of the apostolic faith, and not as a definition or teaching, that the
Nicene symbol is considered in the following period (at least until the end of
the fifth century) as the decisive proof of orthodoxy.[78]
This is why it was used as the basic text at subsequent councils. Thus, Ephesus
and Chalcedon were intended to be interpretations of the Nicene Creed: they
emphasised their agreement with Nicaea and opposed the positions taken by those
who dissented from Nicaea. When the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Confession of
Faith was read out at the Council of Chalcedon, the assembled bishops exclaimed:
‘This is our faith. This is what we were baptised in, this is what we baptise
in! Pope Leo believed thus, Cyril believed thus.’[79]
Note that the profession of faith may be expressed in the singular – ‘I believe’
– but it is often in the plural: ‘we believe’; similarly, the Lord's prayer is
in the plural: ‘Our Father...’. My radically personal and singular faith is just
as radically part of that of the Church as a community of faith. The Nicene
Symbol and the Greek original of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol open with
the plural ‘we believe, ‘to bear witness that in this “We”, all the Churches
were in communion, and that all Christians professed the same faith.’[80]
55. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, to this day ‘Nicaea’ – ‘the
confession of faith of the 318 Orthodox Fathers’[81]
– is regarded in the Eastern Churches as the Council par excellence, that is,
not as ‘one Council among others’, nor even as ‘the first in a series’, but as
the norm of the right Christian faith. The ‘318 Fathers’ are explicitly
mentioned in the liturgy of Jerusalem. Moreover, in the Eastern Churches, unlike
the Western Churches, Nicaea has also been given its own commemoration in the
liturgical calendar. It should be noted that the disciplinary issues dealt with
at Nicaea were given a different weighting from the outset from that of the
confession of faith. While majority decisions are possible for disciplinary
matters, it is the apostolic tradition that is decisive for matters of faith:
‘With regard to the date of Easter, the Fathers wrote: “It has been decided.” As
regards the faith, they did not write: “It has been decided”, but “So believes
the Catholic Church!”[82]
3. Going deeper in preaching and catechesis
56. The Fathers of the East and West did not content themselves with arguing
with the help of theological treatises, but also clarified the Nicene faith in
sermons addressed to the people, in order to protect the faithful against
erroneous interpretations, generally designated by the term ‘Arian’ – even if
the ‘Homoeans’ of the West at the time of Augustine differed greatly from the
‘Neo-Arians’ of the East in their argumentation. The theological view that the
Son is not ‘true God from true God’, but only the Father’s most eminent
creature, and that he is not coeternal with him, was recognised by the Fathers
as a persistent threat, and combated, even independently of actual opponents.
The prologue to John's gospel offered just such an opportunity to explain the
relationship between the Father and the Son, or between ‘God’ and his ‘Word’, in
accordance with the Nicene confession.[83]
Chromatius of Aquileia (ordained bishop in 387/388, died in 407), for example,
passed on the Nicene faith to his followers without using technical terminology.[84]
Even the Fathers of the Church, who were sceptical in principle about
‘theological debates’, took a very clear stand against ‘Arian impiety’ (‘asebeia’,
‘impietas’): the Arians understood neither the ‘eternal begetting of the
Son’ nor the ‘original equality-eternity’ of the Father and the Son.[85]
They were even mistaken in their monotheism by accepting a second, subordinate
divinity. Their worship was therefore depraved and erroneous.
57. Thus, in his catecheses, John Chrysostom explains the baptismal faith that
had been validly formulated at Nicaea,[86]
and distinguishes the right faith not only from Homoean doctrine, but also from
Sabellian doctrine: Christians believe in God as ‘one essence, three
hypostases’. Augustine makes a similar argument in his instructions to
candidates for baptism.[87] Gregory
of Nyssa's Oratio catechetica magna, the most voluminous parts of which
are devoted to the eternal and incarnate Word of God, can be considered the
masterpiece of a catechesis that was clearly intended for those who should relay
it, namely bishops and catechists. The theme is not only the relationship
between the Son-Word and the Father (chapters 1, 3, 4), but also the
significance of the Incarnation as a redemptive action (chapter 5).
Gregory wants to make it clear that birth and death are not something unworthy
of God or incompatible with his perfection (chapters 9 and 10), and explains the
Incarnation in terms of God's love for human beings. But he insists above all on
the fact that Christian baptism is accomplished in the ‘uncreated Trinity’, that
is, in the three co-eternal Persons. It is only in this way that baptism confers
eternal and immortal life: ‘Indeed, he who subjects himself to a created being,
unwittingly places his hope of salvation in that being and not in the divinity.’[88]
58. The heart of the debate is indeed an existential question rather than a
theoretical problem: is baptism linked to ‘establishment in filiation’ (Basil),
to ‘the beginning of eternal life’ (Gregory of Nyssa), to ‘salvation from sin
and death’ (Ambrose[89])? This is
only possible if the Son (and the Holy Spirit) is God. It is only when
God himself becomes ‘one of us’ that there is a real possibility for human
beings to participate in the life of the Trinity, that is, to be ‘divinised’.
4. Prayer to the Son and doxologies
59. The faith of Nicaea serves as a rule for personal and liturgical prayer[90]
and these are marked by Nicaea. Although the ‘invocation of the name of the Lord
(Jesus)’ is already attested to in the New Testament writings[91]
and, above all, the hymns to Christ[92]
bear witness to the offering of praise and adoration to him, prayer to the Son
became a source of controversy in the Arian crisis.
60. Taking their cue from certain texts of Origen,[93]
the Arians of the fourth century, as well as followers of Origen in the fifth
and seventh centuries, were particularly opposed to liturgical
prayer to the Son. The Arians had an interest in highlighting the passages of
Scripture that show Jesus himself praying, in order to emphasise his inferiority
in relation to the Father. Combined with the (Apollinarian) conception, also
widespread among the Arians, according to which the Logos takes the place of
Jesus' soul, the subordination of the Logos to the Father thus seemed to
be proven. For them, therefore, prayer to the Son was inappropriate. In favour
of their point of view, the Arians argued using the traditional wording of the
doxology, which is of great importance, particularly in Eastern
liturgies: ‘Glory and adoration to the Father through (dia
/ per) the Son in (en / in) the Holy Spirit.’[94].
The difference in prepositions was invoked as proof of an essential
difference in persons. The Arians sought to use the liturgy – recognised as a
witness to the faith of the Church – to prove what they considered to be
theologically justified.
61. On the other hand, the defenders of Nicaea argued that the practice of
prayer should correspond to faith, but that faith in turn
corresponded to baptism. The baptismal formula manifests the equal
dignity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It follows that prayer –
whether personal or liturgical – can and must also be addressed to the Son.
Although they did not reject the ancient formula of the doxology, but defended
its orthodox meaning,[95] they
preferred other formulations and prepositions: ‘tō Patri, kai...kai’, ‘tôi
Patri, dia... sun’, which are also attested in the biblical and liturgical
tradition.[96] Basil thus refers,
among others, to the very ancient hymn ‘Phōs hilăron’ (perhaps from the
2nd century), in which the Father, Son, and Spirit are the object of a
song of adoration.[97]
62. The principle, «we are baptized, so, also, do we believe; as we believe, so,
also, do we give glory»[98] also
applies to personal prayer. The invocation of Jesus – as practised
in forms of prayer to Jesus, especially in monastic circles – is explicitly
justified by the invocation of ‘homoousios tôi Patri’. ‘When we say
“Jesusˮ, explains Chenouté, a Coptic father of the fifth century, ‘the Most Holy
Trinity is also named.’ When the Incarnate Son is invoked, he is not invoked
separately from the Father and the Holy Spirit. Anyone who does not want to pray
to Jesus is following the ‘new impiety’; he does not understand anything
about the Trinity, nor does he understand anything about “Jesus”.’[99]
The way someone prays shows what they believe.
63. Correctness in prayer has a soteriological dimension. It is Gregory of Nyssa
who issues the most forceful warning here: the hope of the believer is more than
morality in the current sense of the term, but is also expressed in prayer. Hope
is directed towards the divinisation worked by God: if ‘the first great hope is
no longer present in those who allow themselves to be led into doctrinal error’,
the consequence is that ‘there was no advantage in behaving correctly with the
help of the commandments’. And Gregory continues
So we are baptised as we received it, in the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit; webelieve as we are baptised; for it is fitting that faith should be in accord with confession; we glorify
as we believe, for it is not natural that glory should fight against faith. But
that in which we believe we also glorify. Also, since faith is in the Father,
the Son and the Holy Spirit, and since faith, glory and baptism are mutually
dependent, we do not distinguish between the glory of the Father, of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.[100]
64. The addition of the Trinitarian doxology at the end of each psalm, the order
of which is attributed to Pope Damasus (d. 384 AD), can be understood along
these lines. Cassiodorus notes that all heresies are thus reduced to nothing:
O truly holy, spotless, perfect mother Church! […] Through all the psalms and
all the canticles you interpose praise of the holy Trinity, so that confession
and the sweetest glory might be rendered to the Persons of God to whom belong
the consecrated words we utter […]. Though Sabellius goes detestably astray on
the issue of the Fater, though Arius like a madman is awry on the Son, though
Manes sacrilegiously denies the Holy Spirit, though others evily detract from
the Old Testament and some do not pursue the grace of the New.[101]
This is particularly the case with the addition ‘sicut erat in principio...’, which has been understood as an unequivocal profession of anti-Arian
faith.[102]
5. Theology in hymns
65. Finally, hymns were a locus that gave expression to the Nicene faith, which
found a place in the life of the believer, informed by Nicaea. Thus many hymns
end with the Trinitarian doxology. Moreover, confrontation with the Arian heresy
played an important role in the development of Christian poetry. Hymns and songs
were first composed in the East,[103]
in response to the propaganda poems of heterodox groups. As for the West, it
could even be said that its most important theological contribution in the
fourth century was the composition of hymns.
66. Apart from John Chrysostom, it was above all Ephrem the Syrian (306-373)
who, in his theological poetry (which later left its mark on all classical
Syriac literature) and especially in the hymns De fide and De
nativitate, sang of the mystery of Christ: Christ is God, despite the
weakness of his human nature; Christ's kenosis is such a great miracle only
because he is God and remains God in this self-emptying.[104]
It is with profound piety that Ephrem describes the intra-trinitarian relations:
the Son is in the Father ‘before all time’, he is ‘equal to the Father
and yet distinct from him.’[105]
He readily uses the image of the sun, its light and its heat, which are joined
in unity.[106] He constantly
refers to the three ‘names’ to which the divine reality corresponds and in which
‘our baptism and justification consist.’[107]
He does all this while making clear the context of the Nicene faith, since he
cites ‘the glorious synod’, clearly referring to Nicaea.[108]
Other Syriac theologian-poets of the fifth century, such as Isaac of Antioch and
Mar Balai, composed sermons and metrical chants addressed to Christ himself,
explicitly glorifying him with divine attributes: ‘Praise be to Him [Jesus
Christ] and to His Father, and glory to the Holy Spirit’ – ‘Praise be to
Him, the Most High, who came to redeem us, praise be to Him, the Almighty, whose
movement of the head governs the world.’[109]
67. Hilary learned to sing hymns during his exile and introduced them to Gaul;
Ambrose also attests to having adopted the ‘custom of the East’ during the
fierce conflicts with the Arians in Milan in 386-87. The Son is ‘always Son,
just as the Father is always Father. How else could the Father bear this
name if he had no Son?’, Hilary points out in the hymn Ante saecula
qui manens, in which he describes the ‘double birth of the Son, who was born
of the Father, for the Father who knows no birth, and born of the Virgin Mary,
for the world’.
68. Unlike Hilary's highly theological hymns, which scarcely found a place in
the liturgy, Ambrose's hymns quickly became famous everywhere and gave powerful
encouragement to the faith, as Ambrose himself intended them. His morning hymn
Splendor paternae gloriae could be seen as a commentary on the Nicene
Confession. Particularly striking are the final stanzas of some hymns, which
emphasise the equality of the Son with the Father, ‘Aequalis aeterno Patri...’,
or which address the Son directly, ‘Iesu, tibi sit gloria ... cum Patre
et almo Spiritu’. In a very short hymn, perhaps written by Ambrose,
the confession of the one God in three persons is almost set down in verse as a
key phrase for the faithful: “O lux beata trinitas, et principalis unitas...”.
69. Besides Ambrose, it is above all Prudentius (Aurelius Prudentius Clemens,
348-415/25) whose hymns are important for Christology. The Spanish poet was
particularly impressed by the true divinity and humanity of the Redeemer, in
whom our new creation is founded:
Christ is the figure of the Father, and we the figure and image of Christ ; we
are made after the likeness of the Lord by the goodness of the Father, and
Christ was to come into our likeness after ages of time.
Christus forma Patris, nos Christi forma et imago;
Condimur in faciem Domini bonitate paterna
Venturo in nostram faciem post saecula Christo.[110]
Chapter 3
Nicaea as a theological and ecclesial event
70. To celebrate Nicaea is to grasp how the Council remains new. This
eschatological newness, inaugurated on Easter morning, continues to renew the
Church 1,700 years after the event of the resurrection. It is indeed an event
in the strongest sense, a turning-point that is part of the fabric of
history with its concatenations, but is also a point of concentration,
introducing a real novelty and exerting a decisive influence on what follows.
Depending on the language, the term ‘event’ refers to what ‘comes to’, the
ad-ventus (avènement, Avent, avvenimento), or what ‘comes from’
(évènement, event), to the production of a fact (acontecimiento)
or to the appearance of the new (Ereignis). Thus, Nicaea is the
expression of a turning-point in human thought that comes to, comes forth,
occurs, which has come about through the Revelation of the One and Triune God in
Jesus, which makes the human spirit fruitful by giving it new content and new
capacities. It is an ‘Event of Wisdom’. Likewise, Nicaea, which was after the
event described as the first ecumenical council, was also the expression
of a turning point-in the way the Church structured herself and ensured her
unity and the truth of her doctrine through the same confession of faith: it was
an ‘Ecclesial Event’. Evidently, in both cases, the newness is based on a prior
process, on a given reality, the very reality it transforms. The Event of Wisdom
presupposes human culture, assumes it, so to speak, in order to purify and
transfigure it. The Ecclesial Event is based on the preceding evolution of the
structures of the Church of the first centuries, itself rooted in the Jewish and
Greco-Roman heritage.
71. Now the source of these two events is another, of divine initiative, the
event of God's Revelation, the ‘event of Jesus Christ’. This is the Newness par
excellence: the Novus is the Novum.[111]
It is Revelation itself, while the Wisdom Event and the Ecclesial Event
are part of the transmission of this primordial gift.[112]
In it, God makes a covenant with a people in order to make a covenant with all
peoples; he assumes a humanity in order to assume all humanity. Nicaea is the
expression and the fruit of the Newness of Revelation, and it is for this reason
that the Council of 325 offers a paradigm for every period of renewal of
Christian thought, as well as of the structures of the Church. What is more,
because Nicaea is born of the Novum that is Christ, it can be understood
in a way that is ever renewed and it can continually enrich the life of the
Church. It is therefore a question of first exploring the event that is the
source, the event of Jesus Christ, and then examining its consequences for human
thought and for the structures of the Church.
1. The Christ event: ‘No one has ever seen God. The one-begotten Son has
revealed him.’ (Jn 1:18).
1.1 Christ, the Incarnate Word, reveals the Father
72. The Nicene symbol is the expression, the putting into words, of an
unheard-of, assured and fully salvific access to God, offered by the event of
Jesus Christ. In the Incarnation, life, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension into
Heaven of the Word consubstantial with the Father, witnessed in Sacred Scripture
and in the faith of the Apostolic Church, God semper major offers, on his
own initiative, a knowledge and access to himself that only he can give, and
which are themselves beyond what human beings can imagine and even hope for.[113]
In fact, the New Testament transmits to the Church of all times, down the
centuries, the testimony that Jesus gave of himself and that the Father, in the
light and power of the Holy Spirit, confirmed it once and for all[114]
in the Passover of the death, resurrection and ascension into heaven of the Son
made flesh and the pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit, in the fullness of
time, ‘propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem’. So, if it is true
that ‘no one has ever seen God’, the faith of the Church testifies that Jesus,
‘the only Son of the Father, revealed him’ (Jn 1:18; cf. Jn 3:16.18 and 1 Jn
4:9). This testimony is summed up in the answer Jesus gave to the apostle
Philip, who asked him: ‘Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied.’
Jesus replied, Philip, have I been with you for so long and you do not know me? He who has seen
me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ Do you not
believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? What I say to you I am
not speaking from myself, but the Father, dwelling in me, does his works (Jn
14:8-11).
73. If Jesus makes us see the Father, everything in him is access to the Father. Christ, in his fragile and vulnerable humanity, is the true expression of God
the Father: ‘to see him is to see the Father. (cf. Jn 14:9)[115]
As a result, God did not first hide himself on Golgotha under the powerlessness
of the Crucified One, only to manifest himself on Easter morning, showing
himself at last as he really is, as all-powerful. On the contrary, the love of
Jesus Christ, who permits himself to be crucified and who, by suffering physical
death, descends to the place where the sinner is imprisoned by sin (the šəʾôl
or hell), is the revelation of the Love of the Triune God who does not operate
by force, but who is precisely stronger than death and sin. It was precisely
before the cross that Mark has a pagan centurion say: “Truly, this was the Son
of God.” (Mk 15:39) As Pope Benedict XVI said in his book on Jesus,
The Cross is the true ‘summit’. It is the summit of love ‘to the end’ (Jn 13:1).
On the cross, Jesus is ‘at the summit’, at the same height as God, who is love.
