Completed the Creed we still say, confessing the Holy Spirit as Lord and Giver of life, and gave Constantinople precedence after Rome.
- Where
- Constantinople — Istanbul, Turkey
- Convoked by
- The emperors Gratian and Theodosius I, who summoned it in 380
- Pope
- Damasus I. No papal legates are recorded as present; the West was not represented, and Rome received the council's creed only later
- Emperor
- Theodosius I
- Sat
- Met in May 381 and closed on 9 July; ratified by imperial edict on 30 July
- Sessions
- Held at Constantinople. Gregory of Nazianzus presided at first; after his resignation, Nectarius
- Bishops present
- One hundred and fifty bishops, all of them from the East
What it faced
Nicaea had said what the Son is and said almost nothing about the Holy Spirit — the creed of 325 ends, abruptly, 'And in the Holy Spirit.' Full stop. Within a generation that silence had become a battlefield.
The party the council calls Pneumatomachi, the Spirit-fighters, accepted Nicaea on the Son and stopped there: the Spirit, they held, was a creature, the greatest of the ministering spirits. Basil the Great answered them in his treatise On the Holy Spirit with an argument from the Church's own knees — we are baptised into the name of the Spirit, and we glorify him in our doxologies; the Church has always prayed to the Spirit as God, and the rule of prayer is the rule of belief.
Two other errors were in the room. Apollinaris of Laodicea had defended Christ's divinity so hard that he denied him a human mind, putting the Word in place of a human soul; the council saw that this leaves humanity unhealed, since what is not assumed is not redeemed. And the old Sabellian instinct — that Father, Son and Spirit are three masks of one actor — kept resurfacing whenever the language of one substance was pressed too far.
What it defined
- ✠That the Holy Spirit is Lord and Giver of life, proceeding from the Father, and is to be worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son — divinity confessed by the way the Church prays rather than by the word homoousios.
- ✠The creed in the form the Church still says: the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which expanded Nicaea's on the Spirit, the Church, baptism and the resurrection.
- ✠That Apollinarianism is a heresy: Christ has a human mind and soul as well as a human body.
- ✠That the bishop of Constantinople holds the primacy of honour after the bishop of Rome, because it is the new Rome — a canon Rome did not accept.
In its own words
“And in the Spirit, the holy, the lordly and life-giving one, proceeding forth from the Father, co-worshipped and co-glorified with Father and Son, the one who spoke through the prophets; in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. We confess one baptism for the forgiving of sins. We look forward to a resurrection of the dead and life in the age to come. Amen.”
“Every heresy is to be anathematised and in particular that of the Eunomians or Anomoeans, that of the Arians or Eudoxians, that of the Semi-Arians or Pneumatomachi, that of the Sabellians, that of the Marcellians, that of the Photinians and that of the Apollinarians.”
“Because it is new Rome, the bishop of Constantinople is to enjoy the privileges of honour after the bishop of Rome.”
Its canons
The disciplinary rules it made — law, not doctrine, and most of them long since changed.
- Canon 1Anathematises every heresy, naming seven parties — Arian, semi-Arian, Sabellian and Apollinarian.
- Canon 2Bishops are to keep within their own provinces and not meddle in other churches — an attempt to stop Alexandria intervening in Constantinople.
- Canon 3Constantinople takes the primacy of honour after Rome, because it is the new Rome.
- Canon 5Recognises the orthodox at Antioch who confess one godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
- Canon 7How converts from the various heresies are received — some by anointing, some by baptism.
- ✕It did not add the Filioque. The creed as this council issued it says the Spirit proceeds 'from the Father' and stops there. 'And the Son' entered the Latin creed in Spain centuries later, spread through the Frankish churches, and was only accepted at Rome around 1014. Whatever one thinks of it, it is not the creed of 381.
- ✕It did not call the Spirit homoousios. The fathers deliberately kept to scriptural language — Lord, Giver of life, worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. They asserted the Spirit's divinity by the way the Church worships, not by the technical term.
- ✕It was not, when it met, an ecumenical council at all. It was a council of the East; the West was absent and Rome had not called it. It was received as ecumenical afterwards, largely because its creed was.
- ✕Its third canon was not accepted by Rome, and would be the seed of a quarrel that grew at Chalcedon and never fully healed.
What people think it did
The Nicene Creed we say at Mass is the creed of Nicaea.
What happened: It is not; it is the creed of Constantinople in 381, which expanded Nicaea's, and it differs at several points. The creed of 325 ends with anathemas against Arius, which the later creed drops, and says nothing about the Spirit beyond naming him. Calling the later text 'the Nicene Creed' is convenient shorthand, but the two are different documents and conflating them is the most common error in accounts of both councils.
The Catholic Church added the Filioque at this council, or in defiance of it.
What happened: Neither. The council said nothing about 'and the Son'; the phrase appears in Spain from the sixth century, most likely against lingering Arianism, and spread through Charlemagne's realms. Rome long resisted inserting it and only adopted it in the eleventh century. The Catholic Church holds it a legitimate development of what the creed means and not a contradiction of it; the Orthodox hold that no local church may alter a conciliar creed. Both statements of the problem are fairly stated here because the disagreement is real and remains unresolved.
What followed
The creed of 381 became the one text that almost all Christians say together. It entered the eucharistic liturgy at Constantinople in the sixth century and at Rome only in 1014, and it is the creed sung at Mass on Sundays and solemnities to this day.
The Arian crisis, sixty years after Nicaea, was effectively over inside the empire. What survived was Arian Christianity among the Germanic peoples — Goths, Vandals, Lombards — evangelised during the Arian ascendancy, which is why the conversion of Clovis to catholic Christianity in the late fifth century mattered so much politically.
The third canon, on the other hand, started something. Constantinople's claim to rank second because it was the imperial city set a principle of honour following political importance that Rome could not accept, since Rome's own claim rested on Peter. Chalcedon would press the point further in its twenty-eighth canon, and the argument runs through the whole later history of East and West.
Follow it further
Sources
Every date, figure and quotation on this page was checked against the conciliar text or a published translation before it was written, and independently re-checked by three separate passes over dates, quotations and theology. Where the sources disagree — attendance figures above all — the page gives the range rather than choosing.