The First Council of Constantinople

By 381 the Nicene position on the Son had largely prevailed in the East, and the argument had moved on. A party generally called the Pneumatomachi, the fighters against the Spirit, accepted that the Son was of one being with the Father but declined to say the same of the Holy Spirit, treating him as a ministering creature. The theologians of the previous generation, Basil of Caesarea and the two Gregories among them, had argued that this was incoherent: a creature cannot sanctify, and the Spirit is invoked in baptism alongside the Father and the Son.

The council called by Theodosius reaffirmed Nicaea and condemned the position. What is striking is how it did so. The creed associated with the council calls the Holy Spirit the Lord and giver of life, proceeding from the Father, worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. Every phrase asserts divinity in practice, and the word homoousios is deliberately not used of the Spirit.

That restraint was probably tactical, an attempt to carry bishops who would not sign the strongest available formula. It has had a long life: the article on the Spirit is worded in terms of worship rather than metaphysics, and it is the article that has proved most durable across traditions with very different theological vocabularies. The council was attended by Eastern bishops only, with no representative of Rome, and its ecumenical status was recognised in the West afterwards rather than at the time.

The third canon of this council is short and it caused centuries of trouble. It gave the bishop of Constantinople the prerogative of honour after the bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is New Rome. The reasoning is what matters. Precedence among the great sees had been justified by apostolic foundation, and Constantinople had none: it was a provincial town until an emperor rebuilt it. The canon substitutes political importance for apostolic descent.

Rome did not accept it, and the refusal was consistent. If rank followed the location of the imperial court, then Roman primacy rested on the empire rather than on Peter, and the whole basis of the Latin understanding of the papacy was at stake. The same claim was made more forcefully at Chalcedon seventy years later in its twenty-eighth canon, and Leo I annulled that canon as far as he was able, while the Eastern churches proceeded on the basis of it.

The dispute is one of the long roots of the East-West Schism, and it is worth noticing because it is not doctrinal. Nothing about God is in question. What is in question is how authority in the church is distributed and on what grounds, and the two halves of Christendom gave different answers early, kept giving them, and eventually found the difference unbridgeable.