Eusebius of Caesarea Explains the Creed of Nicaea

The Council of Nicaea. A letter of Eusebius of Caesarea to the people of his diocese.

You have probably learned already from other sources, beloved, what was done about the faith of the church at the great council gathered at Nicaea, for rumor usually runs ahead of an accurate account of what is happening. But so that the facts are not misrepresented to you in such reports, we have felt obliged to send you, first, the statement of faith that we ourselves put forward, and next, the second one, which the fathers published with some additions to our words. Our own paper, then, which was read in the presence of our most devout emperor and declared to be good and beyond objection, ran as follows: [b] “As we received it from the bishops who came before us, both in our first instruction in the faith and when we received the holy washing; as we have learned it from the divine Scriptures; and as we believed and taught both as presbyters and in the office of bishop itself, so we believe at the present time as well, and we report our faith to you. It is this: [c] “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, God from God, Light from Light, Life from Life, the only Son, the firstborn of all creation, begotten from the Father before all ages, through whom also all things were made; who for our salvation was made flesh, and lived among men, and suffered, and rose again on the third day, and ascended to the Father, and will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. And we believe also in one Holy Spirit. “We believe that each of these is and exists: the Father truly Father, the Son truly Son, and the Holy Spirit truly Holy Spirit, just as our Lord said when he sent out his disciples to preach: ‘Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ About them we firmly declare that this is what we hold and what we think, that this is what we have held in the past, and that we will hold to this faith until death, anathematizing every godless heresy. “We testify before God Almighty and our Lord Jesus Christ that we have always thought this from our heart and soul, for as long as we can remember, and that we now think and say it in truth. And we are able to show you by proofs, and to convince you, that this was our belief and our preaching in times past as well.” [d]

When we had put forward this faith publicly, there was no room for objection. Our most devout emperor was the first of all to testify that it contained entirely orthodox statements. He also confessed that these were his own views, and he advised everyone present to agree to it, and to sign its articles and assent to them, with the insertion of the single word “of one substance.” He himself explained this word: it was not meant in the sense of what happens to bodies, nor as if the Son existed from the Father by way of division or any cutting off. For a nature that is without matter, belongs to the realm of mind, and has no body cannot undergo anything that a body undergoes; such things, he said, we must understand in a divine and inexpressible way. Such were the theological remarks of our most wise and most religious emperor. But they, with this addition of “of one substance” in view, drew up the following statement. The creed as it was dictated in the council: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible. “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only Son, that is, from the substance of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made, both things in heaven and things on earth; who for us men and for our salvation came down and was made flesh, was made man, suffered, and rose again on the third day, ascended into heaven, and is coming to judge the living and the dead. “And in the Holy Spirit. “And those who say, ‘Once he was not,’ and ‘Before he was begotten he was not,’ and ‘He came to be from nothing,’ or who claim that the Son of God is ‘of another hypostasis or substance,’ or ‘created,’ or ‘subject to alteration,’ or ‘changeable,’ the catholic church anathematizes.” [g]

When they dictated this statement, we did not let it pass without asking in what sense they brought in the phrases “from the substance of the Father” and “of one substance with the Father.” So questions were put and explanations given, and the meaning of the words was tested by reason. They declared that the phrase “from the substance” meant that the Son is indeed from the Father, yet not as if he were a part of him. With this understanding we thought it right to assent to the sense of this religious teaching, since it taught that the Son is from the Father, yet not a part of his substance. For this reason we ourselves assented to the sense, without refusing even the term “of one substance,” since we set peace before ourselves as our aim, along with steadfastness in the orthodox view. In the same way we also accepted “begotten, not made,” since the council said that “made” is a term shared by the other creatures that came into being through the Son, and the Son has no likeness to them. That is why, they said, he was not a made thing like the things that came into being through him, but was of a substance too high for the level of any made thing, a substance which the divine Scriptures teach was begotten from the Father, though the manner of that begetting is past searching out and past reckoning for every nature that has come into being. So too, on examination, there are grounds for saying that the Son is “of one substance” with the Father: not in the way bodies are, nor like mortal beings. For he is not so by division of substance, or by cutting off, no, nor by anything the Father’s substance and power undergoes, nor by any alteration or change in them, since the Father’s nature, which has no beginning, is foreign to all such things. Rather, the grounds are that “of one substance with the Father” suggests that the Son of God bears no likeness to the creatures that came into being, but is made like in every way to the Father alone, who begot him, and that he is not of any other hypostasis and substance, but from the Father. We thought it right to assent to this term as well, understood in this way, since we knew that even among the ancients some learned and distinguished bishops and writers have used the term “of one substance” in their teaching about God, concerning the Father and the Son. [j]

So much, then, for the faith that was published. All of us assented to it, not without inquiry, but in the senses stated, which were set out before the most religious emperor himself and justified by the considerations already mentioned. As for the anathema they published at the end of the creed, it did not trouble us, because it forbade the use of words not found in Scripture, from which almost all the confusion and disorder of the church has come. Since, then, no divinely inspired Scripture has used the phrases “out of nothing” and “once he was not,” and the rest that follow, there seemed no reason to use them or to teach them. We assented to this too as a good decision, since it had not been our custom until now to use these terms. Moreover, to anathematize “Before he was begotten he was not” did not seem absurd, since everyone confesses that the Son of God existed before his birth according to the flesh. [k] Indeed, our most religious emperor proved at the time, in a speech, that he existed even according to his divine begetting, which is before all ages. For even before he was begotten in actuality, he was with the Father potentially, in an unbegotten way, since the Father is always Father, just as he is always King and always Savior. The Father is all things potentially, and he is always the same in the same respects and in the same way. [l]

We have been compelled to send you this, beloved, to make clear to you how carefully we inquired and how we came to assent. It shows how reasonably we held out, even to the last moment, as long as we were offended at statements that differed from our own, and how we accepted without dispute what no longer troubled us as soon as, on a fair examination of the sense of the words, they seemed to us to agree with what we ourselves had professed in the faith we had already published.