It is there that we can ‘know’, that we can understand the ‘I am’. The burning
bush is the Cross. The highest claim to revelation, the ‘I am’ and the cross of
Jesus are inseparable.[116]
74. The knowledge of God through Christ does not offer a simple doctrinal
content, but brings us into salvific communion with God, because it plunges us,
so to speak, into the very heart of the reality, or better, the person to be
known and loved. The prologue to John's Gospel is an expression of the highest
contemplation of the mystery of God, manifested to us in Jesus so that we may
enter, in the grace of the Holy Spirit poured out ‘without measure’ (Jn 3:34),
into the very life of the Triune God revealed by the Logos. The figure of this
Logos echoes not only the divine Logos discerned by Greek thought, but also,
even more profoundly, the Old Testament heritage of the Word of God, the
Dābār witnessed by the Old Testament. For the revelation made to Israel and
passed on in the Old Testament already introduces us to a radically new
knowledge of God that inaugurates this event of Revelation. This Logos, the Son,
“God from God”, who has been with God from the beginning as his Word that
expresses him in all truth, is also God like the Father. In the fullness of
time, the Logos “became flesh and made his dwelling amongst us” (Jn 1:14), so
that those who welcome him receive “the power (exousia) to become
children of God” (Jn 1:14). Admitting human beings to full communion with him,
the Logos made flesh has thus “made them partakers of the divine nature.”[117]
75. This unprecedented and authentic knowledge of and communion with God also
brings about a salvific communion with the human brothers and sisters loved by
God, because the event of Jesus Christ is inseparably communion with God and
with every human being. The faith of the Apostolic Church bears witness to this
communion in Christ and through Christ, within the Trinitarian communion:
We proclaim to you that which was from the beginning, that which we have heard,
that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we have looked upon and
touched with our hands, the Word of life [...], so that you too may have
communion with us. Our communion is with the Father and with the Son, Jesus
Christ. We write these things to you so that our joy may be complete (1 Jn 1:1,
3-4).
Theological tradition emphasises that charity makes us love God and our
neighbour, insofar as the neighbour is a friend of God.[118]
We may think that the three theological virtues introduce us to a full and
radically new knowledge of God and communion with him. But according to the
renewed access to God that they offer, they give us, in addition, a path of
faith towards fraternity, an unheard-of hope in our neighbour, and that charity
which forgives all and urges us to give of ourselves.
1.2 ‘We have the mind (νοῦς) of Christ’ (1 Cor 2:16): analogy of creation and
analogy of charity
76. The event of Jesus Christ, by giving us access to God in an incomparable
way, both gives rise to and implies a ‘way’ of access which is also new and
unique: to accept the Symbol in faith and with understanding, better still to
accept the God who is manifested in it, is to enter into the gaze of Christ
consubstantial with the Father, into the ‘thought’ or the very mens of
Christ and into his relationship with the Father and with others. ‘We have the
mind of Christ (noun Christou),’ exclaims Saint Paul (1 Cor 2:16).[119]
It is a cry of wonder. Here again, Nicaea shows the immensity of God's gift. But
Nicaea also indicates that this is the only way to gain access to what the Creed
expresses, both in letter and in spirit. We cannot contemplate the God of
Jesus Christ, the redemption offered to us, the beauty of the Church and of the
human vocation, and participate in them, without ‘having the mind of Christ’.
Not simply by knowing Christ, but by entering into the very understanding of
Christ, in the sense of a subjective genitive. One cannot fully adhere to the
Symbol or confess it with one's whole being without “the wisdom that is not of
this world”, “revealed by the Holy Spirit”, who alone “searches the depths of
God” (cf. 1 Cor 2:6, 10):
In faith, Christ is not only the one we believe in – the greatest manifestation
of God's love – but also the one with whom we are united precisely in order to
believe. Faith not only looks to Jesus, but looks from Jesus’ point of view,
with his eyes: it is a participation in his way of seeing. [...] Christ’s life,
his way of knowing the Father, of living totally in relationship with him, opens
up a new space for human experience, and we can enter into it.[120]
77. This is possible because Christ sees the Father through his human eyes and
invites us to enter into his gaze. On the other hand, this path requires a
profound transformation of our thinking, of our minds, which must involve
conversion and elevation: ‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed
by the renewal of your mind.’ (Rom 12:2) And this is precisely what the event of
Jesus Christ brings: the mind, the will, the capacity to love, are literally
saved by the Revelation professed at Nicaea. They are purified, oriented, and
transfigured. They take on new strength and unheard-of form and content. Our
faculties can only enter into communion with Christ by being conformed to him in
a process that makes believers ‘like (symmorphizomenos)’ (Phil 3:10) to
the Risen Crucified One in their minds. This new way of thinking is
characterised by the inseparability of knowledge and love. As Pope Francis
points out: ‘Saint Gregory the Great wrote that “amor ipse notitia estˮ, love itself is knowledge, bearing within itself a new logic.’[121]
It is merciful and compassionate knowledge, since mercy is the substance of the
Gospel[122] and reflects the very
character of the God of Jesus Christ, professed in the Nicene symbol. The
renewed mens implies an understanding of analogy revisited in the light
of the mystery of Christ. It holds together what we might call the ‘analogy of
creation’, by virtue of which we perceive the divine presence in the peace of
the cosmic order,[123] and what
we might call the ‘analogy of charity’.[124]
This analogy, inverted so to speak, in the face of the mystery of iniquity and
destruction but illuminated by the stronger mystery of Christ's Passion and
Resurrection, discerns the presence of the God of love at the heart of
vulnerability and suffering. This wisdom of Christ is described in the First
Letter to the Corinthians as that which ‘has made foolish the wisdom of
the world’:
For Christ did not send me to baptise, but to preach the gospel, and to do so
without using the language of human wisdom, which would empty the cross of
Christ of meaning. For the language of the cross is foolishness to those who are
on their way to their ruin, but to those who are on their way to their salvation
it is the power of God. For Scripture says: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the
wise, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject. Where is the wise
man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this world? Has not God made
foolish the wisdom of the world? Since the world, with all its wisdom, failed to
recognise God, God was pleased, by a provision of his wisdom, to save believers
by the proclamation of the Gospel (1 Cor 1:17-25).
This conversion and this transfiguration cannot take place without grace. Human
understanding is revealed to be constitutively ordered for grace and relies on
grace to be fully itself, just like humanity itself.[125]
This is what enables us to understand how the human faculties, restored to
themselves and transfigured by the event of Jesus Christ, are brought to their
fulfilment by growing in the forms of faith, hope and charity, the first fruits
in this world of the life of glory: ‘Have in yourselves the disposition which
was in Christ Jesus.’ (Phil 2:5)
1.3 Entering into knowledge of the Father through the prayer of Christ
78. How can we enter into the ‘thought of Christ’ offered by the Jesus Christ
event? Because Jesus Christ is not simply a teacher or a guide, but God’s own
revelation and truth, those who receive him are more than just recipients of
instruction. Because the person of the Risen One is not an object of the past,
anyone who wants to understand the intimate mystery of Jesus, the revelation of
God in his humanity, must allow himself to be included in his relationship of
communion with the divine Father. This is done through the ‘theologal’ life,
reading the Scriptures in the Church, personal and liturgical prayer, and
especially the Eucharist.
79. Participation by grace in the prayer of Christ is the royal road to
acknowledging Christ, which discloses knowledge of the Father (‘My Father and
your Father’, in Jn 20:17). Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI declares:
“Because prayer is the very centre of the person of Jesus, participation in his
prayer becomes the condition for knowing and acknowledging him.”[126]
In other words, knowledge of Christ begins through an entering into Jesus’ act
of prayer by the one who acknowledges him: ‘Where there is no relationship with
God, he who is profoundly nothing other than a relation to God, to the Father,
cannot be truly known or understood.’[127]
And what applies to each believer also applies to the Church as a whole. It is
only as a community of prayer inscribed in Jesus’ relationship with the Father
that the Church is the ‘we’ that acknowledges Christ as he is evoked in Jn
5:18-20 and in 1 Jn 3:11.[128]
Again, this is what is at stake in the Christological affirmations of the
Symbol: ‘The central affirmation of the dogma, “the Son is consubstantial with
the Father, of the same nature as the Fatherˮ, which sums up all the testimony
of the ancient councils, simply transposes the fact of Jesus’ prayer into
specialised philosophical and theological language, nothing more.’[129]
The faith expressed by Nicaea is born of Jesus' relationship with the Father and
brings us into it, in order to offer human beings and the Church participation
in the knowledge and communion of Jesus with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
2. The event of Wisdom: a new reality for human thought
2.1 Revelation enriches and broadens human thought
80. In proposing the Christological and Trinitarian faith, the Nicene symbol is
part of a movement to make human thought fruitful, to ‘broaden reason’,[130]
through Revelation in its process of transmission. Indeed, the incomparable
access to God provided by the event of Jesus Christ, as well as participation in
the thought (phronēsis) and prayer of Christ, cannot but have a decisive
impact on human thought and language. We are witnessing an ‘Event of Wisdom’,
through which these must be and are enlarged by Revelation so that it can be
expressed in them. And in this very movement, they bear witness to the fact that
they are capable of being conducted beyond themselves. In the history of this
event of Wisdom, Nicaea constitutes a major turning-point, ‘a new and living
way’ (Heb 10:20). Pavel Florensky grasped its decisive importance and expressed
it in vigorous words:
It is impossible not to shudder to recall that unique moment, forever
significant for its philosophical and dogmatic importance, when the thunder of ‘Homoousios’
first rang out over the City of Victory [Nicaea]. It was not a particular
question of theology, but a radical definition the Church of Christ gave itself.
This term alone not only expressed the Christological dogma, but also provided a
spiritual evaluation of the rules of reason. There rationalism was put to death.
There, for the first time, the new principle of rational activity was proclaimed
urbi et orbi.[131]
The Logos that is Christ incarnate, Son of the Father in the communion of the
Holy Spirit, shows that he himself is the measure of all human logos, which he
can enliven and expand, but of which he can also be the judge, putting it in
crisis (krisis) in the strict sense of the term. Indeed, it is striking
to observe how Athanasius, in a lapidary judgement, considers that Arius’
rejection of the fullness of the figure of Christ constitutes a negation of
reason, of logos tout court: ‘Denying the Logos of God, they find
themselves justly deprived of all logos.’[132]
Basically, the event of Wisdom produced by the event of Jesus Christ introduces
human reason and thought to their highest and truest vocation. It returns it, so
to speak, to itself. Thus, as we shall see, homoousios is not simply an
instance of interculturality, but belongs to a prototypical event of wisdom,
which is foundational of the Church in her apostolicity.
81. The event of Jesus Christ makes possible a new ontology, with the dimensions
of the one and triune God and the incarnate Logos. Human reason had already
allowed itself to be opened up and penetrated by the mystery, made accessible by
the revelation of creation ex nihilo (2 Ma 7:28; Rom 4:17), of the
ontological transcendence of a God who is yet more intimate to each creature
than it is to itself.[133] Reason
is renewed from top to bottom when it is informed by the profound meaning given
to all things by the mystery of the Triune God who is love (1 Jn 4:8,16) –
otherness, relation, reciprocity, mutual interiority are henceforth manifested
as the ultimate truth and the structuring categories of ontology. Being is
illuminated by this, and shows itself to be even richer than it seemed in its
earlier philosophical iterations, however profound and complex they may have
been. Moreover, Nicaea, which starts from the Christological and soteriological
question to set out the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is a good
reflection of the way in which Christ’s manifestation prompts the inventio
of the Trinitarian doctrine through the dynamic between the order of
discovery, Christological and pneumatological, placed at its heart, and the
order of Trinitarian reality, which structures it. Nicaea accelerated Christian
reflection on theo-logy, or exploration of the ‘immanent Trinity’. Since
the mystery of Christ, realised in history and in a singular humanity, gives
access to God, matter and flesh, time and history, novelty, finitude and
fragility themselves are endowed with nobility and with their power to speak of
being. In fact, through Revelation, being is also shown to be semper major.
82. The event of Wisdom evidently implies a renewal of anthropology, since the
event of Jesus Christ casts a new light on the human being. Let us briefly
recall these aspects, which were developed in the first chapter of this
document.[134] The anthropology
of the Bible obliges us to revisit the concept of the human being, beginning
from the nobility of matter and of singularity. The Creator of Genesis willed
each individual, who is ‘engraved on the palms of his hands’ (Is 49:16).
Moreover, Jesus calls every human being his brother and sister, because the
event of the Incarnation has ennobled every human being, individually, in an
unsurpassable and imprescriptible way. When the Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol
declares that Jesus Christ as a true human being is the Son of God, who as such
is ‘equal’ to God the Father, all human beings – whatever their origins, nation,
talents or training – are attributed a dignity that obliges human intelligence
to think in new ways, to go beyond the limits of a merely natural vision of the
human being. There is a properly Christological dignity of singular beings.
83. In a similar way to what happens when there is a question of entering into
the ‘thought of Christ’, the broadening of ontology and anthropology implies a
conversion and can come up against the resistance of a thought that is
accustomed to its limits. The event of Wisdom obliges us to take into account
not only the ‘analogy of creation’ but also the ‘analogy of charity’. Before the
kenosis of the Incarnation and the Passion of Christ, before the suffering and
evil that affect humanity, the human spirit stumbles over its limits. The
question arises: Why does the Almighty Father seem to have first observed the
suffering Son's way of the Cross from on high, and only acted after his death?
Why did he not immediately answer the prayer in the Garden of Olives, presented
in the sweat of fear: ‘Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me...’
(Mt 26:39b)? In fact, the equality of essence with the Father of the incarnate
and crucified Son, professed in the Nicene symbol, invites human thought to
conversion of itself and to conversion of the meaning of the term ‘omnipotence’.
The Triune God is not at first omnipotent and afterwards only loving; rather,
his omnipotence is identical to the love manifested in Jesus Christ. Indeed,
what Jesus lived, as attested in the New Testament, is – through the action of
the Spirit – the revelation in history, on the level of the Trinitarian economy,
of the intra-trinitarian relation and reality immanent in God.[135]
God is truly God when his omnipotence of love imposes nothing but, rather, gives
his covenant partner, human beings, the capacity to bind themselves to him in
freedom. God is in harmony with his own being when he does not forcibly convert
humanity distorted by sin, but reconciles it to himself through the events of
Bethlehem and Golgotha. In all this, our human ways of seeing are called upon to
allow themselves to be profoundly transfigured by Christ: ‘Your thoughts are not
my thoughts.’ (Is 55:8; see also Mt 16:33)
2.2 A cultural and intercultural event
84. If the event of Jesus Christ renews thought as recreated according to an
event of Wisdom, it also renews and purifies, fructifies and broadens human
culture. In fact, the Council of Nicaea, which put into words the Christian
faith for the Church spread among all nations, in the Greek language and by
adopting a term derived from Greek philosophy, undoubtedly constitutes a
cultural event. It is necessary for faith assume human culture, just as it
assumes human nature, since nature and culture are constitutive of the human
being and therefore inseparable. Pope Francis reminds us that ‘the human being is always culturally situated.’[136]
Because human beings are relational and social beings who inscribe themselves in
history, it is through culture that they reach the fullness of their humanity.[137]
Moreover, Revelation, which establishes communion between God and the human
being, requires recipients who have the ability accept it in full freedom and
responsibility. Hence came the election of the people of the twelve tribes of
Israel, who had to distinguish themselves from all the other peoples and
painstakingly learn, for their own sake first of all, to separate truth from
error. Hence came Jesus Christ, in whom the Son of God became truly human, a Hebrew, a Galilean,
whose humanity bears the cultural marks of the historical journey of his people.
Hence came the Church, constituted from all nations. Thus, basing himself on the Thomasian principle
– ‘grace presupposes nature’ – and extending it, Pope Francis adds: ‘grace presupposes culture, and the
gift of God becomes incarnate in the culture of those who receive it.’[138]
85. This assumption of culture by Revelation implies a certain reciprocity of
influence between the two, notwithstanding their asymmetry. Just as the human spirit is capable of being transfigured, so culture has a
vocation to allow itself to be illuminated by Revelation, to the point of being
able to accept, at the price of conversion, the wisdom of the Crucified One: ‘The power of the Gospel [must permeate]
modes of thought, criteria of judgement, norms of action; in a word, it is
necessary that the whole of human culture be permeated by the Gospel.’[139]
Nevertheless, faith is not foreign to the cultures in which it is lived, for
since Pentecost the Christian faith has included the certainty that there is not
a single human culture that does not await and hope for its fulfilment from the
coming of the Word of God, who himself has spread the semina Verbi[140]
in all cultures awaiting his visitation. It is in this way that they become
fully themselves. It is therefore from within, from their openness to what is true, good, and beautiful, that Revelation
purifies and elevates them. But then, the cultures and languages assumed and
transfigured by the newness of Revelation make it possible to enrich and clarify
the expression of faith. This reciprocity has been seen down the centuries in
the fertilisation of language, poetry, and art by the Bible, the understanding
of which is itself in turn illuminated by its diffraction into other words and
visions of the world. This is also what happens at Nicaea in the use of the term
homoousios, which clarifies the Church's understanding of the Sonship of
Jesus Christ while transfiguring the term it assumes.
86. In this assumption of culture, a unique and providential place must be
reserved for the relationship between Hebrew culture and Greek culture.
