The Legacy of Nicaea After Pope Francis

In 2025, we mark the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of the first ecumenical council, convoked by Constantine in the city of Nicaea on the coast of Asia Minor in 325. The socio-political factors surrounding that event, the happenings and outcome of the council itself, and the subsequent wrangling over its ratification are no doubt fascinating. But amid these factors stands the still relevant object of confession that has sustained Christian thought and life since then—namely, that Jesus Christ, the human being born of Mary, is also an eternal person, “born of the Father before all ages, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, consubstantial with the Father.” The Christian affirmation of one God in three equally divine Persons arose from a recognition that Jesus is God with us, that God is made known through a human life and through actions that, while undoubtedly revelatory, are within reach of our deepest moral sensibilities. It is an affirmation which has always rung true for Christians, but as we honor the life and remember the legacy of Pope Francis, we must appreciate how consistently and powerfully he emphasized the message of God’s coming near seventeen centuries after the Council. To do so, we ought first to canvass the major features of Nicaea’s historical-theological context and its earth-shattering affirmation. With that perspective in mind, we might then better understand how Francis has endeavored to manifest the perennial legacy of Nicaea by calling the Church to proclaim and embody the fact of God’s nearness.

Nicaea and the Problem of Divine Transcendence

In seeing itself as in some sense the fulfillment of Judaism and of the Hebrew scriptures, Christianity was always and ever committed to understanding itself as monotheistic. This is to say little of the philosophical conviction many early Christian apologists felt they shared with monotheistic tendencies in certain pagan schools of thought. So, it was only a matter of time before there arose the question of how Christians could claim to be monotheistic and also worship the man Jesus Christ, honoring him in its liturgies and seeing him as the fundamental revelation of God. It would become necessary to articulate how this monotheism related both to Jewish monotheism and to pagan forms of polytheism, including those among the latter set which also accepted the idea of a transcendent, singular God above all other gods and deities. The most prevalent way of threading the needle, and one already undertaken by Jewish thinkers of the time such as Philo of Alexandria, drew upon the widespread Greco-Roman idea that subordinate to the highest, most transcendent and singular God, there were ordered levels or hierarchies of quasi-divine entities. In some perspectives, such as later permutations of Platonic thought, right “beneath” that highest God were two Principles—Mind and Spirit—which, though exalted above all other mythical deities, were still not quite as transcendent as the highest God. Central to this worldview is that while some things are divine and some things are not divine, there are also degrees of divinity and transcendence.

It might be easy to see how some early Christians could initially repurpose this hierarchy of divinity to explain their devotion to Jesus and the Holy Spirit while maintaining their monotheism: they held firmly that God (i.e. the Father) was the highest God, the only utterly and fully divine “God,” whereas the Son and the Spirit were “subordinate” to the Father, of a lower rank of divinity, but still eminently exalted far above all (other) creatures, existing prior to his virginal conception beyond our realm of space and time. And that “divine” Son was understood also to be (or at least present in) the man Jesus. In fact, in this view it was precisely because he was of a lesser degree of divinity that this quasi-divine Son could actually enter into our world, take on human flesh, live a human life, suffer, and die for humanity: no fully divine entity could be implicated in the ebb and flow of history, could come face to face with human suffering. We might say that in this perspective, divine transcendence over the creaturely order rules out any sense of the highest God being personally immanent or profoundly near us creatures. To the subordinationist, the less-divine entity of the Son could act as a kind of “middle-man,” linking divinity and humanity by virtue of his rank as a lesser divinity. In its day, subordinationism was named after its most famous proponent, Arius, going by the name “Arianism.”

