Muslims and the Council of Nicaea

Last update: 2025-12-18 09:50:17

Some anniversaries pass unnoticed, while others end up in the spotlight. Pope Leo gave the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea as much prominence as possible, choosing Turkey, together with Lebanon, as the destination for his first apostolic journey. And while the emphasis in the Land of the Cedars was on peacebuilding, the Turkish leg of the trip had a strong ecumenical flavor, in the footsteps of the Council held 1,700 years ago in present-day Iznik. In fact, as the Pope recalled in his letter In unitate fidei, which provides the key to the entire visit, “the Council of Nicaea is [also] relevant today because of its great ecumenical value” (n. 12).

 

Was Arius right?

But while Nicaea represents a fundamental point of unity between the various Christian denominations—Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants all profess the Creed—the first ecumenical council in history is, on the other hand, an extremely problematic event from an Islamic point of view. In fact, for most Muslim thinkers, it was precisely in Nicaea that the great betrayal of early Christianity took place. Under pressure from Emperor Constantine, the Council Fathers allegedly deified the figure of Jesus, radically altering the original message of the Gospel. The story has various more or less conspiratorial variations—in recent days, several media outlets in Türkiye have presented a Dan Brown-style version—but even stripped of its more fictional aspects, the controversy that underlies it is real.

In truth, this controversy did not originate with Islam. The main arguments against Nicaea were in fact put forward by the followers of Arius, the Alexandrian priest who triggered the crisis that shook the Church at the beginning of the 4th century. In the nearly seventy years following the Council, the Arians did everything they could to oppose the doctrine that emerged at Nicaea, enjoying imperial support, first from Constantine himself (but wasn’t he the one who invented the divinity of Christ?) and then from most of his successors. Alongside ad hominem attacks that had run their course, this confrontation ended up producing an inspiring literature. Suitably updated, it can help answer two questions that Muslims often ask Christians, sometimes in a polemical spirit, but at other times driven by a sincere desire to understand: why do you say that Jesus is God? And above all, how does this not undermine the fundamental principle of monotheism?

In his apostolic letter, for example, Pope Leo draws from the treasure trove of the past a beautiful quotation from St. Athanasius, who explains how, in the case of Jesus, one should not think in terms of a movement of deification from below, like that of a Greek hero who after his death is elevated to the Olympus of the gods, but rather in terms of a movement of divine lowering, which in its radical emptying (kénosis) preserves transcendence intact. ‘He was not man, and then became God,’ writes Athanasius; ‘but he was God, and then became man, and that to deify us (n. 7). A few lines later, as if to dispel the scandal that this verb, deify, already arouses in our Western Christian ears, let alone in non-Christians, Pope Leo clarifies: The divinization [of which Athanasius speaks] “in no way implies the self-deification of man. On the contrary, divinization protects us from the primordial temptation to want to be like God. What Christ is by nature, we become by grace.” In short, the Arian controversy is not a distant chapter in the history of the early Church, but touches on a fundamental aspect of the Christian message for every age, as historian Jack Tannous argued in a recent interview for the YouTube channel Reasons for our Hope.

 

From what has been said, one might be tempted to conclude, as some have done, that Muslims are, to put it bluntly, the Arians of our time. On closer inspection, however, the parallel does not hold up, because alongside elements of similarity there are also no less important differences. According to sources, Arius still attributed a special place to Christ in creation. “Through him,” the Alexandrian priest wrote to his Patriarch Alexander in a letter, God “made the ages and everything.” However, Arius added, the Son too “was created by the will of God before times and ages”[1]. Now, in a current of mystical Islam one encounters a very similar doctrine, that of the Muhammadan Light, in Arabic al-Nūr al-Muhammadī. According to it, God created the Muhammadan Light before time; through it and in view of it the entire world then came into existence. In this case, the parallel with Arianism (and with currents of Jewish mysticism where the same role is assigned to the Torah) is absolutely valid. With the not insignificant caveat, however, that this first of creatures is no longer Christ, but Muhammad.

The fact is that for mainstream Islam the doctrine of the Muhammadan Light has no scriptural basis. And if this reservation applies to the seal of prophethood, it is all the more true for Jesus, who is simply seen as a link in the chain of divine dispensations. Even some statements in the Qur’an that might suggest a different status for him, such as his definition as God’s Word/Verb (Q. 4:171), are taken in their most literal sense. Finally, it should not be forgotten that Arians still argued on the basis of Scripture, while Muslims, following the Qur’an, do not feel bound by the biblical canon. In short, there are elements of similarity with Arianism, but Islam expresses a more radical objection to the figure of Jesus, in which elements of Jewish thought also seem to converge.