Homoousios will be seen here as the fruit of a particularly strong synthesis
between Semitic culture, already touched and transfigured by Revelation, but
also shaped by encounters and disagreements with peoples of other cultures – Egyptians, Canaanites, Mesopotamians, Romans
– and the Greek world. For more than three centuries before the birth of
Jesus and up until the third century AD, the teaching and intellectual life of
Hellenistic Judaism had been expressed not only in Aramaic, but also in Greek,
with the Septuagint as its centre of gravity. The teaching of Jesus was recorded
and transmitted in Greek, in order to be able to communicate the Gospel to
everyone in the universal language of the Mediterranean world, but also because
the New Testament is inscribed in the history of the Jewish people’s
relationship with Greek culture and language. As in the Septuagint, there are
influences in both directions. For example, the panta ta ethnē of Mt 28:19 translates the ancient Jewish idea of all the nations flocking to
Jerusalem, and măthētēs (disciples-students) translates the Aramaic talmudim. Conversely, the
evangelists use the Greek of the law court to interpret the trial and passion of
Jesus, the author of Acts draws on the epic poetry of the Odyssey to narrate
Paul’s travels, and Paul often echoes elements of Stoic philosophy, just as
certain passages in the New Testament bear traces of a Greek ontological
vocabulary.[141] It was quite
natural for nascent Christianity to continue this synthesis of Semitic and Greek
thought, in dialogue with Judeo-Hellenistic and Greco-Roman authors, in order to
interpret the Scriptures and develop its own thought. The richness of the Greek
expression of Judaism and Christianity suggests that there was a foundational
dimension to this grafting of Greek culture onto Hebrew culture, which made it
possible to explain in Greek the uniqueness and universality of salvation in
Jesus Christ in the face of philosophical reason.[142]
Obviously, a whole section of Christians, particularly outside the borders of
the Roman Empire, did not belong to this cultural area, and they deployed their
own genius in the service of the expression of faith in the Syriac-speaking
world of Armenia and Egypt, but they too took a position in relation to Greek
thought, allowing themselves to be both inspired by it and to distance
themselves from it.
87. The Council of Nicaea is not simply an event of the assumption and enriching
of culture by Revelation, but it is also the occasion for intercultural
encounters. And this meeting of cultures is a major aspect of the Wisdom event
to which the event of Jesus Christ gives rise, so much so that Revelation
connects and brings cultures into communion with each other, making possible the
highest possible degree of interculturality. Exchange and mutual fertilisation
are already a constitutive part of all cultures, which do not exist apart from
the process by which they are in contact with each other, and thus evolve,
enrich, and sometimes oppose and endanger each other. However, the renewing
power of Revelation brings to these relationships a qualitative leap in
intensity. On the one hand, by giving access to the transcendent source of truth
and goodness, to the root of the universality of the human spirit that makes
their communication possible,[143]
it fully opens up common space for their encounters and exchanges. On the other
hand, the event of Jesus Christ is a power of conversion and liberation from the
forces of confinement and opposition to the other found in the lives of peoples
and cultures. It is only a ‘saved’ culture, so to speak, which can surpass
itself without losing itself, and open itself to other cultures to be enriched
by them as well as to enrich them. Listening to the Word of God and Tradition,
and therefore to the word of the Other, accustoms one’s spirit and accustoms
cultures, so to speak, to the practice of listening to others.[144]
This does not lead to an external and impoverished juxtaposition of cultures,
nor to a fusion into an indistinct whole, but to a saved and elevated
interculturality in which each culture surpasses itself while being strengthened
in its own solidity, by virtue of a form of perichoresis of cultures.[145]
This is why we need to take into account both the real newness and the
‘elevation’ of cultures, including the fact that those who accept the Gospel of Christ preserve their cultural identity and are
strengthened by it:[146] ‘For
Christians are no different from other people in terms of their country,
language, or customs [...] And they show forth the character of their own
citizenship in a marvelous and admittedly paradoxical way by following local
customs in what they wear and what they eat and in the rest of their lives.’[147]
88. Interculturality is in fact the manifestation of a deeper issue, which
constitutes its foundation: the divine plan for the unity of peoples and the
arduous path of this unity in diversity. This is one of the major threads
running through biblical salvation history. The typical story of the Tower of
Babel in Gen 11:1-9 underlines the tension between the richness of the
multiplicity of languages and cultures, on the one hand, and the capacity of
human beings to shatter the unity of the common home, to blur the logos
of the oikos. Abraham's call, the promise made that in him ‘all the
families of the earth will be blessed’ (Gen 12:3), is God's first salvific
response. The prophets extended this promise to the peoples of the world by
announcing the unity of all nations around the chosen people and the Law.[148]
The New Testament presents this unity as realised in the Messiah, who by his
blood and in his flesh ‘destroys the dividing wall, the hostility’ between
Israel and the nations, in order to ‘create in himself out of both a new human
being’ (Eph 2:14, 15b). In this way, the Gentiles are associated with the people
of the Covenant, by being ‘admitted to the same inheritance, members of the same
body, associated with the same promise’ (Eph 3:6). This is possible in Christ,
the singular universal, who holds together otherness and identity, and who
assumes all humanity by assuming a genealogically and culturally situated
humanity. The antitype of Babel, the Pentecost of the tongues of fire in Acts
2:1-18, is the manifestation and realisation of this power of communion of the
human logos, which ultimately proceeds from the Logos of God.[149]
It is not in the fused unity of a single language that the Holy Spirit brings
about the communion of these Jews of different languages and cultures, but by
inspiring an understanding of the other, an image of what will be the Church
that gathers all the nations, all striving towards its fulfilment, when the
“144,000 sealed” of the twelve tribes of Israel and ‘the great multitude that no
one could number, from every nation, tribe, people and language’ will bring
about the full eschatological communion of humanity in the new Jerusalem (Rev
7:4.9).
89. The intercultural dimension of which Nicaea is the founding expression can
also be seen as a model for the contemporary period in which the Church is
present in a variety of cultural settings: Asian, African, Latin American and
Oceanic cultures, new popular European cultures, not to mention the new cultural
form carried by the digital revolution and technoscience. All these contemporary
cultural universes seem far removed from the ancient Greek culture that was the
first to welcome the form of dogmatic inculturation achieved at Nicaea. On the
one hand, it must be emphasised that it was in these Greek categories that the
Church expressed itself in a normative way, and that they are therefore forever
linked to the deposit of faith.[150]
On the other hand, however, the Church can draw inspiration from the Nicene
Fathers to seek meaningful expressions of the faith in different languages and
contexts today, while remaining faithful to the terms of that era and finding
her living roots in them. With the grace of the Holy Spirit, Christian
communities, their theologians and pastors, in effective communion with the
magisterium, must themselves, in their own cultural situations and idioms, carry
out a task similar to that of the past in affirming the radical unity of the Son
and the Father. Nicaea remains a paradigm for all intercultural encounters and
for the possibility of receiving or forging new authentic ways of expressing the
apostolic faith.
2.3 The Church's creative fidelity and the problem of heresy
90. The perception of Nicaea as a moment of the event of Wisdom brought about by
the event of Jesus Christ allows us to reread with greater finesse the history
of the heresies to which the Council responds. Heresy, which intentionally
departs from the apostolic witness and mutilates its integrity, is perceived by
the Fathers as the novelty that leaves the path of regula fidei and
traditio and, by that very fact, departs from the historical reality of
Christ. Arius is criticised precisely for introducing something new.[151]
However, in view of the novum inaugurated by the event of Jesus Christ,
it may be illuminating to understand heresy also as a fundamental resistance,
both passive and active, to the supernatural novelty that opens up human thought
and cultures beyond themselves – a novelty of grace to which the new language of
faith expressed by the homoousios bears witness. It is almost inevitable
that human beings, with all their faculties and in all their being, will resist
this unheard-of novelty that converts and transfigures them. This is a
resistance, and therefore a sin of the ‘old human being’ (Rom 6:6; see also Eph
2:15), coming from the difficulty of fully conceiving and accepting the
immensity of God and his love, as well as the immense dignity of the human
being. The slow, tentative but prudent path taken by the first attempts to
understand the meaning of the mystery of the Crucified One and his glorious
resurrection, the passage from the apostolic kerygma to the first steps of what
we today call theology, is therefore accompanied by constant tensions and a
plurality of opinions that depart from the fullness of the apostolic witness and
are designated by the term heterodoxy, as well as that of heresy.
91. Rather than give an exhaustive list of the heresies of the first centuries,
let us highlight this resistance to the novum of Revelation through a few
examples. Often considered to be the first heresy, the rationalist teaching of
the Gnostics trivialised the realism of the mystery of the Incarnation through
Docetism and, by reducing sacred history to mythological narratives, denied the
completeness of human salvation, which was relegated to the plane of an ethereal
spirituality. In his battle against Gnosticism, Irenaeus emphasises that it is a
matter of resistance to the idea that God himself is capable and willing to
enter history, to unite himself with humanity to the very end, even to the point
of becoming truly human and dying. This is a resistance to believing in the
beauty of the singular, of matter and of history, also revealed in the event of
Jesus Christ and to which the Old and New Testaments bear witness. Subsequently,
the Fathers did not hesitate to have recourse to concepts and frameworks of
thought derived from Greek philosophy in order to refine Christian thought. In
doing so, they were obliged to burst open frameworks of thought that were by
themselves incapable of making it possible to conceive that the Logos could
become flesh, that the Logos or the Nous (νοῦς) that express the
divinity are equal to the source from which they come, or that a multiplicity is
possible that does not contradict divine unity and is even good within that
unity. The proponents of the Christological and Trinitarian heresies are those
who have not succeeded in allowing these frameworks of thought, whatever their
richness and real contribution to thinking about Christian doctrine, to be
enlarged by the unheard-of immensity of the nous (νοῦς) Christou.
The same difficulty can be found in the interplay of Christological currents in
the East throughout the third century, which in a sense prepared the
way for the Arian heresy. We must avoid caricaturing the varying positions of
the protagonists of these currents, for they were above all individual thinkers,
but they all struggled with the same difficulties in holding together the
Trinitarian richness of the one God and the radicality of the full assumption of
a singular humanity by the Son equal to the Father: some faced a Trinitarian
theology with a subordinationist tendency and a Christology that risked being
Docetist, while others resisted forms of Trinitarian modalism and adoptianism.
It is these same forms of resistance from the old ways of thinking that are
expressed, a few decades before Nicaea, in the teaching of Arius: it is
inconceivable to him that the Son, who is other than the Father, who is born and
dies, could be co-eternal and equal to God, without undermining divine unity and
transcendence and thus the redemption of humanity.
92. These forms of resistance are quite understandable, given how human this is.
They bear witness, as in a negative way, to the incredible light cast on the
perception of God and of the divine vocation of the human being by the event of
Jesus Christ, and to the no less incredible transfiguration of human thought and
culture deployed in the event of Wisdom that follows from it. Nothing human is
abolished, but access to the immensity of God’s truth requires God’s own
Revelation and the grace that converts and elevates human faculties and
achievements. In a sense, the resistance of the heresies allows us to see Nicaea
in all its power of immeasurable newness.
3. The ecclesial event: the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council
3.1 The Church enters into the event of Jesus Christ through her nature and
structures
93. The Council of Nicaea is not only an event in the history of doctrine, but
it could well be understood as an ecclesial event, corresponding to a
fundamental stage in the process of structuring the Church. In the course of a
long process following Nicaea, the ‘Ecumenical Council’ became the beacon of
doctrinal and juridical orientation and decision-making for the whole Church,
her place of communion and ultimate authority. Can this be seen, from the point
of view of her structure, as a turning-point that orients the further life of
the Church, similar to what the Nicene symbol represents from the point of view
of access to God (the Jesus Christ event) and human thought (the Wisdom event)?
This would be the case if the Ecumenical Council as such could be considered as
a specifically ecclesial fruit and expression of the event of Jesus Christ.
94. From her very beginnings, the Church has been aware of being part of the
continuity of the chosen people, an assembly called together (qāhāl/ekklēsia
– cf. Dt 5:22) to live by the revealed Torah and to worship the Lord
its God. She too sees herself as ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy
nation, a people acquired to proclaim the praises’ (1 Pet 2:9) of the God of
Israel. In the Acts of the Apostles, she is presented as a community of
discerning the will of God, whose principal agent is the Holy Spirit,[152]
and which is guided by human beings who continue the role of the twelve
apostles, ‘witnesses of the Resurrection’ (Acts 1:22). In a sense, it is in the
ecclesial community, as the body of Christ, that we can discern ‘the disposition
of Christ’ (Phil 2:5; see § 77 above).
95. This awareness was expressed by the early Fathers, who linked the structure
and functioning of the Church to her profound nature and calling. Thus, at the
beginning of the second century, Ignatius of Antioch emphasised that the various
particular Churches see themselves in solidarity as an expression of the one
Church. Its members are synodoi, companions on the journey, where each is
called to play his or her part according to the divine order that establishes
the harmony expressed by the Eucharistic synaxis. Thus, by her unity and order,
the Church sings the praise of God the Father in Christ, striving towards her
full unity, which will be realised in the Kingdom of God. Cyprian of Carthage
deepened this teaching in the middle of the third century by clarifying the
synodal and episcopal foundation on which the life of the Church must rest:
nothing is done without the bishop (nihil sine episcopo), but likewise
nothing is done without ‘your council’ (that of the priests and deacons) or
without the consent of the people (nihil sine consilio vestro et sine
consensu plebis).[153] Unity
linked to the unity of the Trinity, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, walking
together (synodos) towards the Kingdom, fidelity to the doctrine of the
Apostles and to the celebration of the Eucharist, the order and harmony of the
ministers and the baptised, with a particular role conferred on the bishops:
these elements show that the Church, in her structures and functioning, is
deeply inscribed in the event of Jesus Christ as its moment and its privileged
expression. In celebrating Nicaea, we are gathering together and celebrating the
entire synodal process that preceded and culminated in the Ecumenical Council.
3.2 The structural collaboration of the Church’s charisms and the road to Nicaea
96. These elements proper to the theological nature of the Church, which can
only be the fruit of the event of Revelation, were manifested in the historical
journey that led to the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea through the interaction of
three charisms, applied to government, teaching, and community decision-making
in the Church: first the threefold hierarchy, then the teachers and the synod.
An order of precedence, in which the apostles come first, seems to be well
established in the Pauline corpus: ‘God established in the Church first
apostles, second prophets, third teachers...’ (1 Cor 12:28; cf. Eph 4:11). The
first characteristic is the progressive development of the threefold hierarchy
of bishops, priests and deacons. This hierarchy, which supervised the prophets
and itinerant teachers of the first 150 years of Christianity (often called
‘apostles’ in a general sense), came to supplant them to a certain extent, and
became the local governing structure of the Church. The figure of the bishop, in
particular, expresses the apostolic dimension of the Church. From the fourth
century onwards, ecclesiastical provinces were formed, which expressed and
promoted communion between the particular Churches, headed by a metropolitan.
97. Since Christians were called upon to proclaim Christ and to transmit his
teaching and the teaching of the Apostles to all nations, it is not surprising
that the second characteristic of Christianity in the pre-Nicene period was the
decisive importance of schools and teachers, who taught catechumens and
interpreted the Scriptures. They could be ordained ministers or not. Pelagius,
for example, taught in Rome at the beginning of the fifth century even though he
was not a priest, as did Melania the Elder and Rufinus in Jerusalem, and Jerome
in Bethlehem and then in Rome. Origen himself directed the School of Alexandria
after the death of his father Leonidas before being ordained.
98. Finally, after the second half of the second century and at the beginning of
the third,,especially in Asia Minor, the synod took on an
increasingly important role in deciding important questions of discipline,
worship, and teaching. Initially, synods were local, but the sending of
synodical letters communicating their decisions (acta) to other Churches,
the exchange of delegations and requests for mutual recognition all bear witness
to the ‘firm conviction that the decisions taken are an expression of communion
with all the Churches’, inasmuch as ‘each local Church is an expression of the
one and catholic Church.’[154] It
should be noted that the synod had a very clear juridical or canonical dimension
as an institution that legislates. The documents and collections of synodal
canons were gathered together in episcopal archives, particularly in Rome: the
development of canon law and that of the synods go hand in hand and accompany
each other. Constantine's legitimisation of the Church cannot be solely
attributed to a shift towards an institutionalised, kind of state Church.
Perceived as a polis (city) which reflects the City of God, the heavenly
Jerusalem (cf. Is 60 and 62; 65:18; Rev 3:12; 21:1-27), or as a synodos
in the literal sense of a people taking the same path as Jesus towards the
Kingdom, with Jesus at their head as their proestos, or president, the
Church is constitutively ‘political’ and institutional.[155]
99. These three charisms evolved differently and in their own way within the
Church, but none was separate or set free from the other two. Although tensions
naturally arose between and within them, they enriched, informed, and reinforced
each other. Teachers often participated as members in synods. Similarly, the
bishops were from the outset teachers and preachers according to the model of
Ignatius of Antioch. Clearly, the bishops presided over the synods and played a
leading role as guardians of orthodoxy in faith and practice. Moreover, in his
sacramental role, the bishop presided at the Eucharistic celebration which
opened and closed each synod, the source and summit of the ‘walking together’
that is the synodos.[156]
The Eucharist was a sign of the reception of the synodal decisions, and of the
communion of believers with their bishops, established in apostolic succession
within the bosom of the ‘Catholica’, the one and single Church of God,
and was a visible manifestation of belonging to the body of Christ and of the
mutual belonging of Christians (cf. 1 Cor 12:12).[157]
100. Not only do these elements of the process of structuring the Church show
that it is rooted in the Jesus Christ Event, but it is also possible to discern
in these processes a certain analogy with what constituted the Wisdom Event, as
analysed above. Just as human thought, profoundly renewed by the event of Jesus
Christ, takes on and transforms human cultures, notably through the encounter of
Semitic thought, already affected from within by Revelation, with Greek culture
and other cultures, so the three dimensions or charisms we have identified arose
both from Jewish institutions and from local versions of Greco-Roman
institutions of the first centuries of our era, both civil and sacred. On the
one hand, Second Temple Judaism had its own priestly hierarchy, schools, and
synods. On the other hand, as there were no specific schools for them, Christian
teachers were almost all trained as orators and interpreters in the enkyklios
paideia, or general education system of the Greco-Roman world, and therefore
used rhetoric and philosophy, which they helped to inscribe in the heritage of
Christian doctrine. The synod (concilium in Latin) was already an ancient
institution in the Greco-Roman world when Christians gave it an important place.