Dwelling upon this simple fact reveals an important aspect of Nicaea’s meaning and ongoing legacy. It is common for scholars to claim that central here is its affirmation of the distinction between what (or who) is divine and what is not. Christ, as the eternal Son of God is fully divine, consubstantial with the Father, precisely because there is no middling region of metaphysical gradation—a realm of the “semi-divine”—in which, on Arius’ flawed rendering of things, a quasi-divine/human Jesus could mediate between the highest God and God’s created order. But the erasure of that intermediate range of quasi-divine natures or kinds of beings does not entail the erasure of such mediation; rather, it is the person of Jesus who mediates in his singular identity the otherwise radically different, seemingly incommensurable realms of the divine and the human. As the most perspicacious scholars of early Christianity have keenly pointed out, this means that the Nicene affirmation of the distinction between humanity and divinity necessarily and simultaneously affirms its inverse—namely, God’s intimate nearness to creatures and, at least in the person of Christ, God’s nearness as a creature. Transcendence cannot be fully understood or appreciated apart from immanence; Christ’s mediation is personally im-mediate. And this should be no surprise: the doctrine of the Trinity and the distinction between the divine and the not-divine was forged not in the abstract but in the face of the necessity to understand the Incarnation, the arrival of Emmanuel, “God with us.”

On one rather compelling reading of the legacy of Nicaea, the richest doctrinal fruits of the Council were gleaned in the next few centuries, as Christology took center stage in subsequent councils. That assessment is more than compelling: it is ultimately true. What is striking, however, is that even prior to those major Christological councils, some of the earliest defenders of the Nicene position already exhibit an awareness—whether implicit or explicit—of the inseparable relationship between divine transcendence and immanence.

Perhaps the most widely recognizable figure who exhibits such awareness is St. Athanasius of Alexandria. He attended the Council in 325 as a deacon and an assistant to his bishop, Alexander, who was Arius’ initial opponent. Athanasius would go on to succeed Alexander in his bishopric and in his role as primary challenger to Arius through the mid-fourth century. Central to his work in defense of the Council was his defense of the pro-Nicene term homoousios. This Greek term most of us will recognize in its Latinate English form, “consubstantial,” meaning “of the same essence.” Athanasius’ effort to assert the scriptural and rational validity of the claim that the Son is of the same essence with the Father undoubtedly involves him in drawing the definitive distinction between what is divine and what is creaturely. But to focus only upon this aspect of Athanasius’ efforts would be to miss much of the import of his writings, the most famous of which is his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word.

Among Arius’ most strident charges against the notion of the Son’s full divinity and consubstantial equality with the Father was precisely the Son’s ability to enter into time and space, take up human flesh, and suffer and die. Thus, in defending Christ’s full divinity while affirming the reality and importance of Christ’s human life, Athanasius must challenge received notions of divine transcendence. He claims that it is supremely fitting, in fact, for the Son and eternal Word of God by whom the Father made all things and through whom the Father sustains all of creation to be the one who enters that creaturely realm personally so as to redeem and reconcile it. This claim has broad implications which, again, challenge the received pagan notions of divinity; however, the real thrust of the argument is simultaneously moral in nature. Athanasius invites the reader to think about how the goodness and compassion of the highest God necessitates a response to sin through divine nearness. Where Arius has seen weakness, even a metaphysical deficiency in the Incarnation, leading him to conclude that Christ was merely quasi-divine, Athanasius responds by pointing out that divine neglect of God’s creation would have been the real sign of weakness. God’s embrace of the limitations of creaturely life is nothing other than a sign of divine power, precisely because it is an exhibition of compassionate love recognizable to human moral sensibilities. Within this emerging Nicene logic, then, notions of divine power and weakness, transcendence and immanence are not merely united in conceptual tension, held together but apart. Rather, through the Incarnation Christians begin to realize that such attributes inform one another: through the self-emptying of the eternal Son of God unto death on a cross, humanity sees that power is expressed most fully through self-sacrifice. Divine authority and compassionate goodness are inseparable in ways recognizable to human moral sensibilities.

Athanasius was hardly the only fourth-century thinker to absorb and deploy this logic. A generation later, St. Gregory of Nyssa would defend Nicaea and the homoousios position alongside his brother, St. Basil of Caesarea, and their friend, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, against neo-Subordinationist thinkers who perpetuated the controversy into the latter half of the century. An even more complex and philosophically attuned thinker than Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa had no trouble articulating the distinction between God and creatures—indeed, he is credited with taking some of the strongest positions about the insufficiency of human speech and knowledge to grasp divinity. And yet, like Athanasius, when defending the doctrine of the Son’s full divinity he could not help but address the question of God’s nearness to humanity in the person of Christ. Two examples from Gregory’s own writings illustrate the point.

