From: Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.
+ B A R T H O L O M E W
By God’s Mercy, Archbishop of Constantinople-New Rome
and Ecumenical Patriarch
To the Plenitude of the Church: May God’s Grace and Peace be with you!
We offer a hymn of thanks to the almighty, all-seeing, and benevolent God in Trinity, who vouchsafed that His people reach the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea, which bore spiritual witness to the authentic faith in divine Word born without beginning and truly consubstantial with the Father, “who for us and for our salvation descended, was incarnate and became human, suffered and arose on the third day, and ascended to the heavens, who will come again to judge the living and the dead.”
The Council of Nicaea constitutes an expression of the synodal nature of the Church, the culmination of its “earliest conciliarity,” which is inseparably linked to the eucharistic realization of church life as well as of the practice of assembling together for decisions “with one accord” (Acts 2:1) on current matters. The Council in Nicaea also signifies the emergence of a new conciliar structure, namely of Ecumenical Councils that would prove definitive for the development of church affairs. It is noteworthy that an Ecumenical Council does not comprise a “permanent institution” in the life of the Church, but an “extraordinary event” in response to a specific threat to the faith, aiming at restoring the ruptured unity and eucharistic communion.
That the Council of Nicaea was convened by the Emperor, that Constantine the Great attended its deliberations and embraced its decisions with the status of imperial law, does not render it “an imperial synod.”[1] It was an unquestionably “ecclesiastical event” whereby the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, decided about its internal affairs, while the Emperor implemented the principle “Render unto Caesar the things that belong to Caesar and to God the things that belong to God” (Mt. 22:21).
In the face of the Arian heresy, the Church, in council, formulated the essence of its faith, which is experienced uninterruptedly. The pre-eternal Son and Word of God, “consubstantial to the Father . . . true God of true God,” through His incarnation, saves humankind from enslavement to the enemy and opens up to us the way of deification through grace. “He became human so that we might become divine.”[2] The Symbol of Nicaea proclaims the sure conviction that the ongoing heretical deviation constitutes a denial of the potential for human salvation. In this sense, it is not simply a theoretical declaration, but a confession of faith, just like all the dogmatic texts of the Church, a genuine articulation of the living truth within it and through it.
What is of particular theological importance is the fact that the basis of the Sacred Symbol “We believe . . .” comprises a local baptismal Symbol or group of such Symbols. As the genuine bearer of the perennial self-conscience of the Church, the Council recapitulates and reaffirms the Apostolic deposit preserved by the local Churches. Athanasius the Great mentions that the Synodal Fathers “on matters of faith, do not write “It seemed to us . . .” but rather “This is what the catholic Church believes; and at once they confessed what they believe, in order to demonstrate that nothing novel was discovered in what they wrote, but that their mindset is apostolic, in other words exactly as the Apostles had taught.”[3] The conviction of the divinely-instructed Fathers was that nothing was added to the faith of the Apostles and that the truly ecumenical Symbol of Nicaea comprises a proclamation of the common tradition of the catholic Church. The Conciliar Fathers, whom the Orthodox Church worthily honors and hymns as “precise protectors of the apostolic traditions,” adopted the philosophical term “essence” (and its derivative “of one essence”) to express the Orthodox faith about the divinity of the Word, which Arius denied, and along with this denied the entire mystery of the universally salvific incarnate Divine Economy by becoming embroiled in Hellenistic concepts, thereby rejecting the “God of our Fathers” in the name of the “God of the philosophers.”