But these different aspects take on their own dimensions, transfigure, one could
say, when they are at the service of the Church’s mission to proclaim the Gospel
and to be an effective sign of unity for humankind.
3.3 The Ecumenical Council of Nicaea
101. In 325, a synod was held at Nicaea, which was in part a culmination of this
process, but also an exceptional form of it because of its ecumenical scope.
Convened by the Emperor to resolve a local dispute that had spread to all the
Churches of the Eastern Roman Empire and to many Churches in the West, it
brought together bishops from various regions of the East and legates from the
Bishop of Rome. For the first time, therefore, bishops from all over the
Oikoumenè were gathered in synod. Its profession of faith and canonical
decisions were promulgated as normative for the whole Church. The unprecedented
communion and unity brought about in the Church by the event of Jesus Christ are
made visible and effective in a new way through a structure of universal
significance, and the proclamation of the Good News of Christ in all its
immensity is also given an instrument of unprecedented authority and scope:
Through the synodal exercise of the bishops’ ministry, the Council of Nicaea was the first institutional expression on the universal level
of the ἐξουσία of the Risen Lord who guides and directs the way forward of the
People of God in the Holy Spirit. An analogous experience was realised in the
successive ecumenical councils of the first millennium, which gave normative shape to the identity of the one Catholic Church.[158]
102. With the Council of Nicaea, the very idea of a synod or ecumenical council
became established. Although none of its acta survived, in all
probability, and notwithstanding a slow and arduous reception, the proclamation
of the homoousios and the statutes of Nicaea endured. After this long
process of reception – which would be typical of any council – Nicaea became the
ideal of a council in the minds of many. Its traditional presentation as a
unified council, inspired by the Holy Spirit, helped it to become the ideal
council in later tradition and gradually created esteem for ecumenical councils
among Christians. Nicaea opened the way for subsequent ecumenical councils and
thus for a new mode of synodality or conciliarity that would mark the life of
the Church to this day, both in its role of defining and proclaiming the faith
and in the manifestation of the unity of the whole Oikouménè represented
within it.
Chapter 4
Keeping the faith accessible for all God's people
Introduction: the Council of Nicaea and the conditions of credibility of the
Christian mystery
103. The first and legitimate idea that we retain from the Council of Nicaea is
that it was a dogmatic council which defended and clarified the
Christological and Trinitarian fides quae. In this final chapter, we
explain how the event of the Council also established a certain institutional
mechanism of the one and catholic Church for resolving a dogmatic conflict in
conditions that would make its decision acceptable. This examination by
fundamental theology must therefore complement dogmatic and historical
investigation. It is the fides quae, the salvific truth, which engenders
adherence to salvation, the fides qua; but at Nicaea the fides qua
itself was placed at the service of the acceptance and understanding of the
fides quae. Consideration of the processes of the fides qua, that is,
the conditions for defining and receiving the fides quae, manifests the
nature and role of the Church. Of course, it is clear that the invention of this
institutional mechanism was a gradual process, that it did not emerge fully
armed like Athena from the head of Zeus, in short that the dogmatic concept of
the ‘ecumenical council’ could not have been exactly contemporary with the event
of 325. As we explained in Chapter II, the place par excellence where fides
qua and fides quae meet is baptism. It is there that the individual
is incorporated into the faith of the Church, which he or she receives from
mother Church. In this context of baptism and catechesis of initiation, the
early Church articulated the rule of faith as the most substantial summary of
the faith. Given its relevance, it was used to discern the truth of the faith in
the face of heresy (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, for example). It is the
precursor of the dogmatic position of the symbol as a summary of the normative
elements of the faith. This awareness of a norm (regula; kănōn) is
present in the procedure of the pre-Nicene synods which discerned the faith.
104. Based on the many experiences of the regional and local synods of the
second and third centuries, it is possible to support the dogmatic thesis that
it was a certain ecclesiological truth, judged a priori to be operative,
which was called upon to resolve the problem of a Trinitarian, Christological,
and soteriological truth threatened with being altered, distorted, or lost. The
processes of fides qua manifest the nature of the Church. The Word of God
who became flesh (Jn 1:14) truly makes the Father known, and this knowledge,
through the power of the Holy Spirit, is entrusted to the Church, which is
responsible for guarding and transmitting it. This mission implies that the
Church can interpret the Scriptures with authority. This also shows that
believing in the Church – as the Symbol professes – and believing in her
authority to define Christological and Trinitarian doctrine is founded in the
act of faith in Jesus Christ and in the Trinity, in a form of a ‘reciprocal
priority’ or ‘reciprocal causality’, according to the happy Thomistic
expression.[159] Finally, the
ultimate aim of this whole ecclesial procedure should also be a focus of our
attention. Our hypothesis is that the conciliar procedure was put at the service
of the little ones, at the service even of the faith of children, which is the
paradigm of the faith of the true disciple in the eyes of the Lord Jesus, and
thus of the proclamation of the Gospel to all. This sheds light on the meaning
of the Church’s magisterium, which aims at a protecting charity towards the
‘least’ of Christ's ‘brothers and sisters’ (cf. Mt 25:40).
1. Theology at the service of the integral character of salvific truth
1.1 Christ, the eschatologically effective truth
105. Insofar as Nicaea proposes a truth in questions related to salvation and
distinguishes it from error, its first issue from the point of view of
fundamental theology is that of the place of truth in soteriology. This
conviction stems first of all from the very form of Revelation, which, by
allowing itself to be transcribed into written words, shows that the dimension
of truth is constitutive of it. The Christian faith presupposes that the truth
of Christ is made accessible to his disciples. Indeed, the Saviour himself is
the truth: ‘I am the way and the truth and the life.’ (Jn 14:6) In Christianity,
truth is a person. Truth is no longer a simple matter of logic or reasoning; it
is not possible to have it as a possession, and it cannot be separated from the
other attributes identified with the very person of Christ, such as goodness,
justice and love. The fact remains that adherence to Christ always calls on the
disciples' understanding: ‘Credo ut intelligam.’[160]
Indeed, it is neither imaginable nor coherent to think that the God who created
human beings intelligent and free – one of the dimensions of creation in the
image and likeness of the Creator himself (Gen 1:26-27) – could, as God the
Saviour, be indifferent to access to the knowledge of his truth
and of the saving truth. Moreover, this saving truth has a communal dimension.
Nicaea is a communal act of expressing the truth, in order to communicate it to
the whole Church. In fact, it is neither imaginable nor coherent to think that
the creator of the human family, and in particular of its capacity for
intelligible communication through languages (cf. Gen 11:1-9 – the Tower of
Babel, and Acts 2:1-11 – Pentecost), could be indifferent to communal access
to his truth and to saving truth. This is why disintegration of the unity of
the faith compromises the strength and effectiveness of salvation in Jesus
Christ.
106. This constitutive place of truth in salvation reflects on the very nature
of the Church as ‘bearer of truth’ (alēthefora). She bears another than
herself, Christ the Truth, and would not be herself without this Truth. The
Church is by necessity a place of searching for, finding, guarding, and
deploying the truth accomplished in the Word for the personal and ecclesial
benefit of his disciples and of all human beings. She is also a place of
communion with the vivifying power of this truth, which circulates within her,
while also as it were irrigating the world’s search for truth, its thought and
its culture.[161] The life-giving
tradition (transmission) of saving truth itself is therefore one of the most
powerful meanings that can be given to the dogmatic concept of ecclesial
Tradition.[162]
107. The centrality of truth explains the profound rejection of idolatry in the
Scriptures. The Holy One of Israel is a God who speaks, unlike idols. ‘They have
mouths and do not speak’, say the Psalms (115:5 and 135:15), echoed in 1
Corinthians 12:2: ‘As you know, when you were pagans, you were irresistibly
drawn towards dumb idols.’ Moreover, the truth, power, justice and holiness of
God has always been conceived, biblically, in relation to his claim to bring
true and universal salvation, whereas idolatrous practices claim to offer only a
gift that is partial and regional. Moreover, since this is the person who comes
from God and is God and Lord (cf. Jn 13:14), the truth of salvation is something
that must be received, whereas idolatry constructs the divine from the human.
The fact that God cannot be fashioned like the statue of an idol (see the irony
of Wis 13:11-19) brings us back to the notion of divine self-revelation, which
stands in stark contrast to the idea of self-realisation so common in religion,
even in ancient times, as evidenced by Gnosticism, described by Irenaeus as a
heresy and as a ‘lyingly named gnosis’. Gnosticism ‘lies’; it contradicts the
very notion of salvific truth, because it is not truth accepted from God and
freely received in love. To the contrary, through his incarnation, the Word of
God calls upon the ecclesial and personal act of faith as a reception in the
Holy Spirit, through the mind and the whole being, of the mysteries that save:
‘You worship him whom you do not know; we worship him whom we do know, because
salvation comes from the Jews’ (Jn 4:22). Finally, Jesus is the Word of God,
sent into the world on a mission of the word, a word of integral truth that
calls for a response of faith from human beings. That is why this is a truly
salvific truth, eschatologically effective: ‘Today you will be with me in
paradise’ (Lk 23:43). Nicaea’s choice to express in words an integral truth of
salvation for all, to be received in faith, is a fidelity not only to
Christological truth (fides quae) but also to the personal relationship
to the truth that is Christ himself (fides qua).
1.2 Salvation and the process of divine filiation
108. This soteriological truth is to be taken in its strongest, ontological
sense. Without claiming to offer an exhaustive understanding that would detract
from the mystery of salvation as a mystery, it nevertheless gives access to the
very truth of God’s filiation and paternity. The God of truth wanted, so to
speak, to put human beings to the test of the unheard-of filial claim of
his only Son Jesus. The truth revealed by God is then summed up in the truth of
his only ‘Son’. This term cannot be reduced to a simple metaphor or analogy,
because what is metaphorical here opens itself to the register of ontology, just
as the symbolon, in the strong sense of the term, gives real and
effective access to the reality it signifies. The testimony of the Father given
to Jesus is the foundation of this truth: ‘If we receive human testimony, the
testimony of God is greater, because this is the testimony of God: he has
testified to his Son. Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in
themselves’ (1 Jn 5:9). The author adds: ‘The one who does not believe God
makes God a liar’ (1 Jn 5:10). Our old catechisms liked to formulate this
intimate conviction of the Christian act of faith with direct simplicity: ‘God
who can neither deceive nor be deceived’,[163]
in which Thomas Aquinas would have recognised his own formulations.[164]
This justifies the ontological option of the Nicene neologism homoousios,
which extends and clarifies the biblical and hymnic terminology. The
confirmation of the ontological truth of the divine filiation of Jesus is, as we
have seen in the first and third chapters, that the relationship of paternity
and filiation is mysteriously reversed regarding the divine and the human: human
and earthly paternity become a secondary and derivative naming from its
prototype, God the Father (see Eph 3:14; Mt 23:9). It is this truth of divine
filiation into which believers are invited to enter that underpins the truth of
baptismal filiation.[165] To be
saved, according to the Gospel of Jesus, consists in entering into the full
truth of sonship, which is an insertion into the eternal sonship of Christ.
2. The mediation of the Church and the inversion of the dogmatic order: Trinity,
Christology, Pneumatology, Ecclesiology
2.1 The mediations of faith and the ministry of the Church
109. This salvific and efficacious truth is made explicit and communicated at
Nicaea by an act of interpretation of the biblical text in terms derived from
hymns and from philosophy, and through the exercise of the understanding of
faith. Indeed, the whole economy of biblical revelation attests that the force
of conviction about Christological truth should certainly not be understood in
terms of fundamentalism, for which the meaning of the Scriptures is available
only in an immediate way. On the contrary, the interpretative tradition of
ecclesial doctrine and the research of theologians show that faith needs many
mediations, starting with the first, unique and foundational one, that of
the humanity of the only-begotten Son, which he takes from Mary. God arranged
that his unheard-of divine truth would come to humanity through the mediation of
his incarnate Word: ‘This is my beloved Son, listen to him’ (Mt 3:17; 17:5). In
addition, the different literary genres of expression of Revelation that
constitute the biblical texts call for different hermeneutical strategies.[166]
The Symbol, born of the liturgy and proclaimed in a liturgical setting, bears
witness to the fact that interpretative mediation is not reduced to a commentary
on the text, but takes place gestis verbisque, where faith is lived out
in a community of prayer and grace.[167]
We see this in the account in Lk 24, where the Risen Christ himself not only
gives an explanation of himself through the exegesis of the Law and the
prophets, but also, finally, through his presence and his Eucharistic
self-donation, in ‘the breaking of the bread’, as Pope Benedict XVI explained in
Verbum Domini:
The Word and the Eucharist are so intimately related to one another that one
cannot be understood without the other: the Word of God becomes sacramental
flesh in the eucharistic event. The Eucharist opens us up to the understanding
of Holy Scripture, just as Holy Scripture in turn illuminates and explains the
eucharistic Mystery. Indeed, without recognition of the Lord's real presence in
the Eucharist, understanding of Scripture remains incomplete.[168]
110. Thus, the ordering of the mysteries as it is presented in dogmatics can be
usefully reversed in fundamental theology. It is through the mystery of the
Church, ‘the most difficult mystery to believe in’,[169]
that the unheard-of mysteries of the Christian faith are first proposed,
mysteries on which the Church herself logically and ontologically depends. In
fact, it is primarily the Church's task to establish the credibility of the
journey of faith. Obviously, there is ‘an order or “hierarchyˮ of the truths of
Catholic doctrine since they vary in their relations to the foundation of the
Christian faith.’[170] The
Christological, Trinitarian, and soteriological doctrine of the Creed
constitutes this foundation. However, within the nexus mysteriorum of the
dogmas,[171] the Council’s act of
interpretation sheds light on the Church's participation, according to her
specific place and role, in the order of salvation.
2.2 Disagreement and synodality
111. The Church's interpretive mediation showed itself in the form of
arbitration, particularly in the face of dissension or the need to translate the
sacred text. The ‘Council of Jerusalem’ in Acts 15 bears witness for the first
time to a disagreement over doctrine (the relationship of Christ’s Gentile
disciples to the Mosaic Law) and practice (circumcision, idolatry and
fornication), a source of conflict whose resolution, in the form of a restored
ecclesial consensus, was first examined by the college of ‘apostles and elders’
(Acts 15:6). A process emerged: first there was a succession of authorised
testimonies (Peter, Paul and Barnabas, James), all of which were received in a
spirit of mutual listening,[172]
then an appeal to the authority of Moses, the institution of mandated messengers
to deal with messengers ‘without a mandate’ (Acts 15:24), and finally the
drafting of a prescriptive document to be officially presented to the assembly
at Antioch (Acts 15:30-31), which met on the initiative of these mandated
messengers. Everyone was involved, because the question was submitted to the
whole Church of Jerusalem (Acts 15:12), which was present during the ecclesial
discernment process and was involved in the final decision (Acts 15:22).[173]
The sign of this communal aspect is that the messengers were sent in pairs (Acts
15:27). What is essential for our reflection is that the Church, assisted by the
Holy Spirit and functioning synodically, relying on the sensus fidei fidelium[174]
and on the particular authority of the apostles, constitutes the living and
active mystery in which the doctrinal development regarding the distinction
between the disciples of Christ from the Jewish people and those from the
Gentiles in regard to the practice of the Mosaic Law was worked out. The
arbitration of faith that concerned God’s universal purpose, the entry of the
nations into the mystery first revealed to Israel, took place here, in the
exchange between fides qua and fides quae, within the dynamic
mystery of the Church.
112. From the time before the incarnation of the Word, the Chosen People had had
to deal with a similar problem of the preservation, but above all the diffusion,
of Revelation in the diaspora of Israel and, beyond that, among the groups of
pagan origin which the New Testament calls the ‘proselytes’ (Mt 23:15 and Acts
2:10 and 6:15), and the ‘God-fearers’ (Acts 10:2). It was this fundamental
choice, the real origin of which is lost in legend (Epistle of Aristaeus
or Talmud-Soferim 1:7), which authorised the translation of the Bible of
the Jewish people from Hebrew into Greek, leading to the Alexandrian version of
the Septuagint. These translations, like the later use of the neologism
homoousios, involved a great deal of lexical arbitration to ensure that the
truths of the original text, conceived in the semantic field of a Semitic
language, were not lost when the text was transferred to the semantic field of
an Indo-European language.
113. These arbitrations express the very nature of the Church and make it
possible to grasp the meaning of the magisterium she exercises. For the Church
is a reality of grace inscribed in history. She is constituted and moved by the
Holy Spirit, the same Spirit who brought about the Incarnation of the Word and
who continues to bring about the incorporation of believers into the Mystical
Body confronted by the joys, temptations, and vicissitudes of history. Her
mission of salvation is carried out not only through preaching, the teaching of
the Scriptures and the celebration of the sacraments, but also through the
magisterium exercised by the bishops, the successors of the apostles, in
communion with the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter. This is not to say
that the truth of the faith is historical and changeable: rather, it is to say
that the recognition of truth and the deepening of its understanding constitute
a historical task for the unique Subject of the Church. The Church does not,
therefore, dispose of the truth as though it were her possession: truth cannot
be manufactured, since it is fundamentally Christ himself who is at stake.
