Reviewed by: The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils, AD 431–451 by Mark S. Smith Paul L. Gavrilyuk Mark S. Smith, The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils, AD 431–451. Oxford University Press, 2018. Mark Smith is a priest of the Church of England and the dean of Clare College at the University of Cambridge. His study of the “idea of Nicaea” began its life as a dissertation at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Professor Thomas Graumann. Unlike most literary debuts in theology, Smith’s prose is lucid and elegant, rewarding the reader with insight in every chapter. This is no average dissertation-published-as-a-book, but a brilliant contribution to a central event in the life of the early Church: the Council of Nicaea (325). Given the centrality of Nicaea, one would expect the field of its reception histories to be overcrowded. However, this is far from being the case. The only monographic treatment is Hermann Sieben’s Die Kozilsidee der Alten Kirche (1979), which focuses more broadly on the authority of the councils. The same applies to the Orthodox scholarship on the councils, from Georges Florovsky’s “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers” to the more recent treatments of the topic by Peter L’Huillier and others.1 While doctrinally sound, such scholarship typically assumes Nicaea’s unique status and authority without any in-depth analysis of how Nicaea acquired them in the Orthodox Church’s history. The Council of Nicaea’s reception remains surprisingly understudied, prompting a forthcoming collective volume, the Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea (ed. Young Kim). Hence, Smith’s book identifies and fills an important lacuna in our understanding of the reception of the church councils in general and that of Nicaea in particular. The book is divided into seven chapters, each dedicated to a particular moment in the reception of Nicaea, up to the Council of Chalcedon (451). Smith formulates the [End Page 115] main problem driving his investigation thus: “[A]t the heart of the struggles over ‘Nicaea’ lay the problem of how continuity with the Nicene past could be persuasively maintained, whilst the fresh challenges of the new doctrinal contexts could be genuinely confronted. It was the dilemma, in other words, of how ‘Nicaea’ could be both reaffirmed as sufficient and yet also acknowledged (even if not openly) as inadequate; of how the Creed could both remain inviolate and yet also be supplemented; of how the ‘great and holy synod’ could both abide unchallenged and yet also admit (in some sense at least) to authoritative successors” (3). According to Smith, an inquiry into the reception of the “idea of Nicaea” has important implications for understanding doctrinal development. He sets aside Newman’s influential understanding of development in terms of organic growth, where later formulations render more explicit the content that was contained in the earlier formulations implicitly. Instead of representing the doctrinal development as linear, Smith embraces Ormond Rush’s concept of “rejuvenating reception” (5). According to this concept, reception consists in a creative reformulation of the past doctrinal claims in a new context. Such reformulation not only validates past achievements, but also and more importantly, generates new questions and problems. As Smith shows, in the first two decades after Nicaea, the distinct language of the Nicene Creed, especially the notorious homoousios, was avoided in the doctrinal debates, while other terms and formulations were proposed. During this time, the main impact of Nicaea was to stimulate extensive conciliar activity and creed-making. Ironically, such proliferation of creeds and councils diminished the value of any particular creedal statement, including that of the Nicene Creed (15). The bishops representing different theological camps (for example, those supporting Athanasius of Alexandria or Eusebius of Caesarea), were all initially willing to improve on the language of Nicaea by experimenting with the new expositions of faith. Such attempts, which became especially numerous in the 340s, attest that the Nicene Creed was widely perceived as unsatisfactory. An alternative solution was offered by Basil of Ancyra, who proposed to locate orthodoxy not in one particular creed, but in a succession of councils: Antioch...