First Ecumenical Council: Nicaea I (325)

The first council of the whole Church, called by Constantine to Nicaea in 325 when the quarrel over Arius had split the East. The Church remembers the three hundred and eighteen Fathers, the number of Abraham’s household in Genesis; historians count somewhat fewer. It condemned Arius, wrote the first part of the Creed with the word homoousios at its centre, and settled that all the churches should keep Pascha on the same Sunday, apart from the Jewish Passover reckoning. Its twenty canons regulate the rights of the great sees, the readmission of the lapsed, and why no one kneels on Sundays. The council did not end the controversy; it took fifty years for the Church to receive what it had said, and that reception, more than the gathering itself, is what made it ecumenical.