Rather she receives truth, recalls it, and interprets it. For each generation,
believing with the Church means participating in her unceasing efforts to
achieve a deeper and fuller understanding of the faith. The obligation of
fidelity cannot be reduced simply to passive docility: it is an obligation of
active appropriation for all disciples, with the support and under the vigilance
of the living magisterium of the college of bishops. The bishops, when they are
in agreement, have the authority to decide in a binding way whether or not a
theological interpretation is faithful to the source – Christ and the Apostolic
Tradition. The magisterium adds nothing to the Revelation accomplished in Christ
and attested by the Scriptures, apart from clarifications of dogmatic
development, because the Church exercises her role as authentic interpreter of
the Word of God in acts of creative fidelity to Revelation:[175]
‘Thus the judgement concerning the authenticity of the sensus fidelium
belongs in the last analysis, not to the faithful themselves nor to theology,
but to the magisterium.’[176]
What is termed the ordinary magisterium of the successors of the apostles
consists of habitual teaching, which continually gives expression to tradition –
already referred to in the New Testament as ‘sound doctrine’ (2 Tim 4:3). By
comparison, the extraordinary magisterium is exercised rarely, but is so
when a decision of doctrinal significance concerning the whole Church has to be
taken, particularly in the face of a challenge from some part of the Church.
This is what happened in an eminent and explicit manner at the Ecumenical
Council of Nicaea.
2.3 The tongues of the Holy Spirit for forming and renewing consensus
114. Basically, then, the ecclesial task was first and foremost a
pneumatological task of metaphrase. It operates in the register of
translation, as in the Septuagint and the Targumim, which seek fidelity
to the Hebrew text by situating themselves resolutely in the modes of thought
and genius proper to Greek and Aramaic. We can assume that the same process was
at work in the translation of the words of Jesus, spoken in Aramaic, into the
Greek of the Gospels. It was also at work in the exegesis of the sacred text,
beginning with the midrashim and the writings of the early Fathers of the
Church. It is this twofold movement that blossomed in the lively exchanges of an
ecumenical council celebrated under the movement of the Spirit of Pentecost,
where the speakers could come from the Syriac, Greek, Coptic, or Latin world,
and which led to definitions that were themselves translatable into other
languages and forms of expression. We witness a twofold boldness of the Holy
Spirit. First, a strengthening of the understanding of the faith professed at
Nicaea on the part of those who proclaim it with parrēsia and
effectiveness for the benefit of the people of God in the different contexts of
the world; secondly, boldness in the Holy Spirit on the part of those who listen
(auditus fidei) and receive (obsequium fidei) this proclamation.[177]
This movement manifests both the nature of the Church and the identity of the
Spirit of truth, who ‘recalls’ the words of Christ and guides towards the ‘whole
truth’ (Jn 14:26; 16:13). There is nothing surprising in the fact that such an
ecclesiological task, which assumes the action of the third divine person, had
to go back from salvation history to the original mystery of Trinitarian
relations, from the economy to divine ontology.
115. In this task of pneumatological metaphrase, which introduces a new concept
unknown to Sacred Scripture, the famous homoousios, it is essential to
note that the biblical narratives as well as the metaphors of the scriptural
texts are not abolished or obscured by the speculative transcriptions which
summarise and clarify their substance. Dogmatic clarification is only of value
if it retains the roots that give it life in the humus of the Bible and in the
liturgical communion of faith. This is clearly the case in the text of the
Creed. In circumstances such as those of the Arian crisis, where the Word of God
seems to provide ambivalent support for the preservation of the truth of faith
(Lk 18:19: ‘Why say that I am good? No one is good but God alone’), it became
necessary for speculative expression to settle the exegetical dispute. However,
doctrinal development, with the specific resource of neologisms, must be content
to unpack the truths immanent in the language of revelation, in the way that
Christ himself explains his parable of the sower in Mt 13:3-9 and then in 18-23.
In this sense, it is worth noting that in the history of the Church, dogmatic
neologisms have been few and far between, and that they corresponded to truly
decisive knots in the Christian mystery: these include ‘consubstantiality’ and
‘hypostatic union’ in Christology; and in the Trinitarian domain, ‘subsistent
relations’ and ‘perichoresis’; but also ‘person’ (prosôpon and
hypostasis) in its specifically Christian sense, in Trinitarian theology,
Christology, and anthropology.
3. Safeguarding the deposit of faith: charity at the service of the littlest
3.1 The unanimous faith of the People of God offered to all
116. The Symbol of Faith and the canons adopted by the Council of Nicaea are not
simply ecclesial acts of interpretation, translation and metaphrase, but they
also aim to ‘guard’ or ‘watch over’ (phȳlaxein) the deposit of faith
handed down by the Apostles (1 Tim 6:20). Now this protection operates in
particular for the benefit of those most at risk. Just as, on the level of
fides quae, homoousios is the principle and foundation of the
koinonia in Christ of all human beings among themselves, down to the
smallest, so, on that of fides qua, the Council’s decision to define a
common profession of faith protects all disciples. Doctrinal clarity makes the
faith capable of resisting the forces of absolutised cultural regionalism and
geopolitical fracture, as well as those of heresy, which is often linked to a
form of elitist subtlety.
117. Let us insist on this last aspect. In the fourth century, at a time of the
‘peace of the Church’, when there was a risk that Christian conviction would
become weaker as it spread throughout the world, the supporters of ancient
paganism were trying to restore its lost vigour by emphasising the
accessibility to ordinary mortals of the gods in its pantheon, its
practices, and the customs of their ancestors. But the faith preached by
Jesus to simple people is not a simplistic faith. The parables and other
sayings, or certain Johannine declarations such as the magisterial ‘The Father
and I are one’ (Jn 10:30), bear witness to the fact that access to the mystery
of God is at least paradoxical. Neither what dogma would come to call the
Trinity, nor the hypostatic union enunciated at the Council of Chalcedon, nor
the dynamic dyothelitism safeguarded by the soteriology of Maximus the
Confessor, could pass for simple propositions. However, Christianity has never
considered itself to be an esotericism reserved for an elite of initiates.
Christ affirmed this in a fundamental statement: ‘I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in the synagogue and in
the temple, where all the Jews assemble, and I have said nothing in secret. Why
do you question me? Ask those who have heard me about what I have told them;
behold, they know what I have said’ (Jn 18:20). Even the mystagogical discipline
of the arcane during a period of early Christianity did not indicate a jealous
preoccupation with secrecy, but rather a recognition of the seriousness and
stages of Christian initiation. And as the centuries have passed, it seems that
the Christian faith has fully embraced its decidedly exoteric and popular style.
Basically, any Christian, by tracing the sign of the cross on himself or
herself, expresses the heart of the Trinitarian and Paschal faith in a fitting
and full way.[178] The entire
people of God must give a reason for its faith and hope (cf. 1 Pet 3:5): in this
sense, it is a theologian.[179]
118. In the same sense, the exercise of the Magisterium, as realised at the
Council of Nicaea, and which gives the teaching of the ‘Catholic’ Church an
authentically public and institutional style, thereby establishes the equality
of all with regard to the content of the faith. The liturgical creed, practised
by all the members of the Mystical Body, within a public and common liturgy,
will form a touchstone for the contesseratio (the bond of hospitality) of
ecclesial communion, dear to Tertullian.[180]
The common good of Revelation is truly placed ‘at the disposal’ of all the
faithful, as confirmed by the Catholic doctrine of the infallibility in
credendo of the people of the baptised: ‘The community of the faithful,
anointed by the Holy One (cf. 1 Jn 2:20, 27), cannot err in matters of faith.’[181]
The bishops have a specific role in defining the faith, but they cannot assume
that role without being part of the ecclesial communion of the whole People of
God.[182] In this sense, the New
Law in the New Testament puts on the characteristics of the Old Law, whose
public dimension is not usually appreciated enough: the law is known by all as a
divine law because it is solemnly promulgated. Thus, even leaders are bound by
the public character of the Law to its observance. ‘Acceptance of
persons’, which is often identified and denounced in the Torah, is more easily
seen in an objective way as a violation of the equal dignity of God’s children
(cf. Lev 19:5; Deut 10:17; Acts 10:34; Rom 2:11).
3.2 Protecting faith before political power
119. Thus, the Council of Nicaea, with all that it owes to the initiative of the
Emperor Constantine, nevertheless represented a milestone on the long road
towards libertas Ecclesiae, which is everywhere a guarantee of protection
for the faith of the simple and the most vulnerable in the face of political
power. At the same time, there was undoubtedly a competing movement towards what
would become known as ‘Caesaropapism’, a persistent temptation among the
Christian Churches. So should we see in this Council the beginnings of an
ecclesial guarantee for the freedom of conscience of the little ones, or the
beginnings of a political instrumentalization of the religion of Christ? It is
true that the political preoccupations of the Emperor Constantine are often
emphasised today; it is pointed out that the Council of Nicaea was intended,
among other things, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his reign, and it
is even insinuated, in some cases, that the profession of faith adopted by
Nicaea was intended above all to restore concord within the Empire. Similarly,
the notion of heresy is criticised for being associated with the repressive
power of the confessional state. Without being able to go into a full treatment
of these complex issues within the limits of this document, we can nevertheless
distinguish here between forms of unity and objectives, unity of faith among
Christians and unity of citizens. On the one hand, Nicaea’s Trinitarian
monotheism in its dogmatic truth rightly did not allow honour to, along with
Arianism, the Basileus’ claim to be the state and religious symbol of
Roman unity and to lay the foundations of a theological-political order
stricto sensu.[183] On the
other hand, without the magisterial vigilance of the apostolic Church, assisted
by the Holy Spirit, in the face of that resistance to the unheard-of nature of
Revelation which is heresy, the mysteries of the faith communicated by the
self-revelation of the Incarnate Word, crucified and risen, would not have
resisted the explosion and cacophony that followed.
120. The protection of the faith of all, as well as the importance of listening
to the voice even of the last and least listened to, can be seen in the fact
that Nicaea did not follow the path of Arianism. Indeed, Saint Jerome emphasises
the numerical majority of Arians and the equally large majority of Arian
bishops. Historically, Jerome’s reading probably needs to be nuanced, because
the majority of bishops and Christians did not opt directly for Arianism, but
were rather hesitant in the face of a terminology that was not found in the New
Testament. That said, with an effect of force initiated by the political
authorities, the Council was able to safeguard the sensus fidelium[184]
which dwelt in the people of God. In this sense, it can be said that the Nicene
profession of faith is a faithful echo lived in the Church out of Christ's
exultation: ‘I praise you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding this from
the wise and understanding and revealing it to babes. Yes, Father, for such was
your gracious will’ (Mt 11:25-26).
Conclusion: Proclaiming Jesus our Salvation to everyone today
121. 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 evangelisation’.[185]
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. Dostoyevsky declared it forcefully: ‘I have forged within myself a
Creed, in which everything appears to me clear and sacred. This Credo is very
simple: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more
attractive, more reasonable, more virile and more perfect than Christ.’[186]
In Jesus, homoousios with the Father, God himself comes to save us; God
himself has bound himself to humanity for ever, in order to fulfil our vocation
to be human. As the Only-Begotten Son, he conforms us to himself as beloved sons
and daughters of the Father through the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit.
Those who have seen the glory (doxă) of Christ can express it in song,
and let the doxology become a generous and fraternal proclamation, that is to
say, a kerygma.
122. To proclaim Jesus our salvation on the basis of the faith expressed at
Nicaea does not ignore the reality of humanity. It does not turn away from the
sufferings and upheavals that plague the world and today seem to undermine all
hope. On the contrary, it confronts these troubles by professing the only
possible redemption, won by the one who experienced the violence of sin and
rejection, the loneliness of abandonment and death, and who, from the very abyss
of evil, rose to bring us too in his victory to the glory of the resurrection.
This renewed proclamation does not ignore culture and cultures either, but on
the contrary, here too with hope and charity listens to them and is enriched by
them, invites them to purification and raises them up. Entering into such a hope
obviously requires conversion, but first and foremost on the part of those who
proclaim Jesus through their life and words, because conversion is a renewal of
the mind according to the thought of Christ. Nicaea is the fruit of a
transformation of thought that is both implied and made possible by the event of
Jesus Christ. In the same way, a new stage of evangelisation will only be
possible for those who allow themselves to be renewed by this event, by those
who allow themselves to be seized by the glory of Christ, who is always new.
123. To proclaim Jesus our Salvation on the basis of the faith expressed at
Nicaea is to be particularly attentive to the smallest and most vulnerable of
our brothers and sisters. The new light shed on the fraternity between all the
members of the human family by Christ, the homoousios Son of the Father
who shares our common human nature, enlightens in particular those who are most
in need of the hope of grace. We are linked by an indestructible radical bond to
all those who suffer and are excluded; we are all called to work so that
salvation can reach them in particular. To proclaim means here ‘to give food’,
‘to give drink’, ‘to welcome’, ‘to clothe’ and ‘to go and visit’ (Mt 25:34-40),
to radiate the humble glory of faith, hope and charity for the one who is not
believed, in whom no one hopes and who is unloved by the world. To proclaim
means to make these theological virtues shine through humiliation and suffering:
this can only come from Christ our Saviour and therefore bear witness to him and
enable us to meet him. But let us make no mistake: these crucified people of
history are Christ among us, in the strongest possible sense: ‘you did it
to me’ (Mt 25:40). The Crucified and Risen One knows their sufferings
intimately, and they know his. So they are the apostles, the teachers and the
evangelisers of the rich and the healthy. It is a question of helping the poor,
but above all of entering into a relationship with them and living with them so
as to be taught by them: they understand better than anyone else the immensity
of the gift of the homoousios Son, who goes all the way to the Cross, as
professed at Nicaea. They can introduce us to the hope that is stronger than
death, following the Word of God who descended to the lowest place among us in
order to raise us to the highest with him.[187]
124 To proclaim Jesus as our salvation on the basis of the faith expressed at
Nicaea is to proclaim him in the Church. It means proclaiming him through the
witness of the unprecedented fraternity founded in Christ. It means making known
the marvels by which the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’ Church is the
‘universal sacrament of salvation’ and gives access to new life: the treasure of
the Scriptures that the Creed interprets, the richness of the prayer, liturgy
and sacraments that flow from the baptism professed at Nicaea, the light of the
magisterium that is at the service of the faith we share. This treasure,
however, ‘we carry in earthen vessels’ (2 Cor 4:7). This is right, because the
proclamation will be fruitful only if there is harmony between the form of the
message and its content, between the form of Christ and the form of
evangelisation. In today’s world, it is particularly important to bear in mind
that the glory we have contemplated is that of Christ, ‘meek and humble of
heart’ (Mt 11:29), who proclaimed: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit
the earth.’ (Mt 5:5) The Crucified and Risen One is truly victorious, but it is
a victory over death and sin, not over adversaries – there are no losers
in the Paschal Mystery, apart from the eschatological loser, Satan the divider.[188]
The proclamation of Jesus our Salvation is not a battle, but rather a
conformation to Christ, who looked upon those he met with love and compassion
(Mk 10:21; Mt 9:36) and allowed himself to be guided by another, by the Spirit
of the Father.[189]
The proclamation will be fruitful if it is Christ who acts in us: ‘It is good to
remember that in sending his disciples on mission, ‘the Lord acted with them’
(Mk 16:20). He is there, working, striving and doing good with us. In a
mysterious way, it is his love that manifests itself through our service, it is
he who speaks to the world in this language that sometimes has no words.[190]
[1] Francis, Bull of Indiction for the Ordinary Jubilee of 2025,
Spes non confundit,
n° 17.
[2] Ephrem of Nisibe,
Hymns on the Nativity, III, 3, ed. and trans. by E. Beck, Secrétariat
du CorpusSCO, Louvain 1959 (CSCO 186 / Script. Syr. 82, p. 21; CSCO 187 /
Script. Syr. 83, pp. 18-19, modified trans.); Eng. trans. by J. Meyendorff
(Paulist Press, New York – Mahwah 1989, p. 83).
[3] Francis,
Address to the Members of the International Theological
Commission, 30 November 2023.
[4] Constantine,
Letter to the Bishops: «Since at first it had been
agreed that a synod of bishops should take place at Ancyra of Galatia, it has
now appeared to us, for many [reasons], that it is better that it should gather
in the city of Nicaea, in Bithynia: both on account of those bishops coming from
Italy and the other regions of Europe, and on account of the good climate, and
because I shall be in a proximate way an observer of and a participant in the
things that are going to take place» (Athanasius Werke, III/1, 1, ed. by
H.-G. Opitz, De Gruyter, Berlin-Leipzig 1934, pp. 41-42 = Urkunde 20;
Eng. trans.: Fontes Nicaenae Synodi. The Contemporary Sources for the Study
of the Council of Nicaea (304-337), ed. and trans. by S. Fernández, Contexts
of Ancient and Medieval Anthropology 10, Brill-Schöningh, Paderborn 2024, p.
129).
[5] See Council of Chalcedon, preamble (DH,
300).
[6] See Council of Ephesus, 6th
session of the Cyrillians (DH,
265).
[7] Quoted in K. Schatz,
Allgemeine Konzilien –
Brennpunkte der Kirchengeschichte, Brill-Schöningh, Paderborn 2008, p. 41.
