Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed

This is the one text that Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran and a great many other churches all say. It is sung at the Eucharist in the Byzantine and Roman rites, professed at baptism in the East, and set to music more often than any other Christian text. If the atlas needed one document to stand for the doctrinal common ground of Christianity, this would be it.

Its history is oddly obscure for a document so central. It is associated with the Council of Constantinople in 381, which the emperor Theodosius called to settle the Arian question for good, but the creed is not quoted as that council's creed in any surviving source until the Council of Chalcedon read it into the record seventy years later. Scholars have argued that it was adapted at Constantinople from an existing baptismal creed rather than composed there. Nobody can settle it, and the atlas records the dispute rather than choosing.

What the text does is clear enough. It keeps the decisive Nicene word, of one being with the Father, and then does for the Holy Spirit what Nicaea had not done, calling him Lord and giver of life, proceeding from the Father, worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. It stops short of applying homoousios to the Spirit, which is a deliberate restraint, and it adds the clauses on the church, one baptism and the resurrection that give the creed its liturgical shape.

The most consequential four syllables in Western Christianity are an addition to this text. Where the creed says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, Latin usage came to say from the Father and the Son, Filioque. The addition appears in Spain, spreads through the Frankish churches, is sung in Charlemagne's chapel while Rome still resists it, and is accepted at Rome in the eleventh century.

Two arguments are tangled here and they are worth separating, because they are often fought as one. The first is canonical: may any local church alter a creed issued by an ecumenical council, whatever the merits of the alteration. The Eastern answer has been consistently no, and on this ground even Orthodox theologians who find the doctrine defensible reject the procedure. The second is theological: is the doctrine itself true, and does it compromise the Father as the sole source within the Trinity. Here the Eastern tradition is divided in emphasis but broadly negative.

The dispute is a standing marker of the division between the Orthodox and Western churches, and it was one of the grievances aired in 1054 and again at every attempt at reunion since. Modern practice has softened in places: some Western liturgies omit the word when the creed is sung with Orthodox Christians present, and joint statements have distinguished the doctrine from the wording. Neither church has changed its position on who may amend an ecumenical creed.