In his famous Catechetical Discourse, Gregory opens the work by offering subtle arguments for both the reasonableness and the scriptural basis of the Christian confession of a triune God. But that slender portion of the text quickly gives way to a long and complex defense of the necessary corollary to trinitarian faith, which is the confession of God-become-human. Gregory states plainly that, in his estimation, Gentile and Jewish hearer alike will perhaps be prone to accept the arguments for the Trinity from reason and Scripture, “but each will equally reject the economy of the Word of God as man as both unbelievable and not fitting to be said about God.”[1] Like Athanasius, Gregory is keenly aware at just how “upside down” the Nicene logic is, and just like Athanasius he challenges received notions of divinity on both logical and moral grounds. “The all-powerful [divine] nature’s capacity to descend to the humiliation of humanity is a fuller proof of power than great and supernatural miracles.”[2] And the greatness of this divine nearness, Gregory makes plain, is simply a display of the kind of goodness and love that ought to be recognizable to the best moral sensibilities of his audience: “If, then, love for humanity is the characteristic property of the divine nature, you have the reason which you sought, you have the cause of God’s presence among humans.”[3]

Interestingly, the majority of the Discourse is an extended treatment of the entirety of the Christian worldview—a theology of Creation, of the human person, of virtue and vice, and, really, an inchoate philosophy of being writ large. Indeed, it can be easy for the reader to forget along the way that well over half of the text is simply Gregory’s extended answer to the staunch objections of non-Christians regarding God’s nearness in the person of Christ. Why does that matter? It matters at least insofar as we consider that the earliest and most capable defenders of Nicaea recognized that its legacy, and with it the distinctive Christian claim about reality, is as much about divine immanence as it is about divine transcendence. More than that, the wide-ranging nature of Gregory’s defense against non-Christians suggests that if these features of his worldview—his understanding of creation, humanity, and the structure of being itself—represent valid arguments in defense of the Incarnation, then this teaching of God’s nearness is central to a Christian account of the cosmos itself.

Even when Gregory is defending the Nicene faith of the Son’s full divinity against subordinationist Christians, he cannot help but treat the meaning of the corollary claim of God’s immanence. In a much shorter treatise, Gregory challenges his opponents’ interpretation of 1 Cor 15:28, wherein St. Paul claims that in the end of all things “the Son will be subject to the One who has subjected all things to him.” The passage seemed like a knockout proof text for these neo-Subordinationists: what else could Paul mean by “subjection” other than Christ’s (metaphysical) subordination to the Father? Gregory’s reply is stunning in its simplicity, elegance, and profundity.

He first asserts that Paul’s statement about “subjection” can mean nothing other than the salvation human creatures experience in being rescued by God from sin. Yet, the question remains, if the text applies subjection to the Son, how could the divine, eternal Son of God be said to undergo any subjection: in what way does he need saving, and how, further, could it be something future? Gregory answers by widening his interpretive lens and noting that the statement occurs right in the middle of a wider discourse by Paul concerning the resurrection. And what that discourse reveals, Gregory artfully points out, is the deep and powerful union between the eternal and divine Son of God and the entirety of human nature, a union which his Incarnation fully effected. In Gregory’s reading of the text, this bond is made clear by the fact that Christ’s resurrection becomes not merely the pattern or promise of the rest of humanity’s resurrection, but also its causal principle or catalyst. And so, because the whole of human nature was united to God, the subjection of Christ in its most complete form is nothing other than the total salvation of humanity. The saving power of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection will proceed one by one through the transformation of each member of the human species in a manner that transforms the created order writ large, until “divine life penetrates all things.”[4] Humanity will then be reckoned as none other than Christ’s own Body, and “the subjection of this Body will be said to be the subjection of the Son himself, who is identified with his own Body.”[5]