[8] Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, The Greek and the Latin Traditions Regarding the
Procession of the Holy Spirit: «The Catholic Church acknowledges the
conciliar, ecumenical, normative and irrevocable value, as expression of the one
common faith of the Church and of all Christians, of the Symbol professed in
Greek at Constantinople in 381 by the Second Ecumenical Council. No profession
of faith peculiar to a particular liturgical tradition can contradict this
expression of the faith taught and professed by the undivided Church» (Eng.
trans. from: L’Osservatore Romano, 13 September 1995).
[9] Francis,
Address to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, 26 January
2024.
[10] We follow the Greek version of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol,
unless otherwise specified.
[11] The theme of God the Father as creator is very present in the early Fathers of
the Church. Clement of Rome says «Father and creator of the entire world» (To
the Corinthians, 19, 2 and 35, 3: ed. by A. Jaubert, SCh 167, Cerf, Paris
1971, pp. 133 and 157; Eng. trans. by B.D. Ehrman, LCL 24, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge [MA.] 2003, pp. 71 and 97); Justin of Nablus speaks of the
«Father of all and Lord God» (Apology on behalf of Christians, 12, 9; 61,
3: ed. by Ch. Munier, SCh 507, Cerf, Paris 2006, pp. 156 and 288-290; Eng.
trans. by D. Minnis - P. Parvis, Oxford Early Christian Texts, Oxford University
Press, Oxford 2009, pp. 107 and 239); Tatian the Syrian also speaks of the
«Constructor of spirits» and the «Father of the things perceptible and visible»
(To the Greeks, IV, 3: ed. by M. Marcovich, PTS 43, De Gruyter,
Berlin-New York 1995, p. 12; Eng. trans. by M. Whittaker, Oxford Early Christian
Texts, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1982, p. 9). Plato considers God to be «the
author and father of the whole universe» (Timaeus, 28c; 41a: Eng. trans.
by R.G. Bury, LCL 234, Harvard University Press, Cambridge [MA.] 1929, pp. 30
and 40-41; see also Epictetus, Discourses I, 9, 7: Eng. trans. by W.A.
Oldfather, LCL 131, Harvard University Press, Cambridge [MA.] 1925, p. 64).
[12] Contrary to Aeschylus, who speaks of the ‘τῶν θεῶν φθόνος’, ‘gods’ high jealousy’ (The Persians, v. 362: ed. by M.L. West,
Teubner, Stuttgart 1991, p. 21; Eng. trans. by P. Burian - A. Shapiro, Oxford
University Press, Oxford 2009, p. 51), see Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra
Gentiles, I, chp. 89, n. 12: Invidiam igitur in Deo impossibile est esse,
etiam secundum suae speciei rationem: non solum quia invidia species tristitiae
est, sed etiam quia tristatur de bono alterius, et sic accipit bonum alterius
tanquam malum sibi.
[13] Hilary of Poitiers,
On the Trinity, IX, 61 (ed. by P. Smulders, CCSL 62A, Brepols, Turnhout
1980, pp. 440-441; Eng. trans. by S. McKenna, The Catholic University of America
Press, Washington, D.C. 1954, pp. 383-384).
[14] See Hippolytus,
Against Noetus 10, 1-2 (ed. and Eng. trans. by R.
Butterworth, Heythrop, London 1977, pp. 68-69). Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 5, 2:
Ante omnia enim Deus erat solus, ipse sibi et
mundus et locus et omnia. Solus autem quia nihil aliud extrinsecus praeter
illum. Ceterum ne tunc quidem solus; habebat enim secum quam habebat in
semetipso, rationem suam (ed. by A. Kroymann - E. Evans, CCSL 2, Brepols,
Turnhout 1954, p. 1163; Eng. trans. by P. Holmes, Lighthouse Publishing, Savage
2018, p. 13).
[15] See the
Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp (ed. by P. Th. Camelot, SCh 10, Cerf,
Paris 1958, pp. 241-275); Justin, Apology on behalf of Christians, 63
(ed. by Ch. Munier, pp. 294-301; Eng. trans. by D. Minnis - P. Parvis, pp.
245-249).
[16] See the anathema directed against Arius at the end of the Nicene symbol
(DH, 126).
[17] Arius,
Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, 5 (Athanasius Werke, III/1, 1,
ed. by H.-G. Opitz, De Gruyter, Berlin-Leipzig 1934, p. 3 = Urkunde 1;
Eng. trans. from: Fontes Nicaenae Synodi, p. 41).
[18] In a reading post-Nicaea, Chromatius of Aquileia affirms: ‘Just as the
work of our first creation was the work of the Trinity, so our second creation
is the work of the Trinity: the Father does nothing without the Son or without
the Holy Spirit, for what is the work of the Father is also the work of the Son,
and what is the work of the Son is also the work of the Holy Spirit.’ (Chromatius
of Aquileia, Sermons, 18, 4: ed. by J. Lemarié, SCh 164, Cerf, Paris
1971, p. 14).
[19] On these ‘omissions’ of the Holy Spirit, see Y. Congar,
I believe in The Holy
Spirit, vol. I, The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York 1997, pp.
159-166. Congar’s analyses deal mainly with the 19th and 20th
centuries, but the phenomena he describes still exist in a more subtle way.
[20] Pater
[...] fons ergo ipse et origo est totius divinitatis, 6th
Council of Toledo (DH, 490). See also Augustine, for whom the
Father is ‘the beginning of the whole divinity’ (Augustine, De Trinitate, IV,
xx, 29: ed. by W.J. Mountain, CCSL 50, Brepols, Turnhout 1968, p. 200; Eng.
trans. by Ph. Schaff - A. West Haddan, Christian Literature Publishing, Buffalo
1987, p. 85).
[21] Version of the Nicene symbol (325).
[22] Hilary of Poitiers,
On the Trinity, VIII, 41: ‘Nor is he a God of another nature, but the
Father and the Son are one’ (ed. by P. Smulders, p. 354; Eng. trans. by S.
McKenna, p. 308).
[23] See B. Sesboüé,
Histoire des Dogmes. Le Dieu du Salut, vol. I, Desclée, Paris 1994, p. 246.
[24] Latin version of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol, based on the version
translated by Rusticus in the 6th century (cf. I. Ortiz de Urbina, Storia dei Concili Ecumenici, vol. I, LEV, Città del Vaticano 1994, p. 172).
[25] See Ephrem and Gregory Palamas, but also Ambrose:
Splendor paternae gloriae
as a commentary on lumen de lumine, in Ambrosius, Opere poetiche e
frammenti, It. trans. by G. Banterle - G. Biffi - I. Biffi - L. Migliavacca,
Opera Omnia di Sant’Ambrogio 22, Biblioteca Ambrosiana - Città Nuova,
Milano-Roma 1994, pp. 34-37.
[26] ‘The doctrine of the Trinity is not an addition and a weakening but a
radicalisation of Christian monotheism’ (K. Rahner, Unicité et Trinité de
Dieu en dialogue avec l’islam [1978], in Œuvres. 22/1b: Dogmatique après le Concile. Fondement de la théologie, doctrine de Dieu et
christologie, Cerf, Paris 2022, p. 213).
[27] See M. Wyschogrod,
Abraham’s Promise, Judaism and Jewish-Christian
Relations, SCM Press, London 2006, p. 178.
[28] Cf. D. Boyarin,
Le Christ Juif, Cerf, Paris 2019, pp. 42-66; P. Lenhardt,
L’Unité de la Trinité. À l’écoute de la tradition d’Israël, Parole et Silence, Paris 2011; P. Schäfer,
Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish
Concepts of God in Antiquity, Princeton University Press, Princeton (N.J.)
2020.
[29] See D. Boyarin,
Le Christ Juif, p. 55-56, for example. This
position is actually considered in the Jewish world as a possible interpretation
of Daniel in the Aramaic text and of various texts from the Second Temple
period, although it is also much debated.
[30] Pr 1,9.14; 8,1-36; Wis 1,7; 7,22-27; Si 24,1-22. Some exegetes also use the
expression ‘duotheism’ with regard to personified Wisdom, see J. Trublet (ed.),
La Sagesse Biblique. De l’Ancien au Nouveau Testament, Lectio Divina 160, Cerf, Paris 1995.
[31] See L. W. Hurtado,
One God, one Lord. Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism,
T&T Clark, Edinburgh 1998; R. Bauckham, God Crucified (1996), in Id.,
Jesus and the God of Israel, Paternoster, Crownhill (U.K.) 2008, pp. 1-59.
For example, part of the Nicene symbol was formulated in the first early
Judeo-Christian literature, the Odes of Solomon, which date from around
70-125 AD, see Ode 14:12-17, in A. Rahlfs - R. Hanhart (ed.), Septuaginta,
SESB Edition, Stuttgart 2006.
[32] The Latin version of the Creed distinguishes between the fact that Christ took
flesh ‘through’ (de) the Holy Spirit and ‘through’ (ex) the Virgin
Mary.
[33]J. Ratzinger,
Einführung in das Christentum, Vorlesungen über das
Apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis, Vorwort zur Neuausgabe, in JRGS 4
(2000), p. 52.
[34] Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon: ‘Following the holy fathers, then, we all unanimously teach that we confess one
and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in divinity, and the
same perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly human (composed of) a
rational soul and a body, consubstantial with the Father as to divinity and the
same consubstantial with us as to humanity, in all things like us except sin,
before the ages begotten from the Father as to divinity, and in the last days
the same (begotten) for us and our salvation as to humanity from the Virgin
Mary, Mother of God’ (DH, 301).
[35] Athanasius of Alexandria, Discourses against the Arians, II, 70: ‘The human being, constituted as
a creature, would not have been divinised if the Son had not been the true God;
and the human being would not have been able to stand in the presence of the
Father if the one who had put on the body had not been by nature his true Word.
Similarly, we would not have been freed from sin and the curse, if the flesh put
on by the Word had not been human flesh (because we would have nothing in common
with all that is foreign to us)’ (Athanasius Werke, I/1, 1, ed. by K.
Metzler - K. Savvidis, De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 1998, p. 247).
[36] Ibid., III, 7, 3 (Athanasius Werke, I/1, 3, ed. by K. Metzler - K. Savvidis,
De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 2000, p. 313).
[37] This expression is found in the Fathers, where other agents in history are
sometimes also mentioned along with Pilate, such as ‘the tetrarch Herod’ (Ignatius of Antioch,
Letter to the Smyrnaeans, I, 2: ed. by E. Prinzivalli - M. Simonetti,
Fondazione Lorenzo Valla - Mondadori, Milano 2010, p. 407; Eng. trans. by B.D.
Ehrman, Harvard University Press, Cambridge [MA.] 2003, p. 297) or ‘Tiberius
Caesar’ (Justin, Apology on behalf of Christians 13, 3: ed. by Ch.
Munier, p. 164; Eng. trans. by D. Minnis - P. Parvis, p. 111).
[38] John Paul II,
Meeting with representatives of the Jewish community of Mainz, 17
November 1980, no. 3: ‘The Old Covenant, a Covenant that has never been
denounced by God’; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1992, no. 121: ‘The
Old Covenant has never been revoked’. See also Francis,
Evangelii Gaudium,
2013, IV, no. 247.
[39] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Declaration
Nostra Aetate, no. 4.
[40] Irenaeus of Lyon,
Against the Heresies IV, 34, 3: ‘How could the Prophets predict the
King’s coming; how could they tell in advance about the good news of the liberty
he would give; how could they announce beforehand all that was done by Christ,
both by words and by deeds, and his passion; how could they foretell the new
covenant, if they had received prophetic inspiration from some other god, and
had been ignorant, according to you, of the ineffable Father, of his kingdom,
and of his dispensations, which God’s Son fulfilled by coming on earth in the
last days?’ (ed. by A. Rousseau, SCh 100, Cerf, Paris 1965, pp. 850-853). See A. De Halleux,
La profession de l’Esprit-Saint dans le Symbole de Constantinople, in Revue théologique de Louvain 10/1 (1979), pp. 5-39. A symbol of Epiphanius of Salamis dating from 374 develops this theme further:
‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, who spoke in the Law and preached through the
prophets, who came down at the Jordan, speaks in the apostles and dwells in the
saints’ (DH, 44).
[41] John II, Letter
Olim quidem, March 534 (DH, 401). See also Second Council of Constantinople,
anathema 10: ‘If anyone does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, who was
crucified in the flesh, is the true God and Lord of glory and one of the members
of the Holy Trinity, let him be anathema’ (DH, 432).
[42] ‘What has already been accomplished in Christ must still be accomplished in us
and in the world. The final fulfilment will come at the end, with the
resurrection of the dead, the new heavens and the new earth. The Jewish
messianic expectation is not in vain. It can become a powerful stimulus for us
Christians to keep alive the eschatological dimension of our faith. Like them,
we live in expectation. The difference is that for us, the One who will come
will have the features of the Jesus who has already come and is already present
and active among us’ (Pontifical Biblical Commission,
The Jewish People and
their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, 2001, II, no. 21.)
[43] See
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1992, III, no. 1848.
[44] See Council of Orange (529), canon 1 (DH, 371) and canon 2 (DH, 372).
[45] According to Irenaeus of Lyon,
Against the Heresies, III, 6, 1, Jesus is
referring here to ‘those who have received adopted sonship’ in him (ed. by A.
Rousseau, SCh 211, Cerf, Paris 1974, p. 68).
[46] J. Ratzinger,
JRGS 6/2, p. 861: ‘Christ, the human being who is in God, eternally one
with God, is at the same time God’s perpetual openness to humanity. He is thus
himself what we call “heaven”, for heaven is not a space but a person, the
person of him in whom God and humanity are forever united without separation.
And we go to heaven, yes, we enter heaven, insofar as we go to Jesus Christ and
enter into him’. See also H. U. von Balthasar, Eschatologie, in J. Feiner
- J. Trütsch - F. Böckle (ed.), Fragen der Theologie heute, Einsiedeln,
Zurich-Cologne 1957, pp. 407-408.
[47] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Pastoral Constitution,
Gaudium et
spes, I, no. 22.
[48] See John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle
A 38, 3-7; The Spiritual
Canticle B 39, 2-7 (Eng. trans. by K. Kavanaugh - O. Rodriguez, Institute of
Carmelitan Studies, Washington, D.C. 1991, pp. 471-477).
[49] Paul VI, ‘Final Address of the Second Vatican Council’, 1965, § 8.
[50] See Council of Chalcedon (DH, 301).
[51] Cf. the symbol of the Apostles.
[52] See Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, IV, 81.
[53] B. Pascal,
Les Pensées, ed. by Jacques Chevalier, Gallimard, Paris 1954, p. 1207,
fgt 258; see Francis, Apostolic Letter
Sublimitas et Miseria hominis, 19
June 2023, for the fourth centenary of the birth of Blaise Pascal.
[54] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution
Lumen Gentium, VII, no. 48; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
Dominus Iesus,
2000, VI, no. 20.
[55] Hippolytus of Rome,
The Apostolic Tradition, 6 (ed. by B. Botte, SCh 29, Cerf, Paris 1984,
p. 55; Eng. trans. by. G. Dix - H. Chadwick, Routledge, London-New York 1992, p.
11).
[56] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogm. Const.,
Lumen Gentium, VIII, no. 62: ‘As the one goodness of God is really poured on in different ways in
creatures, so the one mediation of the Redeemer does not exclude, but on the
contrary elicits a varied cooperation on the part of creatures in dependence on
the one source’.
[57] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Past. Const.
Gaudium et
spes, II, n° 24-25.
[58] Ibid., II, no. 22.
[59] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogm. Constit.
Lumen Gentium, no. 1.
[60] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Const.
Sacrosanctum Concilium, Appendix.
[61] Theodoret of Cyr,
Ecclesiastical History, I, 9 (ed. by L. Parmentier, GCS 19, Hinrichs,
Leipzig 1911, pp. 38-42; Eng. trans. by Ph. Schaff - H. Wace, Eedrmans, Grand Rapids [MI.] 1953, pp. 47-48).
[62] Eusebius,
Life of Constantine, III, 17-20 (ed. by I.A. Heikel, GCS 7, Hinrichs, Leipzig 1902, pp. 84-87; Eng.
trans. by A. Cameron - S.G. Hall, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1999, pp. 127-130); Card. K. Koch,
Verso una celebrazione ecumenica del 1700° anniversario del Concilio di Nicea
(325-2025), L’Osservatore Romano, 30 April 2021: ‘Purtroppo con
questa decisione venne abbandonata la data comune di Pasqua tra cristiani ed
ebrei’. [63] John Paul II,
Meeting with the Jewish Community of Rome, 13 April 1986, no. 4; Benedetto XVI,
Luce del mondo. Il papa, la Chiesa e i segni dei tempi. Una conversazione con P. Seewald, LEV, Città del Vaticano 2010, p. 123.
[64] Athanasius of Alexandria,
The Life of Saint Antony, 69 (ed. by. G.J.M. Bartelink, SCh 400, Cerf,
Paris 1994, pp. 314-316; Eng. trans. by R.T. Meyer, Newman Press, New
York-Mahwah 1978, pp. 78-79)
[65] Francis, Apostolic Letter
Desiderio desideravi, 2022, n. 10-11: ‘If we too were
not given the possibility of a true encounter with him, it would be as if we
were declaring the newness of the Word made flesh to be exhausted. On the
contrary, the Incarnation, in addition to being the only ever new event known to
history, is also the very method that the Holy Trinity chose to open the way to
communion for us. The Christian faith is either an encounter with the Him alive,
or it does not exist. The liturgy guarantees us the possibility of such an
encounter’.
[66] See
Epistle to Diognetus, V, 10-11 (ed. by H.I. Marrou, SCh 33, Cerf,
Paris 1951, p. 64; Eng. trans. by B.D. Ehrman, LCL 25, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge [MA.] 2003, pp. 140-141).
