Canon 1 The faith of the six councils kept unaltered

It is the best order, at the beginning of every word and deed, to begin from God and to come to rest in God, according to the voice of the Theologian. Wherefore, since piety is already being loudly proclaimed by us, and the Church, for which Christ has been laid as the foundation, is continually growing and advancing, so that it reaches out beyond the cedars of Lebanon; now also, making a beginning of the sacred words by divine grace, we decree to keep free of innovation and unwounded the faith handed down to us both by the eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word, the God-chosen Apostles, and further also by the three hundred and eighteen holy and blessed Fathers who came together at Nicaea under Constantine, who was our emperor, against the impious Arius and the heathen heterotheism, or, to speak more properly, polytheism, dogmatised by him; who by the unanimity of the faith revealed and made plain to us the homoousion in the three hypostases of the thearchic nature, not permitting this to lie hidden under the bushel of ignorance, but openly teaching the faithful to worship the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit with one worship; and who pulled down and tore apart the opinion of unequal grades of the Godhead, and cast down and overturned the childish playthings built of sand by the heretics against Orthodoxy. Likewise also we strengthen the faith proclaimed under Theodosius the Great, who was our emperor, by the one hundred and fifty holy Fathers gathered in this imperial city, embracing the theological utterances, and driving out, together with the earlier enemies of the truth, the profane Macedonius, who insolently dared to regard as a slave that which is sovereign, and chose like a robber to split the undivided Monad, so that the mystery of hope might not be complete for us; condemning together with this loathsome man, who also raged against the truth, Apollinarius too, the initiate of wickedness, who impiously belched out that the Lord assumed a body without mind and without soul, he too thereby concluding that our salvation was made incomplete. Moreover we also set our seal upon the teachings set forth by the two hundred God-bearing Fathers formerly assembled in the city of the Ephesians under Theodosius, the son of Arcadius, who was our emperor, as an unbreakable strength of piety, proclaiming one Christ, the Son of God, even when made flesh, and glorifying her who bore Him without seed, the immaculate Ever-Virgin, as properly and in truth Theotokos; and driving away, as banished from the divine portion, the foolish division of Nestorius, who taught that the one Christ is man separately and God separately, and renewed the Jewish impiety. Not only so, but we also confirm in an orthodox manner the faith inscribed on a pillar by the six hundred and thirty God-chosen Fathers in the metropolis of the Chalcedonians under Marcian, who also was our emperor; which delivered with a great voice to the ends of the earth that the one Christ, the Son of God, is compounded of two natures and glorified in those same two natures, and drove out from the sacred precincts of the Church, as something abominable and a pollution, Eutyches the vain-minded, who declared that the great mystery of the dispensation was accomplished in appearance; and with him also Nestorius and Dioscorus, the one the defender and champion of division, the other of confusion, who from diametrically opposite sides of impiety fell into one pit of perdition and godlessness. But also the pious utterances of the one hundred and sixty-five God-bearing Fathers assembled in this imperial city under Justinian, our emperor of pious repose, we recognise as uttered by the Spirit, and we teach them to those after us. These synodically anathematised and abhorred Theodore of Mopsuestia, the teacher of Nestorius, and Origen and Didymus and Evagrius, who refashioned the Greek myth-makings, and recounted to us cycles and changes of certain bodies and souls by the derangements and dreamings of the mind, and impiously ran drunken riot against the return to life of the dead; and also what was written by Theodoret against the right faith and against the twelve chapters of the blessed Cyril, and the letter said to be by Ibas. And the faith of the sixth holy synod, lately gathered in this imperial city under our emperor Constantine, who is in the divine repose, which received its authority the more fully in that the pious emperor secured its tomes with seals, for safety in every age, we again confess that we keep inviolate; the synod which in a God-loving manner made plain that we are to hold two natural volitions, that is, wills, and two natural energies in the incarnate dispensation of our one Lord Jesus Christ, the true God; condemning by the vote of piety those who counterfeited the straight doctrine of the truth and taught the peoples one will and one energy in the one Lord our God Jesus Christ: we mean Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Honorius of Rome, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, Peter, who presided in this God-guarded city, Macarius, who was bishop of the Antiochenes, Stephen his disciple, and the senseless Polychronius; thereby keeping untouched the common body of Christ our God. And to speak in sum, we decree that the faith of all the men who have been distinguished in the Church of God, who have become lights in the world, holding forth the word of life, shall hold firm and remain unshaken until the consummation of the age, and also their God-delivered writings and doctrines; rejecting and anathematising all whom they rejected and anathematised, as enemies of the truth, who raged vain things against God and practised unrighteousness on high. And if anyone at all does not hold and embrace the aforesaid doctrines of piety, and so believe and proclaim, but attempts to go contrary to them, let him be anathema, according to the definition already set forth by the aforesaid holy and blessed Fathers, and let him be thrust out and fall away from the Christian roll as an alien. For we have altogether resolved neither to add anything to what has been previously defined, nor indeed to take anything away, nor are we able to do so on any account whatever.