This move of Gregory’s might initially seem evasive. Is he not merely punting the question, and in so doing simply reasserting the distinction between God and humanity, by applying the subjection and salvation spoken of in 1 Cor. 15:28 to the rest of humanity and denying that it applies to Christ, the eternal Son? Not quite. That is because in his application of the predicate “will be subjected” to the humans who become Christ’s body through the salvation Christ himself wrought, Gregory does not apply it in a strictly partitive manner. He does not suggest that in this final subjection Christ, the eternal Son of God, is clearly one thing, neatly distinguishable from “Christ,” his Body. Rather, the identity of the two are bound up in their union. That is to say, through this saving work of Christ upon all humanity, the nearness of Christ to creation reveals that human nature itself cannot be fully understood apart from its eternal destination as Christ’s body, in eternal union with the divine. But the inverse is similarly true, precisely because of the Nicene confession of the Son’s full divinity: one cannot fully understand the Christian conception of God apart from Christ’s union with the human nature made in his image and likeness. What God does is not merely a response to human need—rather, it is also and more fundamentally a revelation of God’s intrinsic character. It is worth repeating: “love for humanity is the characteristic property of the divine nature.”

It is true that the declaration of the Son’s full divinity at Nicaea affirmed the radical distinction between what is divine and what is not. But this very affirmation was also the erasure of a metaphysical “buffer zone” keeping God at arm’s length from creation. Thus, it could be nothing other than a pregnant affirmation of a deeper logic about what it means to be divine, an affirmation of divinity’s nearness. This is because the revelation of the radical distinction between God and creatures occurred by way of the presence of the eternal Son within time and space, as a member of the creaturely order. As we have seen, the Incarnation put divine goodness and love within reach of humanity’s own moral imagination, reordering humanity’s conception of the divine by defining transcendent power through the lens of a self-sacrificial weakness, condescension, and humility. Neither for Gregory nor for any of his contemporaries did this preclude divine judgment or correction, but it did mean for him that redemption was also the goal of divine activity vis-a-vis humanity. For Gregory, this was simply an entailment of the Nicene confession, and it was not a logic that ended with the event of Christ’s historical life; rather, the divine-human union permeated the cosmos, and the Church, as the Body of Christ, had the unique role of completing God’s plan to become “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).

The fullest doctrinal import of these affirmations was not fully articulated in the immediate term, though Athanasius’ and Gregory’s proximity to the Council reveals how pervasively that deeper Nicene logic had already taken root. That logic had permeated Christian life already, and well before Nicaea. For the previous three centuries Christians had effectively internalized the fact of God’s nearness and expressed it by following the simple exhortations of Paul in their loving embrace of one another and of the needy, some of whom were regularly cast aside in view of the reigning logic of power and weakness within Greco-Roman society. Although, those striking emulations of divine self-sacrifice would at times give way to Christians, both individual and corporate, embodying much less charitable attitudes and deeds.

But all of this raises the further question: how might the Nicene legacy be unfolding in our own day? No doubt, God’s nearness is on display in myriad ways, each and every day, through the redemptive work of self-giving individuals and groups. Their work shines most brightly especially when other Christians seem intent on asserting power, including the institutional and political sort, precisely to exclude and punish others, all in service of a narrow vision of the “common good.” But we might also take a moment to wonder at the fact that in this anniversary moment, in our celebration of the utterly transcendent God’s unflinching nearness, it has been Francis who has presided over the Roman Catholic communion for the last decade. Whatever his flaws, the message of God’s nearness arguably informed nearly every facet of his papal leadership.

Pope Francis and the Nearness of God

Those familiar with his writing and preaching will quickly recognize Francis’s proclivity for proclaiming God’s nearness. Perhaps less familiar, but nearly as prevalent, is his penchant for grounding that proclamation in the fact of the Incarnation: ‘“God is near’ was the leitmotif of [Christ’s] preaching, the heart of his message.”[6] That it is also a leitmotif of Francis’s ministry would not take long to substantiate with numerous quotes. And Francis often emphasizes the theme of divine nearness in concert with his persistent focus on mercy and compassion across every context of ecclesial and socio-political life, from the parish confessional to national borders. However, if one fails to see the deeper theological grounds for Francis’s emphasis on divine nearness and the other ways it is expressed beyond calls for compassion and mercy, it can easily appear as though all of this talk of “nearness” is simply a pretext for promoting niceness for niceness’ sake. Or, worse, it is seen as a kind of laxity that is only awkwardly adjacent to incarnational theology (Jesus certainly was not always nice, nor was he lax, after all). But as tender as Francis’s heart may be toward at least some people, it would be a superficial assessment to conclude that for Francis divine nearness is simply an ill-informed excuse for cutting folks slack. And that is precisely because it fails to take account of how for Francis the theme of divine nearness flows directly from the interwoven doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