[67] Athenagoras,
Embassy for the Christians, XII, 3 (ed. by B. Pouderon, SCh 379, Cerf, Paris 1992, p. 108; Eng.
trans. by J.H. Crehan, The Newman Press, Westminster - Longmans, London 1956, p.
43); XXIV, 2 (ed. B. Pouderon, pp. 160-162; Eng. trans. by J.H. Crehan, p.
62).
[68] Ambrose,
Exposition of the Christian Faith, I, 1, 8 (ed. by O. Faller, CSEL 78, Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, Wien 1962, p. 7).
[69] Hilary of Poitiers,
On the Trinity, II, 1 (ed. by P. Smulders, CCSL 62A, p. 38; Eng. trans.
by S. McKenna, The Catholic University of America Press, Washington D.C. 2007,
pp. 35-36).
[70] Ephrem of Nisibe,
De fide, 52; 59; 76 (Eng. trans. by J.B. Morris, John Henry
Parker, Oxford 1847, pp. 273, 300, 347).
[71] Athanasius,
Against the Arians, II, 41, 4 (Athanasius Werke, I/1, 2, ed. K. Metzler - K. Savvidis, p.
218), and: II, 41, 5 (Athanasius Werke, I/1, 2, ed. by K. Metzler - K.
Savvidis, p. 218).
[72] See also Basil of Caesarea,
On the Holy Spirit, 26 (ed. by C.F.H.
Johnston, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1892, pp. 59-61; Eng. trans. by D. Anderson,
St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, New York 1980, pp. 46-47): ‘What makes us
Christians? Our faith, everyone would answer. How are we saved? Obviously
through the regenerating grace of baptism. How else could we be? We are
confirmed in our understanding that salvation comes through Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit. Shall we cast away the standard of teaching we received? [...] If
baptism is the beginning of my life, and the day of my regeneration is the first
of days, it is obvious that the words spoken when I received the grace of
adoption are more honorable than any spoken since’. Likewise, regarding the Holy
Spirit: Athanasius, First Letter to Serapion, 30 (Athanasius
Werke, I/1, 1, ed. by H.-G. Opitz, De Gruyter, Berlin-Leipzig 1934, pp.
523-526).
[73] Athanasius,
Against the Arians, II, 42, 3 (Athanasius Werke, I/1, 2, ed. K. Metzler - K. Savvidis, p.
219); Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, 26 (ed. by C.F.H. Johnston,
pp. 59-61; Eng. trans. by D. Anderson, pp. 46-47); Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Discourse, I, 2 (ed. by E. Mühlenberg, GNO III/4, Brill,
Leiden-New York 1996, pp. 12-13; Eng. trans. by I. Green, St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, Yonkers [N.Y.] 2019, pp. 68-69).
[74] Cf. Ambrose,
Exposition of the Christian Faith, I, 9, 58 (ed. by O.
Faller, p. 25); also Zeno of Verona, Sermon, II, 5, 9 (ed. B. Löfstedt,
CCSL 22, Brepols, Turnhout 1971, p. 167).
[75] See Athanasius,
De decretis Nicaenae synodi, 33, 1-7 (Athanasius Werke,
II/1, 1, ed. by H.-G. Opitz, De Gruyter, Berlin-Leipzig 1935, pp. 28-29).
[76] Hilary of Poitiers,
Against Constantius, 16 (ed. by A. Rocher, SCh 334, Cerf, Paris
1987, pp. 200-201). In it, Hilary defends Nicaea against the accusation that it
does not conform to Scripture: according to him, new diseases require a new
composition of remedies. For example, the expression ‘innascible’, which was a
hobbyhorse of Arius, Aetius and Eunomius, is not a biblical word for the Father
either: ‘You declare that “the Son is like the Father”. The Gospels do not
preach this. Why do you not reject this statement?’ (Eng. trans. by R. Flower,
Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, p. 129).
[77] Athanasius,
Epistula ad Afros episcopos, 1, 1 (Athanasius Werke, II/8, ed. by H.Ch. Bennecke - U. Heil -
A. von Stockhausen, De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 2006, pp. 323-323); the Nicene
Creed is ‘sufficient’. Cf. Athanasius, Epistula ad Epictetum, 1 (PG 26,
col. 1049-1052).
[78] The term ‘Nicene’ could also be applied to formulations of confessions of faith
that extended the Nicene symbol, at least as long as they retained its content
and did not adopt opposing doctrines. See DH, 300 (and supra, § 4).
[79] Council of Chalcedon,
Actio 3, 10.12; 2,1,2, 79 [gr.]; 2,3,2, 5f [lat.]) (DH, 300); the ‘definition’ (horos)
of Chalcedon is based on Nicaea, together with the Symbol of the 150 Fathers
meeting in Constantinople (ACO 2,1,2, 126-129 [gr]): ‘Now, for the perfect
knowledge and strengthening of the right faith, this wise and salutary Symbol of
divine grace would have sufficed in itself, for it teaches about the Father, the
Son and the Holy Spirit what is definitive, and puts the incarnation of the Lord
before the eyes of those who are ready to accept it with faith’. In the words of
the author: Sufficeret quidem ad plenam cognitionem pietatis et
confirmationem sapiens hoc et salutare divinae gratiae Symbolum; de Patre enim
et de Filio et de Spiritu sancto perfectionem docet et inhumanationem fideliter
accipientibus repraesentat (COeD, 1962, p. 60).
[80] Francis, Bull of Indiction for the Ordinary Jubilee of the Year 2025,
Spes non
confundit, n. 17.
[81] This is a symbolic reference to Gen 14:14.
[82] Athanasius,
De synodis 5, 1-3 (Athanasius Werke, II/1, 1, ed. by H.-G.
Opitz, De Gruyter, Berlin-Leipzig 1935, p. 234).
[83] Basil of Caesarea,
Homily XVI on ‘In the Beginning was the Word’ (PG 31, col. 471-482). It
should be noted, however, that the Symbol, unlike John’s prologue, avoids the
term ‘Logos’. As a central concept of Greek philosophy, it was almost inevitably
understood in a subordinationist (Arian) way by the Fathers familiar with Greek
philosophy.
[84] Chromatius of Aquileia,
Sermon, 21, 3: ‘Whoever, like Photinus or Arius, “does not
believe that Christ is God, or that the Son is from the Father”, insults the
evangelist John’ (ed. by J. Lemarié, p. 44); Id., Sermon, 18, 1: ‘For the
one who follows Christ there is always daylight, for he walks in eternal light’
(ed. by J. Lemarié, p. 8); Id., Sermon, 8, 4: ‘The throne of God is one,
the throne of the majesty of the Father and the majesty of the Son’, ‘there is
no difference in dignity’ (ed. by J. Lemarié, pp. 192-195).
[85] Zeno of Verona,
Sermon, II, 5, 9-10; II, 8 (ed. by B. Löfstedt, CCSL 22, Brepols, Turnhout 1971, pp.
167, 176-178).
[86] John Chrysostom,
Three Baptismal Catechesis, III, 1 (ed. by A. Piédagnel - L.
Doutreleau, SCh 366, Cerf, Paris 1990, pp. 214-215).
[87] Augustine of Hippo,
De agone christiano, 18 (ed. by J. Zycha, CSEL 41, Tempsky, Wien 1900,
pp. 121-122); De fide et symbolo, V, 11-12; VIII, 18 (ed. by J. Zycha,
CSEL 41, Tempsky, Wien 1900, pp. 14-15, 20-22). The actual theological debate
with the Homoeans is conducted by Augustine in De Trinitate I-VII as well as in
Contra sermonem Arianorum and Contra Maximinum
haereticum Arianorum episcopum (Augustine of Hippo, Opera - Werke,
ed. by H.J. Sieben, Brill, Schöningh 2008).
[88] Gregory of Nyssa,
Catechetical Discourse, 39, 5: ‘He who has a mind
at all must by all means choose one of the two, either to believe the holy
Trinity belongs to the uncreated nature and thus to make [the Trinity] the
author of his own life by a spiritual begetting, or, if he should deem the Son
or the Holy Spirit to be outside the first, and true, and good nature of God (I
mean of the Father), not to include faith in these [persons] at the time of
begetting [i.e., baptism], lest it should escape his notice that he is giving
himself in adoption to a nature that is deficient and in need of someone to make
it good, and in some manner introduce himself again to what is akin to himself,
by deserting faith in the transcendent nature» (ed. by E. Mühlenberg, pp.
100-101; Eng. trans. by I. Green, pp. 151-152).
[89] Ambrose,
Commentary on Luke IV, 67 (ed. by C. Schenkl - H. Schenkl, CSEL 32, Tempsky, Wien 1897, p. 173).
[90] A. Grillmeier, ‘Das Gebet zu “Jesus” und das “Jesusgebet”, in
Fragmente zur Christologie.
Studien zum altkirchlichen Christusbild, Herder, Freiburg 1997, pp. 357-371.
[91] 2 Cor 12:8,9; Rom 10:12; 2 Pet 3:18; invocations inserted into the
liturgy: 1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20; cf Didache 10:6.
[92] In particular, Phil 2:6-11; Col 1:15-20; Eph 1:3-10; 1 Tim 3:16; Rev
5:6-14.
[93] See Origen,
On Prayer, X, 2 (ed. by P. Koetschau, GCS 3, Hinrichs,
Leipzig 1899, pp. 320-321); XV, 1: ‘Perhaps if we understand what prayer is, we
shall see that we should not pray to any being that is produced, not even to
Christ’ (ed. by P. Koetschau, p. 333); XVI, 1 (ed. by P. Koetschau, p. 336); Against Celsus, VIII, 13 (ed. by. P. Koetschau, pp. 230-231; Eng. trans. by
H. Chadwick, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1953, p. 461).
[94] Basil of Caesarea,
On the Holy Spirit, 25-29; 68 (ed. C.F.H. Johnston, pp. 58-66, 133-135; Eng. trans. by D.
Anderson, pp. 45-51, 102-103).
[95] For example, Athanasius, who uses the traditional doxology in an anti-Sabellian
way, and Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, 3-4; 16 (ed. C.F.H.
Johnston, pp. 16-20, 36-38; Eng. trans. by D. Anderson, pp. 17-19, 33-34), who
stresses the difference between oikonomia (Christ’s saving mediation) and
theologia (son of equal importance).
[96] See for example the
Traditio Apostolica: during the consecration of
bishops and presbyters, as well as during the Eucharistic Prayer, the final
doxology is as follows: ‘Through your servant Jesus Christ, through whom be
glory to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’; Origen, Homilies on Luke,
XXXVII, 5 (ed. by M. Rauer, GCS 35, Hinrichs, Leipzig 1930, pp. 220-221; Eng.
trans. by J.T. Lienhard, The Fathers of the Church 94, The Catholic University
of America Press, Washington, D.C. 1996, p. 155); Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration
XIX, 17: ‘The single glory and splendor of Godhead in Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, to whom be the glory and the honor and the worship forever and
ever’ (PG 35, col. 1064; Eng. trans. by M. Vinson, The Fathers of the Church 107,
The Catholic University of America Press, Washington D.C. 2003, p. 106); Oration
XVII, 13: ‘In Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom be the power and
the glory, the honor and the kingdom, as he is and has been and will be forever
and ever, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit’ (PG 35, col. 981; Eng.
trans. by M. Vinson, p. 94).
[97] Basil of Caesarea,
On the Holy Spirit, 73 (ed. C.F.H. Johnston, pp. 142-145; Eng. trans.
by D. Anderson, pp. 109-110). The example of Bishop Leontius of Antioch shows
how explosive the question of the form of the doxology could become in the life
of the local Churches: in order not to fall out with the Arians or their
adversaries, he no longer pronounced the words of the doxology aloud, but ‘all
that those standing near him could hear was the “For priesthood and still ranked
with the laity, ever and ever”’ (Theodoret of Cyr, Ecclesiastical
History, II, 24, 3; ed. by L. Parmentier, GCS 19, Hinrichs, Leipzig 1911,
pp. 38-42; Eng. trans. by P. Schaff - H. Wace, Eerdmans Publishing Company,
Grand Rapids 1953, p. 84 ).
[98] Basil of Caesarea,
Letter 159, 2 (PG 32, col. 620-621; Eng. trans. by J. Deferrari, Fathers of the Church,
New York 1951, p. 313). See also Basil of Caesarea, Letter 125, 3 (PG 32,
col. 549-552; Eng. trans. by J. Deferrari, p. 257); On the Holy Spirit,
16; 24; 26 (ed. by C.F.H. Johnston, pp. 36-38, 55-58, 59-61; Eng. trans. by D.
Anderson, pp. 33-34, 45, 46-47).
[99] Text in A. Grillmeier,
Fragmente zur Christologie, p. 365.
[100] Gregory of Nyssa,
Letter V, 7 (ed. by P. Maraval, SCh 363, Cerf, Paris 1990, pp. 283-285; Eng. trans. by
A.M. Silvas, Brill, Leiden-Boston 2007, p. 139).
[101] Cassiodorus,
Explanation of the Psalms, proem. XVII (ed. by M. Adriaen, CCSL 97, Brepols, Turnhout 1958, pp.
22-23; Eng. trans. by P.G. Walsh, Paulist Press, Mahwah 1990, p. 41).
[102] Second
Synod of Vaison (524 AD), canon 5, Mansi 8, col. 725:
Quia
non solum in sede apostolica, sed etiam per totum Orientem et totam Africam vel
Italiam propter Haereticorum astutiam, qui Dei filium non semper cum Patre
fuisse, sed a tempore coepisse blasphemant, in omnibus clausulis post
Gloriam patri etc. Sicut erat in principio licitur; etiam et nos in universis
ecclesiis nostris hoc ita dicendum esse decernimus. Sicut erat in principio
dicitur; etiam et nos in universis ecclesiis nostris hoc ita dicendum esse
decernimus.
[103] Sozomen,
Ecclesiastical History, VIII, 8, 1-3 (ed. by G.Ch. Hansen, GCS N.F. 4, De Gruyter, Berlin 1995, pp.
360-361; Eng. trans. by Ph. Schaff - H. Wace, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids [MI.] 1952,
p. 404); Ambrose, Contra Auxentium sermo de basilicis tradendis XXXIV
(ed. by M. Zalzer, CSEL 82/3, Brepols, Turnhout 1982, p. 105).
[104] See, for example, Ephrem of Nisibe,
De Nativitate IV, 143-214; especially
IV, 154-156, which is very clear: ‘While He was lying on His Mother’s breast /
in Her womb all creatures were lying / He was silent as a baby / and yet He made
His creatures carry out / all His commands. / For without the First-Born, / no
human being can / approach the Essence. / He alone is capable of it’ (ed. by E.
Beck, CSCO 186, Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, Louvain 1959, p. 39; CSCO 187, p. 34;
Eng. trans. from: ed. by F. Cassingena-Trévedy, SCh 459, Cerf, Paris 2001, p.
103).
[105] Ephrem of Nisibe,
De fide LXXVI, 1-3.7 (ed. by E. Beck, CSCO 154, pp. 232-233;
CSCO 155, pp. 198-199; Eng. trans. by J.B. Morris, John Henry Parker, Oxford
1847, p. 347); VI, 1-6 (ed. by E. Beck, CSCO 154, pp. 24-27; CSCO 155, pp.
18-20; Eng. trans. by J.B. Morris, John Henry Parker, Oxford 1847, pp. 126-133).
[106] See Ephrem of Nisibe,
De fide XL and LXXXIII.
[107] Ephrem of Nisibe,
De fide LII, 1-3 (ed. by E. Beck, CSCO 154, pp. 161-162; CSCO 155, p.
138; Eng. trans. by J.B. Morris, John Henry Parker, Oxford 1847, p. 274).
[108] Ephrem of Nisibe, Hymns against heresies, XXII, 20 (ed. by D. Cerbelaud, SCh 587, Cerf, Paris 2017, p. 399). It should be
noted that, even if Saint Ephrem’s teaching is perfectly in line with Nicene
orthodoxy, the vocabulary and expression are not those of Nicaea, which is
surely due to the consciously chosen poetic rather than discursive form of his
teaching. Cf. eng. trans. by J.B. Morris, pp. 175-177.
[109] Balai (Balaeus),
Gebete (ed. by S. Landersdorfer, BKV 1/6, Jos. Kösel, Kempten [München]
1912, p. 92); Isaac of Antioch, First poem on the Incarnation (Sancti
Isaaci Antiochi Doctoris syrorum opera omnia, ed. by G. Bickell, Typis
Killeri Gissensis, Gissae 1873, p. 23).
[110] Prudentius,
Apotheosis, 309-311 (ed. by M.P. Cunningham, CCSL 126, Brepols,
Turnhout 1966, p. 87; Eng. trans. by H.J. Thomson, LCL 387, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge [MA.] 1949, p. 143).
[111] See Irenaeus of Lyon,
Against the Heresies IV, 34, 1, so often quoted by
Henri de Lubac: Omnem novitatem attulit, semetipsum afferens (ed. by A.
Rousseau, SCh 100, Cerf, Paris 1965, pp. 846-847). See also Francis,
Evangelii gaudium, 2013, no. 11.
[112] On this distinction, see Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogm. Const.
Dei Verbum, I, n. 2-5 and II, n. 7-8.
[113] Irenaeus of Lyon,
Against the Heresies IV, 5, 1 (ed. by A. Rousseau, SCh 100, Cerf, Paris
1965, pp. 426-427).
[114] ‘If we receive human testimony, the testimony of God is greater, because this is
the testimony of God: he has testified to his Son. Those who believe in the Son
of God have the testimony in themselves’ (1 Jn 5:9).