 

Saying Nicaea in Arabic

Arabic-speaking Christians have had to confront the power of this Islamic objection over the centuries. Historically, they have responded by taking two paths and by rejecting a shortcut. Let us start with the shortcut. They did not choose the easy solution of minimizing Nicaea or ignoring the significance of the New Testament passages in which Jesus proclaims his unique relationship with the Father. For example, they did not generally interpret the title “Son of God” as a simple metaphor, a solution put forward by some Muslim theologians such as al-Jāhiz (776–868) in his Refutation of the Christians.

Having rejected this option, they moved along two lines. The first was historical: they kept alive the memory of what had happened at Nicaea, its antecedents, and its troubled reception. While this memory was initially transmitted in the languages of the various Middle Eastern Churches (Greek, Syriac, Coptic), the gradual adoption of Arabic also allowed Muslims to access it. The effect is clearly visible in later writers. For example, the two greatest historians of the Mamluk era, Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) and al-Maqrīzī (1364–1442), recount the events of Nicaea in a substantially correct and fairly detailed manner, respectively in the Kitāb al-‘Ibar[2] and the Khitat[3]. In reality, on this point they are merely summarizing the Coptic historian al-Makīn Ibn al-‘Amīd (c. 1206–1293), who in turn draws on older sources, dating roughly to the time of the linguistic transition from Greek and Syriac to Arabic[4]. Thanks to this tortuous journey, readers of Ibn Khaldūn or al-Maqrīzī are able to form a fairly accurate idea of what happened at Nicaea and in the subsequent ecumenical councils.

Of course, factual knowledge does not mean adhesion to the Christian perspective. This is particularly evident in al-Maqrīzī who, in a later work, the Khabar ‘an al-bashar, returned to the history of the early Church, reproposing the broad outlines of the events that led to Nicaea and the subsequent Councils of Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451), reproduced the Creed, albeit in approximate form[5], and summarized the dogmatic positions of the Christian Churches on Christology, but complemented his section with a long refutation[6]. At any rate, by distinguishing between the factual and the polemical, al-Maqrīzī rendered an important service to his readers.

The second path taken by Arab Christians was apologetic. John of Damascus (d. 749), one of the first Christian authors to engage with Islam, already reports the Muslim objection according to which Christians introduce an associate to God and responds to it precisely in terms of the Arian controversy, affirming the necessity for God to possess an uncreated word[7]. This insight, here still in its embryonic stage, would later be refined by Arab Christian theologians through parallels with the doctrine of divine attributes in Islam.

In fact, the Ash‘ari school, considered today as the main expression of Sunni orthodoxy, came to recognize, in the context of a long controversy about the status of the Qur’an, the existence in God of an eternal and uncreated Word, which would correspond to the Qur’an itself in its transcendent dimension. Such a statement naturally raises the question of what kind of relationship exists between this word and the divinity, since both are uncreated. In this regard, the Ash‘ari school agreed on the formula that the Word, like the other six essential attributes it recognizes, “is not God and is not other than God,” a statement which, from a logical point of view, is no less challenging than the Trinitarian one. It was not difficult for Christian Arabs, who were aware of these debates, to use this category of Ash‘ari theology to illustrate and defend their conception of the divine Logos. And apparently the analogy sounded quite convincing. For example, a heavyweight of Islamic thought, the famous al-Ghazālī (1058–1111), writes clearly in one of his treatises in Persian:

 

Christians who say “third of Three” (Q. 5:73) do not mean that God is three, but they say that He is one in essence and three in respect to attributes. They say, literally, “One in substance and three in hypostasis-ness”, and by hypostasis (uqnūm) they mean attributes (sefāt)[8].

 

Contrary to what one might imagine, it ultimately proved more difficult for Arab Christians to argue for the Incarnation and, above all, to proclaim the scandal of the cross. And yet, even the Trinitarian apologetics developed by medieval Arab Christians shows its limitations today. Ultimately, the persons of the Trinity cannot really be equated with the divine attributes of Islam. As a contemporary Coptic theologian, George Habib Bibawi (1938–2021), effectively wrote, the difference between Christians and Muslims cannot be reduced to the fact that the former recognize three attributes and the latter seven[9]. Above all, given that these past debates are now forgotten by the vast majority of Muslims, it is pointless and cumbersome to resurrect them.

Rather, it is necessary to find new ways of expressing the Nicene faith, for example by tackling head-on the question of what it means to affirm divine uniqueness, as attempted by the Christian philosopher Yahyā Ibn ʿAdī (893–974) in his Treatise on Divine Uniqueness [10], or by reflecting in a new way on the category of relationship, bringing to the conversation 20th-century discoveries in the field of quantum physics.

However, the basic intuition of medieval Arab Christians remains valid: the preservation of historical memory—against ever-resurgent conspiracy theories—and an apologetics that appeals to reason are the two main ways to initiate an Islamic-Christian conversation on Nicaea.

