Canon 1: The Faith of the Six Councils Confirmed

Canon 1. The best order of all is the one that makes every word and every act begin and end in God. So that piety may be clearly set forth by us, and that the church, of which Christ is the foundation, may continually grow and advance and be raised higher than the cedars of Lebanon, we now, by divine grace, at the beginning of our decrees, define that the faith set forth by the God-chosen apostles, who were themselves both eyewitnesses and servants of the Word, is to be kept without any innovation, unchanged and inviolate. [a]

Moreover, we confirm the faith of the three hundred and eighteen holy and blessed fathers who assembled at Nicaea under Constantine our emperor against the impious Arius. They opposed the pagan diversity of godhead he taught, or rather, to speak accurately, the multitude of gods. With the unanimous agreement of the faithful they revealed and declared to us that the three persons contained in the divine nature are of one substance. They did not let this faith lie hidden under the basket of ignorance, but openly taught the faithful to adore the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit with one worship. They refuted the opinion that there are different grades in the Godhead and scattered it to the winds, and they tore down and overturned the childish toys the heretics had built out of sand against the orthodox faith. [b] Likewise we also confirm the faith set forth by the hundred and fifty fathers who assembled in this imperial city in the time of Theodosius the Elder, our emperor. We accept their decisions concerning the Holy Spirit, which assert his Godhead. They expelled the profane Macedonius, together with all the earlier enemies of the truth, as one who dared to judge him a servant who is Lord, and who wished, like a robber, to divide the inseparable unity, so that the mystery of our faith would not be complete. [c] And together with this hateful and detestable opponent of the truth, we condemn Apollinaris, a priest of the same wickedness, who impiously belched out the claim that the Lord took on a body without a soul, and who concluded from this that the salvation he worked for us was incomplete. [d]

Moreover, we assent to what was set forth by the two hundred God-bearing fathers in the city of Ephesus in the days of Theodosius our emperor, the son of Arcadius, as the unbroken strength of piety. They taught that Christ, the incarnate Son of God, is one, and declared that she who bore him without human seed was the immaculate Ever-Virgin, glorifying her as literally and in very truth the Mother of God. We condemn as foreign to the divine plan the absurd division of Nestorius, who teaches that the one Christ is made up of a man on his own and of the Godhead on its own, and who renews the impiety of the Jews. [e] Moreover, we confirm the faith set forth, in accordance with the orthodox faith, at Chalcedon, the metropolis, by the six hundred and thirty God-approved fathers in the time of Marcian, who was our emperor. With a great and mighty voice that council handed down, even to the ends of the earth, that the one Christ, the Son of God, is of two natures and must be glorified in these two natures. It cast out from the sacred precincts of the church, as a black plague to be avoided, Eutyches, who babbled stupidly and emptily and taught that the great mystery of the incarnation was accomplished only in thought. Together with him it cast out Nestorius and Dioscorus as well: the first was the defender and champion of the division of the two natures in the one Christ, the second of their confusion. From their opposite impieties both fell away into a common depth of ruin and denial of God. [f]

We also recognize as inspired by the Spirit the pious voices of the hundred and sixty-five God-bearing fathers who assembled in this imperial city in the time of our emperor Justinian of blessed memory, and we teach them to those who come after us. For these fathers in synod anathematized and cursed Theodore of Mopsuestia, the teacher of Nestorius, and Origen, Didymus and Evagrius. All of these brought back invented Greek myths, and revived the cycles of certain bodies and souls and the deranged turnings, or transmigrations, that came from the wanderings and dreams of their minds, and they impiously insulted the resurrection of the dead. Moreover, the same fathers condemned what Theodoret wrote against the right faith and against the Twelve Chapters of blessed Cyril, and the letter said to have been written by Ibas. [g] We also agree to guard untouched the faith of the Sixth Holy Synod, which first assembled in this imperial city in the time of Constantine, our emperor of blessed memory. That faith received still greater confirmation because the pious emperor ratified with his own seal what was written for the security of future generations. This council taught that we must openly profess our faith that in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, our true God, there are two natural wills, or volitions, and two natural operations. And it condemned by a just sentence those who corrupted the true teaching and taught the people that in the one Lord Jesus Christ there is only one will and one operation. These were Theodore of Pharan; Cyrus of Alexandria; Honorius of Rome; Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter, who were bishops of this God-preserved city; Macarius, who was bishop of Antioch; Stephen, his disciple; and the insane Polychronius. It cut them off from then on from the communion of the body of Christ our God. [i]

And to say it once for all, we decree that the faith is to stand firm and remain unstained until the end of the world, together with the writings divinely handed down and the teachings of all those who have beautified and adorned the church of God and were lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life. And we reject and anathematize those whom they rejected and anathematized, as enemies of the truth, as insane ragers against God, and as men who lift up wickedness. [j] But if anyone at all does not keep and embrace these pious decrees, and teach and preach in agreement with them, but tries to set himself against them, let him be anathema, according to the decree already published by the approved, holy and blessed fathers, and let him be cast out and struck off from the number of Christians as a stranger. For our decrees add nothing to what was defined before, nor do they take anything away; we have no such power.