This chapter examines the ways in which creeds have been collected in late sntiquity and in modern scholarship. Radde-Gallwitz first sketches the history of modern anthologies of creeds and argues that they have led to a conflation of distinct types of creeds, particularly in their portrait of a genealogical relation between creeds without anathemas and creeds containing anathemas. He argues that late-antique sources, by contrast, emphasise anathemas in their presentation of creeds. He examines sources such as canon collections and Athanasius’ De synodis and provides a new account of the afterlife of the anathema appended to the original Nicene Creed.

The first section addresses the debate between Julian’s supporters and detractors following his sudden death in 363. Christian preachers turned Julian’s propagandistic use of his life into proof that Roman history was regulated by Christian providence. However, they also had to confront Julian’s re-assessment of the power dynamics between the ruler and the priests in the post-Constantinian empire. I argue that Julian was wary of how the identification of religious allegiance as the criterion for determining whether an emperor was a philosopher-ruler affected the interaction between the emperor, now decentred from his religious structures of choice, and the ecclesiastical leaders. The second section shows that that the episcopal engagement with philosophical ideas both provided clerics with a weapon against Julian’s attempts to re-centre the ruler in religious matters and shaped the relationship between the bishops and emperors in addressing heresy - a key challenge faced by Christianity in its self-construction as perfect system of knowledge. Episcopal appeals to an exclusive control of knowledge also affected the public role of non-conforming philosophers, which I illustrate with a case study of Synesius of Cyrene.

Episcopal colleagues and later church historians praised Apollinarius of Laodicea for his adherence to the trinitarian orthodoxy articulated at the Council of Nicea and its use of the term homoousion to define the relationship between the divinity of the incarnate Son and that of his Father. However, Apollinarius and his disciples also used this term in Christological discussions concerning the relationship between Christ’s humanity and divinity. This chapter provides a detailed examination of the use of the Nicene term homoousion in the trinititarian and Christological statements of Apollinarius of Laodicea and his disciples. It then considers what prompted Apollinarius to make the move toward applying the Nicene homoousion to Christology, placing that critical moment in the late 350s and early 360s when Apollinarius may have been subject to influences from Athanasius of Alexandria and theologians in the Homoiousian movement. The chapter illuminates the links between trinitarian theology and Christology in the fourth century and what the debates about the Nicene homoousion in the Apollinarian community may have contributed to the Chalcedonian Definition of 451.

The normative importance of the Council of Nicaea in the Orthodox tradition cannot be overestimated. A landmark event in cementing the authority of the Council of Nicaea was the Council of Constantinople (381). In the fifth century, Cyril of Alexandria was singularly concerned about promoting the Nicene Creed and making the interpretation of its second article a focal point in the Christological controversy. The Council of Ephesus (431) formulated the principle of unchangeability of the Nicene faith. The Council of Chalcedon (451) reaffirmed this principle and, building upon the precedent of the Council of Constantinople, advanced a hermeneutic of continuity with the Council of Nicaea. In the sixth century, the Nicene faith passed into the Byzantine liturgy in the form of the Constantinopolitan Creed rather than the original Nicene Creed. In addition, the role of the Council of Nicaea was safeguarded in the Orthodox Church’s liturgical memory through the feast days dedicated to different aspects of the council. The council also left a mark in hagiography and iconography. During the Filioque Controversy, the Nicene legacy, especially the Constantinopolitan Creed without the Filioque clause, was turned into a marker of a Byzantine Christian as opposed to Latin Christian identity.

This chapter narrates the emergence of the pro-Nicene alliance by arguing that it was a consensus-building movement. It begins by tracing the history of other consensus-building movements in the fractured theological landscape of the years 325-61 in order to demonstrate their development of various consensus-building tactics, which were ultimately used unsuccessfully. The impetus for the pro-Nicene alliance itself was dissatisfaction with, or the failure of, these previous efforts. Pro-Nicenes adopted four tactics of previous consensus-building efforts and deployed them successfully: (1) defining itself as the center between extreme positions, (2) promoting a minimalist creed that nonetheless ruled out extremes to be avoided, (3) acknowledging that the meaning of a creed was not self-evident and producing supplementary material to insure its correct interpretation, and (4) securing imperial patronage. The chapter then turns to shifts in thinking which occurred in the early 360s and made consensus between former opponents possible, taking Athanasius of Alexandria and Basil of Caesarea as paradigmatic examples of these shifts. The chapter concludes by narrating the consolidation and ascendency of the pro-Nicene alliance in the late 370s and early 380s.

This chapter contrasts two parallel views of demons and their disruption of the ascetic life which coexisted in fourth-century Egypt. It rests on the hypothesis that we can read discussion of the nature, mode, and location of demons and the violence they work upon the ascetic as a medium for creating religious subjectivities in relation to a non-human adversary. Examination of each ascetic teacher’s demonology therefore reveals their vision for the ascetic life, its urgency and potentials, as well as the precarity and vulnerability an ascetic could expect to experience. The demons in the Letters of Antony manipulate the thoughts, impulses, and emotions of the individual. Their work occurs inside the person and exploits the weakness of the human mind and body. For Athanasius, in contrast, demons function primarily in an external, corporeal, and physically violent mode. Athanasius locates the ascetic life in a large-scale conflict with demons who do not merely corrupt the monk’s perceptions and emotions, as in the Letters, but also turn out in gangs and beat him senseless. This introduction of physicalised and externalised violence into the ascetic work of Antony moves the readers far away from the process of careful reflection and discernment of one’s emotions and thoughts which the Antony of the Letters had encouraged as a defence against internally located demons. This project of comparative reading shows that Antony and Athanasius have diverging and partially incompatible notions of the human predicament and therefore also of the ethical urgencies to which a human being is subject, suggesting that there is substantial diversity within early Christian ascetic thinking which goes far beyond any issue of doctrine. By focusing on each teacher’s account of demonic violence, we can see how violence interacts with the ethical imagination, bodies, and monastic pedagogy.