The First Council of Nicaea (325) CONTEXTS, DEBATES, AND RECEPTION - Dragos Mirsanu, Pr. Dragos Bahrim

Few events in Christian history have proven as consequential as the Council of Nicaea for the subsequent development not only of the Church but of the Mediterranean, European, and, more broadly, Western world. The decision to affirm that the Son is consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father was not a merely technical clarification of vocabulary; it fixed the conceptual grammar within which later generations, from patristic to modern times, would think about God, about personhood, and about the relation between divine and created being. To mark the anniversary of this event by revisiting both its immediate context and its long afterlife is, therefore, an honorable and necessary responsibility, one that the contributors to this volume have taken up with considerable rigor. The volume brings together a selection of the papers delivered at the symposium and divides them into two parts. Part I, “Nicaea (325): The Event, Its Context, and Theological Debates,” stays close to the council itself: the circumstances surrounding it, its central doctrinal innovation, and the controversies of the fourth century that led up to it and followed from it. Part II, “Legacies of Nicaea: Historical, Theological, and Spiritual Perspectives,” follows Nicene theology as it moves through the later life of the Church, from the monastic literature of Late Antiquity, into Byzantine hymnography, and hagiography, up to the doctrinal debates of today. Together the two parts trace one continuous line from the event of 325 to its enduring legacy. The seventeen contributors, based at universities and research institutes in Romania, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy, Austria, and Germany, reflect, in their range of historical, philological, and theological approaches, the breadth of Nicaea's legacy itself.