[115] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogm. Const.
Dei Verbum, I, no. 2.
[116] J. Ratzinger,
Gesammelte Schriften, Band VI/1, 408f, Herausgeber: Gerhard Ludwig
Müller, Freiburg im Breisgau, Herder Verlag 2014; J. Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Jésus de Nazareth, 1. Du Baptême dans le Jourdain à la Transfiguration, Paris, Flammarion 2007, p. 377-378.
[117] See Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogm. Const.
Dei Verbum, I,
n. 2; cf. 2 Pet 1:4.
[118] See Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 25, a. 1, Resp.
[119] Paul emphasises that Christ makes us enter into the very mind of God, since he
quotes Isaiah 40:13: ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord (LXX: noûn Kuriou;
Heb: ruah Adonai) so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of the
Lord’ (cf. also Rom 11:34). See M. Quesnel, La première épître aux Corinthiens,
Commentaire Biblique:
Nouveau Testament, Cerf 2018, pp. 88-92.
[120] Francis, Encyclical Letter
Lumen Fidei, 2013, no. 18.
[121] Ibid., no. 27, which quotes Gregory the Great,
Homilies on the Gospels, II,
27, 4 (PL 76, col. 1207).
[122] See Francis,
Address in Naples on the occasion of the conference ‘Theology
after Veritatis Gaudium in the Mediterranean context’, 21 June 2019,
p. 9.
[123] ‘Through the grandeur and beauty of creatures, we can contemplate,
by analogy,
their Author.’ (Wis 13:5). See Sancti Thomae de Aquino Scriptum super
Sententiis liber I, q. 1, a. 2, ad 2, which refers to the analogia
creaturae ad creatorem.
[124] See M. Lochbrunner,
Analogia Caritatis: Darstellung und Deutung der
Theologie Hans Urs von Balthasars, Freiburg im Breisgau - Basel - Wien,
Herder 1981 (Freiburger Theologische Studien, 120), p. 62 and pp. 292-293. See
also International Theological Commission (ITC),
Theology, Christology and Anthropology, 1981, D, no. 1: ‘The proclamation of Jesus Christ, the Son of
God, is presented under the biblical sign of “for you”. This is why the whole of
Christology must be treated from a soteriological point of view. It is therefore
right, in a certain sense, that modern authors have attempted to work out a
“functional” Christology. But, conversely, it must also be held that the
“existence for othersˮ of Jesus Christ cannot be separated either from his
relationship to the Father or from his intimate communion with him and for that
reason it must be founded on his eternal sonship. The pro-existence of
Jesus Christ, through which God communicates himself to human beings,
presupposes his pre-existence’.
[125] This is why St. Thomas Aquinas insists that Adam was endowed with grace from his
creation, without which he would not have been able to fulfil his human
vocation. See Sancti Thomae de Aquino Scriptum super Sententiis liber II,
d. 29, q. 1, a. 2; d. 30, q. 1, a. 1; Summa Theologiae, I, q. 95, a. 1;
I-II, q. 109, a. 5.
[126] J. Ratzinger/Benedict XVI,
Ils regardont celui qu’ils ont transpercé: Contributions à une christologie
spirituelle, Fr. trans. by R. Kremer - M.L. Wilverth-Guitard, Éd. Salvator, Paris 2006, p. 29 (JRGS
VI/2, p. 701).
[127] Ibid., pp. 30-31 (JRGS
VI/2, p. 702).
[128] ‘Amen, amen, I say to you: the Son can do nothing of himself; he does only what
he sees the Father doing; what the Father does, the Son does likewise. For the
Father loves the Son and shows him everything he does. He will show him even
greater works, so that you all will be amazed’ (Jn 5:18-20); ‘This is the
message you all have heard from the beginning: let us love one another’
(1 Jn 3:11).
[129] J. Ratzinger/Benedict XVI,
Ils regardont celui qu’ils ont transpercé, p. 38 (JRGS
VI/2, p.
707).
[130] See Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter
Caritas in Veritate, 2009, no.
33.
[131] P. Florensky,
La colonne et le fondement de la vérité, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne 1975,
p. 42 (modified translation). When Florensky speaks of the “definition of the Church”, he means the mystery of
the Church in all its mystical and theological depth rather than the
ecclesiastical institution.
[132] Athanasius,
De decretis Nicaenae synodi, I, 2, 1: Τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγον ἀρνούμeνοι,
εἰκότως καὶ λόγον παντός εἶσιν ἕρημοι (Athanasius Werke, II/1, ed. by
H.-G. Opitz, De Gruyter, Berlin-Leipzig 1935, p. 2).
[133] See Augustine,
Confessions, III, 6, 11 (ed. by P. Knöll, CSEL 33,
Tempsky, Wien 1896, p. 33); Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 104,
a. 1, Resp.
[134] Cf.
supra, § 32 to 37.
[135] See ITC,
Theology, Christology and Anthropology, 1982, C.
[136] Francis, Apostolic Exhortation
Evangelii Gaudium, 2013, III, no. 115.
[137] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council,Past. Const.
Gaudium et
spes, II, ch. II, no. 53, § 1: ‘It is proper to the human being to attain humanity truly and
fully only through culture, that is, by cultivating the goods and values of
nature’.
[138] Francis, Apostolic Exhortation
Evangelii Gaudium, 2013, III, no. 115. See also,
as examples, idem,
Letter on the role of literature in formation, 17 July
2024; Letter on the renewal of the study of the history of the Church, 21
November 2024.
[139] Francis, Apostolic Constitution
Veritatis Gaudium, 2017, no. 2, which draws on
Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Exhortation
Evangelii nuntiandi, 1975, 19.
[140] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Decree
Ad gentes, II, no. 11.
[141] For example, the
Egô eimi of the fourth Gospel, or the terminology
of Heb 1:3 or 2 Pet 1:4.
[142] John Paul II, Encyclical
Faith and Reason, 1998, VI, no. 72: ‘When the Church comes
into contact with great cultures she has not encountered before, she cannot
leave behind what she has acquired through her inculturation into Greco-Latin
thought. To reject such a heritage would be to go against the providential plan
of God, who leads his Church along the paths of time and history’.
[143] Ibid., VI, no. 71.
[144] See the theme of the “theology of listening” as an antidote to the “Babel
syndrome”, Francis,
Speech in Naples on the occasion of the conference
“Theology after Veritatis Gaudium in the Mediterranean context”, 21
June 2019, pp. 4-5.
[145] This purification and transfiguration of cultures is what makes it possible to
avoid the risk of relativism, highlighted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
Dominus Iesus, 2000, no. 4.
[146] John Paul II, Encyclical
Faith and Reason, 1998, VI, no. 70: ‘The encounter of faith
with different cultures has in fact given birth to a new reality’. On the
maintenance of cultural identity, see ibid., no. 71.
[147] Epistle to Diognetus,
V, 1-4 (ed. by H.I. Marrou, p. 64; Eng. trans. by B.D.
Ehrman, pp. 138-141).
[148] ‘In the future, it will come to pass that the mountain of the House of the Lord
will be established as the highest of mountains and will be elevated above the
hills. All peoples will flock to it. Many peoples will set out and say, “Come,
let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the House of the God of Jacob.
[...] From Sion goes forth the Law, and from Jerusalem the word of the Lord.
[...] Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn to
fight any more”’ (Is 2:2-4; cf. Mic 4:1-4); ‘My House will be called: House of
prayer for all peoples’ (Is 56:7; cf. Zech 14:16).
[149] It is striking to note how Paul, proclaiming the Gospel in the wake of
Pentecost, celebrates the unity of the human family at Areopagus: ‘From one he
made all peoples to dwell on all the face of the earth, determining the times of
their history and the boundaries of their habitation’ (Acts 17:26).
[150] See John Paul II, Encyclical
Faith and Reason (1998), VII, no. 95-96.
[151] See Alexander of Alexandria,
Letter to Alexander of Byzantium, 5 (Athanasius Werke, III/1, ed. by H.-G. Opitz, De Gruyter,
Berlin-Leipzig 1934, pp. 19-29 = Urkunde 14; Eng. trans.: Fontes
Nicaenae Synodi, p. 43).
[152] See ITC,
Synodality in the life and mission of the Church, 2018, I,
no. 19.
[153] Cyprian,
Letter XIV, 4 (ed. by G. Hartel, CSEL III/2, Geroldi, Wien 1871, p.
512; Eng. trans. by R.B. Donna, The Fathers of the Church 51, The Catholic
University of America Press, Washington, D.C. 1964, p. 43). This development on
Ignatius of Antioch and Cyprian of Carthage is close to the ITC document,
Synodality, I, no. 25, which should be consulted for further details.
[154] ITC,
Synodality, I, no. 28.
[155] See J. A. Brundage,
Medieval Canon Law, London-New York, Longman,
1995, p. 5.
[156] Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic
Church and the Orthodox Church, Ravenna Document: Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the
Sacramental Nature of the Church, Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and
Authority, 2007, no. 26: A synod is in principle ‘governed according to the
principle of consensus and concord (harmonia) expressed in Eucharistic
concelebration, as implied in the final doxology of the Apostolic Canon, no.
34’; ‘The Church [reveals] herself as Catholic in the synaxis of
the local Church’ (ibid., n° 22).
[157] See Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Const.
Sacrosanctum Concilium,
I, no. 10; ITC,
Synodality, II, no. 47.
[158] ITC,
Synodality, II, no. 29.
[159] Rousselot considered that certain heuristic procedures of St. Thomas
corresponded to a ‘reciprocal priority and anteriority’ of two inseparable
principles ordered in relation to each other (P. Rousselot s.j., “Les Yeux de la
foi”, RSR, 1910, p. 448).
[160] See Augustine of Hippo,
Sermon, 43, 7 and 9: Crede ut intelligas
(ed. by C. Lambot, CCSL 41, Brepols, Turnhout 1961, pp. 511-512); Anselm, Proslogion, 1, 100:
Credo ut intelligam (ed. by M. Corbin, Cerf,
Paris 1986, pp. 242-243).
[161] Paul VI, Encyclical Letter
Ecclesiam suam, 1964, III, no. 71[68]: ‘Was it not
the intention, and rightly so, to assign to the [Second Vatican] Council itself
a pastoral objective which amounts to inserting the Christian message into the
stream of thought, expression, culture, customs and sensibilities of humanity as
it lives and moves on the face of the earth today?’.
[162] See Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogm. Const.
Dei Verbum, II, nos. 7-8.
[163] See
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1992, no. 156, with reference
to the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius of the First Vatican Council,
chapter 3 (DH, 3008).
[164] Hoc autem testimonium vel est hominis tantum: et istud non facit virtutem fidei,
quia homo et fallere et falli potest. Vel istud testimonium est ex iudicio
divino: et istud verissimum et firmissimum est, quia est ab ipsa veritate, quae nec fallere, nec falli potest.
Et ideo dicit, ad Deum, ut scilicet assentiat
his quae Deus dicit (Sancti Thomae de Aquino Super Epistolam B. Pauli ad
Hebraeos lectura [rep. vulgata], cap. 6, l. 1).
[165] The term usually used is “filiation”, but the point here is to insist on
filiation’s beginning, the actual movement by which we become sons and daughters
of God.
[166] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogm. Const.
Dei Verbum, III, no. 12: ‘To discover the intention of the
sacred writers, we must, among other things, also consider “literary genresˮ.
For it is in quite different ways that truth is proposed and expressed in texts
that are variously historical, or prophetic, or poetic, or even in other forms
of discourse. [...] Nevertheless, Sacred Scripture must be read and interpreted
in the light of the same Spirit in which it was written’.
[167] Dei Verbum, I, no. 2: ‘This economy of Revelation comprises works and words (gestis
verbisque) intimately linked together, so that the works, accomplished by
God in the history of salvation, attest to and corroborate the teaching and the
meaning indicated by the words, while the words proclaim the works and shed
light on the mystery they contain’.
[168] Benedict XVI,
Verbum Domini, Apostolic Exhortation on the Word of God in the life and
mission of the Church, 2010, no. 55.
[169] ‘The Mystery of the Church is more profound, if that be possible, more
“difficult to believe in” than the Mystery of Christ, just as that was already
more difficult to believe in than the Mystery of God’, in H. de Lubac, Catholicisme: Les aspects sociaux du dogme
(1938), in Œuvres complètes
VII, ed. by M. Sales, S.J. - M.-B. Mesnet, Cerf, Paris 2003, pp. 48-49.
[170] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Decree
Unitatis redintegratio,
II, 11.
[171] See the reference text
L’interpretazione dei dogmi (1990), II, 3, §
3, in Commissione Teologica Internazionale, Documenti 1969-2004, seconda
edizione riveduta e corretta, prefazione Card. W. J. Levada; introduzione L.
Ladaria, SJ, Bologna, Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 2010, p. 403; see also First Vatican Ecumenical Council,
Dogm. Const. Dei Filius, IV (DH, 3016).
[172] We can think of the idea of “conversation in the Holy Spirit”, cf. Francis,
“Address at the opening of the XVIth session of the Synod of
Bishops”, 4 October 2023: “The Church, a single harmony of voices, with many
voices, the work of the Holy Spirit: this is how we must conceive of the
Church”.
[173] See ITC,
Synodality, I, nos. 19-21.
[174] See ITC,
Sensus fidei in the life of the Church, 2014, III, nos.
67-86.
[175] See Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogm. Const.
Dei Verbum, II, no. 10.
[176] ITC,
Sensus fidei in the life of the Church, 2014, III, no. 77.
[177] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Decree
Ad gentes, III, no. 15.
[178] Y. Congar,
La Tradition et les traditions: Essai théologique, vol. II, Fayard, Paris 1963, p. 185: ‘All my faith is in the most banal of my signs
of the cross, and, when I pronounce “Our Father”, I have already included all
that knowledge of which will be delivered to me only in the Revelation of
glory’.
[179] ITC,
Theology Today: Perspectives, Principeles and Criteria
(2012), no.
33: ‘The subject of faith is the people of God taken as a whole, which, in the
power of the Spirit, affirms the Word of God. This is why the Council declares
that the whole people of God participates in the prophetic ministry of Jesus,
and that, having received the anointing of the Holy Spirit (1 Jn 2:20.27), it
“cannot err in matters of faith”’.
[180] Tertullian,
Liber de praescriptionibus adversus haereticos, XX, 8-9 (ed. by R.F.
Refoulé - P. de Labriolle, SCh 46, Cerf, Paris 1957, pp. 113-114).
[181] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogm. Const.
Lumen Gentium, II,
no. 12.
[182] Ibid., III, no. 24
in fine, and no. 25.
[183] E. Peterson,
Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem: Ein Beitrag zur
Geschichte der politischen Theologie im Imperium Romanum, Hegner, Leipzig,
1935, pp. 104f: ‘This concept of politico-religious propaganda was taken up by
the Church as it expanded throughout the Roman Empire. It came up against a
conception of pagan theology in which the divine monarch reigned, but in which
the national gods governed. In response to this pagan theology, which was
tailored to the Roman Empire, it was affirmed on the part of Christians that the
national gods could not reign because national plurality had been abolished.
[...] The Christian proclamation of a God in three persons goes beyond Judaism
or paganism, since the mystery of the Trinity exists in the divinity itself, not
in its creature. Likewise it is true that peace, which the Christian seeks, is
not guaranteed by any emperor, but can only be a gift from him “who is above all
reason”’.
[184] ITC,
Sensus fidei in the life of the Church, 2014: see no. 26 on Newman
and the criterion of the sensus fidei fidelium against the divergences of
the bishops of the fourth century; no. 34 on the renewed conception in the
nineteenth century of the active and not merely passive character of the sensus fidei fidelium; and nos. 113 and 118 on the relationship between the
sensus fidei and majority public opinion, inside and outside the Church.
[185] Francis, Apostolic Constitution
Veritatis Gaudium, 2017, no. 3.
[186] Letter 90 “To Natalia Dmitrievna Fonvizina, late January-February 1854, Omsk”,
in F. Dostoyevsky, Correspondance, vol. I, ed. by J. Catteau, Fr. trans.
by Anne Coldefy-Faucard, Bartillat, Paris 1998, p. 341.
[187] Francis, Apostolic Exhortation
Evangelii Gaudium, 2013, III, no. 198: ‘[The
poor] have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei,
but through their own sufferings they know the suffering Christ. We need to
allow ourselves to be evangelised by them. The new evangelisation is an
invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives, and to place
them at the centre of the Church’s journey. We are called to find Christ in
them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen
to them, to understand them and to welcome the mysterious wisdom God wants to
share with us through them’.
[188] See
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1992, no. 540: ‘Christ vanquished
the Tempter for us’. See also no. 394, no. 540, no. 677.
[189] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Declaration on Religious Freedom
Dignitatis humanae, II, no. 11:
‘Taught by Christ’s word and example (Christi verbo et exemplo edocti),
the Apostles followed the same path. In the early days of the Church, Christ's
disciples did not use coercion or devices unworthy of the Gospel to bring people
to confess Christ as Lord, but above all through the power of the Word of God.
With courage, they proclaimed to all the purpose of God the Saviour “who desires
all human beings to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truthˮ (1 Tim 2:4).
At the same time, however, their attitude towards the weak, even those living in
error, was one of respect, showing how “each of us is to render an account of
himself or herself to God" (Rom 14:12), and for that reason is bound to obey his
or her own conscience. Like Christ, the Apostles were always diligent to bear
witness to God’s truth, full of boldness to “proclaim the Word of God with
confidence” (Acts 4:31) before the people and their leaders’.
[190] Francis, Encyclical Letter
Dilexit nos, 2024, V, no. 214.
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