In his The Pillar and Ground of Truth (1914), the great Russian polymath Fr Pavel Florensky wrote in glowing terms of the momentous achievement of the Council of Nicaea: “The whole power of the mysterious dogma is at once established by the one word ὁμοούσιος.… It is impossible to mention without reverent fear and holy trepidation that moment—infinitely significant and unique in its philosophical and dogmatic importance—when the thunder of «Ὁμοούσιος» first roared over the City of Victory.” While such an expansive declaration may well be seen to have been justified over the longer term, Mark Smith pursues a very different tack in demonstrating quite how much the establishment of Nicaea as a central and immovable foundation of Christian doctrine owed to a long process of negotiation, intrigue, and development. He dissects with great skill the complex processes whereby fidelity to Nicaea became a fixed desideratum even as the precise interpretation of Nicaea shifted and evolved. Far from assuming a simple change of topic from Trinitarian theology in the councils of the fourth century to Christology in those of the fifth, Smith shows quite how inseparable these dogmatic loci are in Christian thinking. Perhaps most importantly, Smith performs an invaluable service in demonstrating the remarkable extent to which the doctrinal disputes of the era of Ephesus and Chalcedon were governed and shaped by a competition to secure the mantle and legacy of Nicaea.

Smith is surely right in drawing attention to ambiguities and even insufficiencies of Nicaea. The council did its job very effectively in its proclamation of the perfect divinity of the Son and his unity with the Father as an essential foundation of the Christian promise of salvation. It did not, however, ascribe any very positive content to the meaning of the term ὁμοούσιος, nor did it specify the manner of the Son's distinction from the Father, nor did it say very much at all about the Holy Spirit beyond the bare fact of his existence. Nicaea did not, therefore, immediately settle the Trinitarian question quite as definitively, let alone thunderously, as Florensky might have liked. Smith goes on to sketch the gradual emergence of the “idea of Nicaea” as a criterion and guarantor of orthodoxy over the fourth century with its numerous of bouts of generally unsuccessful creed-making and ongoing theological confusion and struggle. Smith delineates a process of “re-reception” whereby various reading strategies and companion documents are introduced over time in order to ensure correct understanding of the nature and purpose of Nicaea. Athanasius emerges as a key figure in the process of re-reception whereby Nicaea, correctly understood and duly received, becomes a sure beacon and bastion of orthodoxy. This process of re-reception comes to a head in the following century with all sides of the Christological debate battling to secure the ascendency of their own particular re-reception of Nicaea. In the end, of course, it is essentially Cyril's interpretation that prevails with only minor modifications.

Smith perhaps somewhat underestimates the achievement of Nicaea in his wholly warranted attention to its complex reception history. Was there really nothing rather fundamental about its achievement that contributed to its eventual ascendency? Was that ascendency really just a case of essentially adventitious processes of contested reception? Were bishops in the fourth century really engaged in a hurried cover-up of the “embarrassing infelicities” (13) of Nicaea? Phrases such as this suggest a kind of preciousness that is happily absent from prelates of that era, not that they did not have other faults. While this book does not lapse into mere doctrinal relativism, and while the Holy Spirit is affirmed as perfectly capable of acting amid all the murkiness of human history, more attention might have been paid to the intrinsic virtues and power of Nicaea—to how estimations such as Florensky's might have become even possible. In one revealing passage (212–213), Smith approves a desire “to eschew the errors of both a crudely ‘Protestant’ narrative of orthodoxy (in which doctrine is abstracted and ahistoricized) and a crudely ‘Catholic’ one (in which doctrine develops smoothly and progressively, so that the work of the Holy Spirit is domesticated by being rendered predictable).” Is the alternative a kind of Anglican via media? Smith does not put it in quite those terms but goes on to foreground the “fruitfulness” of Nicaea both in terms of questions raised and even mistakes made. But while rightly warning against any kind of static and closed estimation of Nicaea, he appears curiously reticent as to its positive and constructive achievement.

Other possible criticisms would include the relatively spare attention paid to the Council of Constantinople of 381 with its own repeated insistence on fidelity to Nicaea. The authority of this council (and by extension its creed) was of course disputed at the time of Ephesus, making Ephesus's forbidding of the promulgation of any faith other than that of Nicaea all the more intriguing. The nature of this prohibition is, however, obscured by the translation of the operative word here (πίστις) as “creed” (77n) rather than the more open-ended, and more accurate, “faith,” which the author recognizes elsewhere (195) as more apt. On the subject of Greek, the decision to use a typeface without the facility for an iota subscript is odd one. Lastly, the index is far too short.

Overall, this is a meticulous and perspicuous debut monograph. It is densely but very well written with some delightful turns of phrase (it is a long time since I found “pettifogging” in a book of historical theology!). Mark Smith is to be congratulated on an original and valuable contribution to the study of the councils in their historical context. The book deserves a wide readership.