Il Credo Niceno-Costantinopolitano in Oriente ed in Occidente

In his Early Christian Creeds, J. N. D. Kelly somewhat exaggerates when he writes of the differences between this creed and the original Nicaea being so extensive that, in the context of fourth-century creeds, Constantinople is better regarded as a new creed rather than an adaptation of Nicaea's. However, Kelly expands on his comment to offer a seminalaccountofthecreed664 focusedaroundexploringthedifferencebetweencommitmenttotheprecisewording of Nicaea, and fidelity to the ‘faith’ represented by Nicaea. As we know, faithfulness to Nicaea as a text and to some of its key terminology had become increasingly important in the 360–80 period following the promulgation of the Homoian creed. We know, however, that the creed of Nicaea was not used directly for catechetical purposes or in worship: the theology for which the creed was a cipher rather came to shape the interpretation and presentation of local baptismal creeds—at times by the insertion into existing creeds of phraseology from Nicaea. In this context faithfulness to Nicaea still did not rule out a certain flexibility of how one formally stated the ‘Nicene’ faith. Kelly argues that in debate with the 36 Homoiousian bishops, it was necessary to state in a simple form the ‘Nicene faith’ and that someone did so using a creed that mixed some local credal tradition with phrases from Nicaea and a fuller statement of the Spirit's divinity. Nobody intended this creed as a replacement for Nicaea, merely as a statement of Nicaea's faith. Thus, part of the reason for the lack of reference to this creed until the council of Chalcedon in 451 is the lack of intention of its framers that the Constantinople creed serve as a precise marker of orthodoxy.
It is within this context that we need to assess the differences between this creed and that of Nicaea 325. Hanson provides a list of twelve differences, eight of which seem to imply no difference in doctrine, but perhaps indicate an attemptonthepartofthecreed'sarchitectstomovethetextofNicaeaalittleclosertotheOldRomancreed.665 One of the remaining four changes is the addition of the anti-Marcellan ‘and his kingdom will have no end’: by 381 such an expression was traditional and to be expected. This leaves three changes: (1) the addition of the extended statement about the Spirit; (2) the omission of ‘from the ousia of the Father’; (3) the omission of Nicaea's anathemas. The last is most easily dealt with: the creed was not designed to exclude a party present at the council who might be taken to hold those views and thus no such anathemas were needed. The omission of ‘from the ousia of the Father’ has, as Hanson puts it, ‘caused much heart-searching among scholars’.666 For some this omission resulted from negotiation with Homoiousians. Many Homoiousians would, however, have been perfectly happy with the phrase, and were far more likely to have been offended by the statement that the Spirit is worshipped with (συν) the Father and the Son. Hanson ultimately argues that it was overlooked in a context where the precise wording of the creed as a whole was not a concern.667


664 Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, ch. 10.
665 For the list see Hanson, The Search, 816. For the argument that accommodation with the Old Roman creed is important see Luise Ambramowski, ‘Was hat das Niceno- Constantinopolitanum(c)mitdemKonzilvonKonstantinopel381zutun?’,TheologieundPhilosophie 67(1992),481–513Ambramowski'saccountispersuasivelyadaptedby Staats, Das Glaubensbekenntnis, ch. 5, esp. 165–70.
666 Hanson, The Search, 817.
667 Its absence is also an indication either that Athanasian emphasis on the phrase was no longer of interest even to the Egyptians, or, more likely, that the creed was drawn up before they arrived.