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Pentecost
Second Ecumenical Council

First Council of Constantinople

381Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey)· Convened by Emperor Theodosius I

The second ecumenical council. It completed the Church's confession of the Trinity by affirming the full deity of the Holy Spirit, and gave the Nicene Creed the expanded form recited in the liturgy to this day.

The First Council of Constantinople — 9th-century illuminated manuscript (BnF MS Gr510, fol. 355r), with Emperor Theodosius I enthroned amid the assembled bishops.
Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus, BnF MS Gr510, 9th c. — Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Nicaea had confessed the deity of the Son, but a further question remained: what of the Holy Spirit? A group later called the Macedonians, or Pneumatomachi — 'fighters against the Spirit' — held the Spirit to be a creature, a ministering servant rather than God. The Cappadocian Fathers — Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa — answered them, arguing from Scripture and from the Church's worship and baptism that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son.

The Confession Completed

The council affirmed that the Holy Spirit is 'the Lord, the giver of life,' who proceeds from the Father and is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. With this, the trinitarian confession was whole: one God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each fully God, of one substance and undivided.

The Creed

The council expanded the creed of Nicaea into the fuller text known as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed — what most Christians today simply call the Nicene Creed. It is this 381 form, not the shorter 325 original, that is recited in the liturgy across the traditions.