The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils, AD 431–451 by Mark S. Smith (review)

Eduard Schwartz, the classical philologist and editor of the monumental Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum that was edited in an almost unmanageable mode, used to say in despair that acta conciliorum non leguntur. The complicated material of the Acts of the councils was indeed almost unapproachable as historical source for the history of the church. However, in recent years Richard Price has revolutionized the history of the councils through his large and successfully completed project of publishing precise and eloquent translations of all available proceedings of councils from the fifth to the ninth centuries with introduction and commentary. With Price's achievement, the verdict of Schwartz is obsolete. The study of the Acts has received a new impetus; it is now en vogue! The precious tool of having the Acta easily retrievable through the TLG allows in addition a new generation of scholars to get deeply enough into the material to be able to produce insightful publications.

Within this frame appeared the dissertation of Mark Smith, the new Dean of Clare College, Cambridge, on the Idea of Nicaea. The best way to approach this book is by going back to the studies published under the title, Die Kirche der Väter: Vätertheologie und Väterbeweis in den Kirchen des Ostens bis zum Konzil von Ephesus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002) by Thomas Graumann, who was the author's supervisor. Further evidence for the influence of his supervisor is attested by the fact that eight additional publications by Graumann are duly listed in the book's bibliography (223).

The aim of this book is stated by the author quite clearly at the end: "The foregoing analysis has sought to delineate the ways in which appeals to Nicaea shaped the dramatic conciliar activity of the mid-fifth century" (208). Indeed, the main question raised and discussed in the book is how and to what extent the controversies fought at the conciliar gatherings on the christological issues, mainly in the crucial twenty years from the Council of Ephesus (431) to the Council of Chalcedon (451), were justifying their opposite positions on the same guiding principle of Nicaea.

The author succeeds in demonstrating in seven chapters that the development of the christological debate was pinned on the dogma promulgated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 c.e. We have no indication whatsoever that Constantine convoked his "(o)ecumenical" council as the first in a long series of numbered councils in the new "Constantinian" era. The fact that some of the ecclesiastical gatherings that followed Nicaea were in fact celebrated as the second, third, and fourth ecumenical councils, operating with a binding authority in matters of faith and canonical order, was a development that Constantine could not have foreseen. As we can read in Smith's book, after the middle of the fourth century and actually initiated with the treatise De synodis of Athanasius of Alexandria in 359, Nicaea was as a matter of fact celebrated as the one and only council that possessed absolute authority, and that all diverging opinions on the christological issue were in rivalry with each other on the basis of which of them was offering the authoritative interpretation of the Nicene faith. However, this narration leaves unnoticed the non-Nicene opposition, which for a considerable time in the fourth century was dominating the theological discourse.

The strictly theological approach to the Idea of Nicaea did not leave enough space to the author for questions of synodical procedures, although such questions would have paved the path to demonstrate the crucial principle of continuity and/ or mimesis, followed from one synod to the other within an established synodical tradition. The same is true with the canons of the councils. The (a) short reference to the authority of the Nicene canons in the Council of Carthage (419) at page 30 and (b) the peripheral discussion of Canon 7 of the Council of...