No doubt, Francis’s emphasis upon mercy and compassion bears intimate links to the simple fact of divine condescension in the person of Christ, who was rich yet became poor, dying for us while we were yet in sin:

[God] wanted to make himself one of us and as one of us to walk with us in Jesus. And this speaks to us. It tells us about the humility of God who is so very great and powerful precisely in his humility. He wanted to walk with his people, and when his people wandered far from him through sin, idolatry and the many things we see in the Bible, he was there.[7]

For Francis, this means just what it did for the revolutionary defenders of Nicaea over against both pagan and subordinationist conceptions of the divine: God’s self-emptying love is not merely a concession in the face of human need, or even a temporary act of exemplary kindness; it is the fundamental revelation of God through a loving and merciful human life that represents the core of Nicene Christianity. Divine power or transcendence just is divine weakness, self-sacrifice, expressed in and as a human life. And for Francis this means that God’s nearness is not remote from our own nearness toward and compassion for one another. God’s entire self-disclosure through and the most fully in the history of Jesus Christ reveals to us that our loftiest and most humane moral insights and standards are necessary points of reference when discerning God’s character, works, and purpose. And in recognizing in God the best of what we hope to see in ourselves (and, of course, infinitely better), we thereby challenge ourselves to live up to the example of our Maker and Savior. For, in Christ, God and humanity are fully revealed in a single person, a singular life. Francis’s emphasis on mercy, compassion, and redemption is not haphazard ‘niceness.’ Rather, it flows from the Nicene confession:

God is near, that is the first message. His kingdom has come down to earth. God is not, as we are often tempted to think, distant, up in heaven, detached from the human condition. No, he is in our midst. The time of his distance ended when, in Jesus, he became man. Ever since then, God has been very close to us; he will never retire from our human condition or tire of it. This closeness is the very first message of the Gospel.[8]

This refrain echoed throughout his papacy in numerous ways, including his decision to develop Magisterial teaching on capital punishment. As the CDF’s letter outlining the change in the Catechism makes clear, it is the very fact of the Incarnation that reveals the divine commitment to mercy aimed at correction, all of which thereby informs our developed human moral consciousness: “The Gospel, in fact, helps [us] to understand better the order of creation that the Son of God assumed, purified, and brought to fulfillment. It also invites us to the mercy and patience of the Lord that gives to each person the time to convert oneself.”[9] Our moral consciousness about human affairs and our understanding of God’s dealings with humanity continue to mutually inform one another.

Even when he was not making concrete decisions about difficult questions, the logic of divine nearness always and everywhere shaped Francis’s language concerning humanity’s relationship to the divine. It informed his persistent recourse to God’s parental relationship to humanity: “I do not believe that the heart of [a] father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he knows. He realizes, however, that more than once his son will fall into the same faults, but he is prepared to pardon him always, if his son always takes him by his heart”[10] (here, Francis is quoting St. Thérèse of Lisieux). Reference to the best forms of human parenthood—merciful, while also being ordered to our correction—flows directly from a recognition that the Incarnation reveals God’s nearness to our own moral intuitions. God’s “infinite mercy” is not premised upon an abstract and weak-willed moral laxity. Rather, it is premised upon a recognition that it is simply God’s character to pursue humanity’s redemption relentlessly, just as any morally sensible parent would hope to do for a child: “no one is more patient than God our Father [. . .] no one is more understanding and willing to wait.”[11]

