Between Presence and Perfection: The Protean Creed of Early Christianity

Abstract

This essay analyzes how early Christian writers conceptualized catechetical creeds as verbal objects. In the process of explicating the precise theological meaning of creedal language, Christian authors of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries elaborated a complementary discourse about the creed as a sacred artifact with distinct qualities and properties. Indeed, the creed was no ordinary object; rather, it was perfect, forceful, and physically present. For that reason, explaining the ontological status of creeds required precise explication of the experience of encountering them: how one grasped, learned, and internalized the weight of the doctrinal knowledge they contained. And yet, as Christians insisted that the creed was an inviolable and pristine object, they simultaneously expressed anxiety about it having physical presence in the world. Delineating the creed's status as a thing necessarily entailed confronting the problems engendered by that very same idea. To ease their apprehension, they emphatically prohibited the catechetical creed from being written down on physical objects, save on the heart of the catechumen. The result was that the creed emerged as an object defined by an oscillating, even paradoxical, presence and absence.