Long before he made his first brush stroke, the sixteenth-century Orthodox monk who painted icons for the Mégalo Metéoron Monastery in Thessaly, Greece, had to first contemplate, and eventually experience in his own way, an event that had occurred more than a millennium before and across the Aegean in a small but consequential town named Nicaea. Icons, after all, are conduits to the eternal.
Constrained by the physical limitations of the medium, the monk could not depict all 318 participants in the ecumenical First Council of Nicaea, convened by the Roman Emperor Constatine I in the year 325. Yet the icon-maker was still able to convey a sense of the assembly’s multitude. Nine figures are situated on a circular bench with blurry outlines of dozens more arrayed behind, their saintly halos crowding and blocking each other, a crowd implied to extend into the distance. Bishops sit on the central bench in traditional Byzantine style, adorned in checkered vestments and holding jewel-crusted Bibles, all of them arranged around the emperor himself, the bearded Constantine with his golden crown and purple robes looking not unlike Christ at the right hand of the Father. There is another individual whose identity is clear, the man responsible for this gathering in the first place, the Cyrenaic Presbyter Arius, whose teachings were regarded as heretical and ultimately anathemized by the Nicene Council. In the icon, a turbaned Arius is crawling on hands and knees beneath Constantine as if he were the dragon prone beneath St. George.
This year marks the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, a milestone observed by churches, seminaries, and religious institutions but largely ignored by the secular press. Perhaps that is to be expected, since most readers who don’t know their homoousios (of same substance) from their homoiousios (of like substance) can hardly be expected to care about a few hundred bishops, priests, monks, and ascetics convened nearly two millennia ago in an Anatolian backwater. Sadly, that is the public’s loss. Whatever the intricacies of theology debated at Nicaea, this first of seven ecumenical councils did nothing less than create (or rather confirm) the core doctrine of orthodox Christianity.
Constantine, who had not yet converted to Christianity or declared it the official religion of his empire, convened the gathering to address the difficult questions raised by Arius concerning the nature of Christ’s divinity: namely, whether the Son of God was created by or coeternal with the Father. “The main imperial Churches in the Latin West and the Greek East, but also on the imperial frontier, all agreed on the outcome,” writes historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in his provocatively titled book, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, “Jesus Christ the Son of God is not created and is equal to the Father in the Trinity.”
That interpretation was more a confirmation than a conclusion, the purpose of the council having been to rectify the supposed errors of Arius and his considerable following who maintained that Christ, though divine, was still created by the Father. The rejection of Arius’s views would be repeatedly confirmed in the coming centuries by the successive ecumenical councils of Constantinople (three such), Ephesus, Chalcedon, and (again) Nicaea. From the first council came the 222 to 226 words (depending on the translation) of the Nicene Creed, affirmed by Christians ranging from the pope in the Vatican to Amish farmers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from the Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul to evangelical pastors in Dallas. With some notable exceptions—such as Mormons and Millerites, as well as anti-trinitarian Christians of the Reformation-era and their Unitarian Church successors at the end of the eighteenth century—the creed defines normative Christianity. More than the teachings of Augustine, Paul, or even Jesus himself, Nicaea set the essential terms and parameters of the faith. High Church or low church, smells and bells or white-washed walls, Gregorian chants or praise bands, all orthodox believers affirm the words of that early credo.
As for Arius, tradition maintains that his ecclesiastical enemies had him poisoned, a stratagem more definitive than mere syllogism. When popular culture decides to point out the authoritarian character of orthodox Christianity, it often does so by contrasting it with the supposedly more broad-minded, tolerant, or latitudinarian understandings of the faith promulgated by those who have been deemed, like Arius, heretical. Such accounts tend to be more risible than edifying, particularly in the ways they valorize “heresy” without interrogating the meaning of that word—or of orthodoxy for that matter. Consider the unintentionally funny scene in Ron Howard’s 2006 adaptation of the Dan Brown bestseller The Da Vinci Code in which the Council of Nicaea meets in a dark, resplendent chamber, bishops arguing through a haze of incense smoke, as the voiceover informs us that Constantine pushed through the doctrine of Christ’s divinity (never in doubt at the synod itself) in a close vote (it wasn’t). All those Byzantine and Arab bishops denying the Holy Grail’s existence off in the green and pleasant land of England, or whatever The Da Vinci Code was about, was admittedly sexier than parsing the filioque clause. Because the Church’s history—whether Catholic or Protestant, Orthodox or Oriental—has so often been presented as one of unmitigated hypocrisy and horror (crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, etc.), there is an understandable desire to find a moment when it all went wrong, in the hope of identifying some more authentic (read: kinder and gentler) version of Christianity uncorrupted by bishops or secular rulers. While understandable, this impulse not only does violence to the historical record but also gives short shrift to the powerful mysteries and paradoxes of orthodoxy, regardless of one’s personal beliefs about what Christianity is or should be.
To be sure, anyone looking for a pre-Nicene Christianity to resurrect has no shortage of heterodox groups from which to pick. The 1945 discovery of the ancient Egyptian Nag Hammadi papyri brought wide attention to sects such as the Valentinians, the Sethian Gnostics, and Ophite Gnostics, compared to which the Arians were practically orthodox. “Heresy,” in that inchoate, New Age spiritual sense associated with the American consumerist approach to religion, frequently connotes individuality, rebelliousness, truth-telling, and iconoclasm, all positive virtues in a “Think Different” economy.