But God’s nearness is not only expressed as mercy in response to our failures. Rather, God’s self-revelation through a human life and ongoing presence through humanity’s history is also the basis for Francis’s broader claim that the Church is to be the “prolongation of the Incarnation.”[12] In Francis’s vision the Church is to understand itself as a Body whose ultimate goal is to cooperate with Christ in the ongoing redemption of humanity, and even of the cosmos as a whole. The phrase “prolongation of the Incarnation” is likely borrowed from the father of modern ecclesiology, Johann Adam Möhler, but it has its deepest roots in the Nicene logic as Gregory of Nyssa had previously deployed it in his reading of 1 Cor 15:28. To see the Church in this way is to recognize its never-ending journey to grow up into Christ and its duty to leaven every arena of the modern world with the Gospel. This entails bringing something to the world, so as to “let the word of God move [one] deeply and become incarnate in [one’s] daily life.” But, in keeping with the striking implications of Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25, Francis seems to realize that it must also entail recognizing Christ already incarnating himself in the world, a task which will involve cultivating open eyes and active, self-sacrificial love. “Today, our challenge is not so much atheism as the need to respond adequately to many people’s thirst for God, lest they try to satisfy it with alienating solutions or with a disembodied Jesus who demands nothing of us with regard to others.”[13]

Once again, then, what can seem like laxity or niceness for its own sake bears within it the stamp of a deeply incarnational thinking. Scandalized as some were over his recent comments about humanity’s capacity to find God through any and every religious path, it is not difficult to understand the theological rationale behind them. This is not an erasure of the difference between Christianity and other religious traditions or a relativization of the centrality of Christ so much as it is a recognition of his omnipresence, his nearness to humanity. One could widen the lens even further to understand better Francis’s ecological perspective. It, too, is shaped by his persistent impulse to see all of reality as experiencing and exhibiting the nearness of the transcendent God through the person of Christ:

This leads us to direct our gaze to the end of time, when the Son will deliver all things to the Father, so that “God may be everything to every one” (1 Cor 15:28). Thus, the creatures of this world no longer appear to us under merely natural guise because the risen One is mysteriously holding them to himself and directing them towards fullness as their end. The very flowers of the field and the birds which his human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence. (Laudato Si §100)

What this means within the Church might already be apparent. As the unique instantiation of Christ’s Body in the world, the Church must be involved in its own ongoing process of incarnating Christ and recognizing his presence already there in the experiences and voices of every member of that Body. In this light, the work of synodality is not merely a recognition of divine nearness in a simplistic sense. Synodality seeks to hear from those on the peripheries, as well as those who are very often at the center of the Church’s life but still are not given a voice, precisely because failure to do so is failure both to recognize and to make Christ fully present to the world. Synodality does not aim to recognize divine nearness by merely showing concern, or even simply by asking where life in the Church is difficult so that a lax solution can be tendered; rather, it recognizes that in the prolongation of Christ’s Incarnation, the Spirit of God continues to move and speak through every diverse member of that Body across time and place. “We would not do justice to the logic of the incarnation if we thought of Christianity as monocultural and monotonous.”[14] Only through this ecclesial mode of renewal can the Church respond to the signs of the times and take “an active part in historical processes,” thereby avoiding the temptation to become “mere onlookers as the Church gradually stagnates.”[15]

Conclusion

At the time of this article’s original composition, Pope Francis’s health situation had become dire. Now, at its completion, Francis has taken his leave of this life, having served the Church in the Chair of Peter for a little over a decade. No one will look upon his papacy as flawless. But as the Church seeks to embody the logic of Nicaea fully unfolded in concrete our time and place, the celebration of this confession of divine transcendence in and through God’s immanent presence at this papacy’s end should cause us to pause and remember what is perhaps Francis’s most consistent refrain. The nearness of God in Christ will always and everywhere invite every human heart into the eternal love of the Triune God through the concrete particulars of our daily existence. God is near.

To believe in a Father who loves all men and women with an infinite love means realizing that he thereby confers upon them an infinite dignity. To believe that the Son of God assumed our human flesh means that each human person has been taken up into the very heart of God. To believe that Jesus shed his blood for us removes any doubt about the boundless love which ennobles each human being. Our redemption has a social dimension because God, in Christ, redeems not only the individual person, but also the social relations existing between men. To believe that the Holy Spirit is at work in everyone means realizing that he seeks to penetrate every human situation and all social bonds. (Evangelii Gaudium §178)

Church Life Journal | Articles

Tags: After Francis Legacy Nicaea Pope