The aim, of course, cannot be to bring about the Christian event, which, as such, cannot be deduced from logical antecedents (no one has ever converted after listening to a debate, is another smart observation by al-Ghazālī [11]), but rather to allow us to look at the others with an appreciation of their intellectual abilities. Yes, Christians had already considered the question of how to reconcile biblical monotheism with their faith in Jesus as the Son of God before Islam emerged. They invested considerable intellectual resources in attempting to answer this issue and, in doing so, they refined some extremely fruitful philosophical categories such as those of person, relationship and will, which also benefit those who do not share the solution they propose. It is a starting point.

 

[1] Epiphanius, Panarion, 69.7. Arius’s letter is also preserved in Athanasius, De Synodis, 16. I am quoting the English translation from Stephen J. Davis, The early Coptic Papacy. The Egyptian Church and its Leadership in Late Antiquity. Cairo: American University Press, 2004, p. 47.

[2] Ibn Khaldūn, Kitāb al-ʿIbar, ed. Ibrāhīm Shabbūh et al., vol. III (Werner Schwartz, Ibrāhīm Shabbūh, and Husayn ‘Abd Allāh al-‘Amrī eds). Tunis: Dār al-Qayrawān, 2013, pp. 351–353.

[3] Al-Maqrīzī, Khitat (= al-Mawā‘iz wa-l-i‘tibār fī dhikr al-khitat wa-l-āthār), ed. Ayman Fu’ād Sayyid, vol. IV. London: Mu’assasat al-Furqān, 2003, pp. 980–982.

[4] This part of al-Makīn Ibn al-‘Amīd’s chronography is still unpublished, but I am about to complete its edition, following on the section that I have already edited (al-Makīn Ǧirǧis Ibn al-‘Amīd, Universal History. The Vulgate Recension. Part 1, Section 1: From Adam to the End of the Achaemenids, Arabic text and English translation by Martino Diez. Leiden: Brill, 2023).

[5] As Diego Sarrió Cucarella has shown, the most widely used text of the Creed among Muslim authors dates back to ‘Alī ibn Rabban al-Tabarī (9th century). Originally a physician and a member of the Church of the East, ‘Alī al-Tabarī converted to Islam in his old age and shortly afterwards composed a refutation of Christianity. In it, he quotes the Creed at length, translating it from Syriac. However, this is not “is not the creedal formula promulgated in 325 at the Council of Nicaea, as later Muslim authors who quoted it will mistakenly assume, nor the enlarged formula conventionally known as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, [… but rather a symbol] used by the Church of the East, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the baptismal creed of the early 5th-century Antiochene theologian and teacher of Nestorius, Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428).” See Diego Sarrió Cucarella, The Christian Creed in 13th-century Islamic anti-Christian Polemics, paper presented at the seventh annual conference of the European Academy of Religion (EuARe2024), Palermo, 20–23 May 2024, p. 2.

[6] Al-Khabar ‘an al-bashar, ed. Khālid Ahmad al-Malā al-Suwaydī and ‘Ārif ‘Abd al-Ghanī. Bayrūt: al-Dār al-‘arabiyya li-l-mawsū‘āt, 2013, vol. VII, pp. 360–367. The publication leaves much to be desired. A true critical edition is currently being prepared by a working group led by Frédéric Bauden: https://brill.com/display/serial/BIMA.

[7] Daniel J. Sachas, John of Damascus on Islam. The “Heresy of the Ishmaelites”. Leiden: Brill, 1972, p. 137 (Migne PG XCIV: 768d) and pp. 149–153 (Migne PG XCVI: 1341c–1345a).

[8] Makātīb-e farsī-ye Ghazzālī, edited by ‘Abbās Eqbāl. Tehrān: 1333sh/1954, p. 15. I am very grateful to Alexander Treiger for this quotation and for allowing me to reproduce his translation of it.

[9] The quotation can be found in Mark Swanson, “Are hypostases attributes?”, Parole de l’Orient, 16 (1990–1991), pp. 239–250, here 247.

[10] Yahyā ibn ʿAdī, Treatise on Divine Unity according to the Doctrine of the Christians, Arabic text, English translation and commentary by Giovanni Mandolino. Leiden: Brill, 2023.

[11] “Never have we seen a single disputing session—be it between theologians or jurists—end with a mu‘tazilī [a member of a theological school considered heterodox by Sunnis] or an innovator switching to another [orthodox] group.” Al-Ghazālī, Faysal al-tafriqa bayn al-Islām wa-l-zandaqa, quoted in Farid Jabre, La Notion de certitude selon Ghazālī dans ses origines psychologiques et historiques. Paris: Vrin, 1958, p. 433.