Alhough I am not attempting to write apologetics on behalf of those long-dead bishops or even some kind of “mere orthodoxy” for the millennial set, I would note that when it comes to the major controversies that preceded Nicaea, those who maintain that the heretical is always more radical, subversive, and ecstatic than orthodoxy are misinformed. In truth, the orthodox position was more at home with mystery and paradox than the interpretations or imaginings of erstwhile renegades. If you’re looking for a revolutionary heresy, perhaps the ever-fashionable Gnostics have something to offer, but the doctrine of the Arians seem almost predictably conventional. Maintaining that Christ was created by God the Father, Arius formulated a teaching that fundamentally makes sense. Far from being an exuberant assault on the staid strictures of the Church, Arius attempted to make Christianity more rational. But that which makes sense, that which is logical and rational, is rarely edifying when it comes to questions of faith. “Credo quia absurdum,” wrote the Church Father Tertulian in the second century as he explicated the concept of the Trinity that would come to be associated with him: “I believe it because it is absurd.”
Some heresies question issues of Church governance, the nature of salvation, or the biblical canon itself, but the subject discussed at Nicaea and, at subsequent councils such as Chalcedon in 451, concerned themselves with Christology, the crucial question of the exact nature of the Christ figure. How is Christ to be understood as both human and divine? Who is Christ as a person within the Trinity? Anyone who has tried to explain, or to have it explained to them, how Jesus Christ is both God and the Son of God understands the cognitive challenge of comprehending what amounts to a kind of monotheism with extra steps. I would venture to say that the early Christological heretics, far from being more eccentric, idiosyncratic, and radical, were actually trying to make the faith more rational and therefore more widely acceptable. Docetism, associated with Bishop Serapion of Antioch a century before Nicaea, maintained that Christ only appeared to be human but was always a divine being merely taking on that form, rather than somehow being equally human and equally divine. It makes more sense. Adoptionism, promulgated by Theodotus of Byzantium in the second century, claimed that Jesus was a normal human being who underwent apotheosis, becoming a divine being. Sounds reasonable. Arianism worships a Christ who is lesser than and proceeding from God, which even if it implies 1+1=2 avoids the paradox of 3=1. But that’s exactly the point: The Nicene Creed with its “one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father” was quite purposefully a paradox. At Nicaea, the radicals were the orthodox, and theirs was a defiant stand against the idol of reason, the false deity of logic.
The Nicene Creed is a strange poem, and there is beauty in its strangeness. Those who assert that “there was a time when He was not” or that “He was not before he was made” or that “He is of another ‘substance’ or ‘essence,’”—they are condemned, according to the creed. How to wrap one’s mind around this? Of eternal Christ incarnating as human Jesus, of those two natures in one? The Nicene Creed is barely comprehensible, much less rationally self-evident. And that is part of its power. Christianity exists within that tension, and when believers eschew the language of paradox, they display discomfort with the faith. A 2025 poll from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University reports that only 16 percent of American Christians are Trinitarian, even though the vast majority are members of denominations that profess the Nicene Creed. On one hand, who can blame them? The Nicene Creed, and other statements of the early Church, are complicated, counterintuitive, baroque, and Byzantine (in both senses of that last word). Better to streamline it, clean it up, rationalize it, tame it. Creston Davis, in the introduction to The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, a transcribed debate between theologian John Milbank and the enthusiastic “Christian atheist” Slavoj Zizek, tells how the latter maintains the creed can be embraced not as a “disembodied belief but [in terms of] the true radical nature of Christianity,” with its “rejection of reason,” the same instrumentalized, utilitarian, and reductionist force that has pushed us to the edge of ecological collapse.
What the assembled bishops offered 1700 years ago was not consistency but paradox, not reason but mystery, not an answer, but a question. Theologian David Bentley Hart in The Hidden and the Manifest explains how the Trinitarian metaphysics of the Nicene Creed necessitate that God’s being is an “infinite intelligibility,” in which “his hiddenness—his transcendence—is already a manifestation.” The apophatic—knowledge obtained through negation—can’t help but be threaded through the creed because the council wrote not in the language of logos but mythos.
A disquiet about the strangeness of these doctrines is an ambiguous inheritance of the Christian West. Consider that among the 318 bishops at the historical council were 313 men from Palestine and Egypt, Libya and Phoenicia, Syria and Armenia, but only five lonely participants from the Latin-speaking West, including the synod’s president Hosius of Córdova and two priests observing on behalf of Pope Sylvester. Little wonder that the language of the creed was in keeping with an Eastern Orthodox attraction to mystery and paradox. There is a reason why Arianism peaked among the various Gothic tribes of Germany in the centuries after the council. The West has frequently not known what to do with the creed. The paradox of orthodoxy, whatever its merits, is that it is more mysterious, more otherworldly, more strange, more demandingly paradoxical than many of the supposedly exotic and esoteric heresies. And all the more resonant and compelling because of that.
Return to that icon from Mégalo Metéoron, rendered in pigments of celestial blue and earthy green, a hypostasis of the sacred and profane, a portal into the heavenly. It captures the central tension of the faith, of being human and divine at once, of existing in time but beyond it as well. Behind the figures rises the triumphant dome of Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia whose cornerstone would not be laid for another two centuries following the council—an anachronism of no consequence, since the icon-maker works in the mediums of eternity and infinity.