The Creed in the Liturgy

Midway through the Liturgy, after the gifts of bread and wine have been carried to the altar at the Great Entrance, the deacon turns to the people with a summons that welds together two things modern minds keep apart: "Let us love one another that with one mind we may confess" — and the people complete the sentence by naming what is confessed: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity one in essence and undivided. Only then is the Creed recited. The order is the theology: right belief is not available to people who refuse to love. At the altar this is enacted bodily in the kiss of peace among the clergy — a greeting the whole congregation exchanged in the early Church, a practice some parishes have revived, though in most places today it remains among the clergy.

Then comes a command that puzzles every visitor: "The Doors! The Doors! In wisdom, let us attend!" In the ancient Church the doors of the building were at that moment literally guarded: the catechumens had been dismissed, no one might now enter or leave, and the Creed was about to be spoken by those — and only those — who had professed it at baptism. The words survive as both a fossil of that discipline and a living instruction: what follows belongs to the household of faith, and it demands the whole mind.

What the Church recites is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the "Symbol of Faith" composed at the first two Ecumenical Councils (325 and 381) — and recited by the Orthodox Church as those councils wrote it, without the later Latin addition to the article on the Spirit (the *filioque*). How it is rendered varies with local use: in Slavic practice the whole congregation sings or recites it together; in common Greek parish practice a single reader — often an honored layman — says it aloud on behalf of all. Either way it is everyone's confession. It is also the one moment when a service that otherwise prays as "we" turns personal: the Creed begins I believe, because no one can believe on another's behalf.

While the Creed is sung, the priest gently waves the great veil (the aer) over the chalice and paten — an act of veneration whose homely origin the Apostolic Constitutions record: deacons once fanned the uncovered Gifts to keep insects away, and the Church turned the gesture into an image of the hovering of the Spirit; some churches keep liturgical fans (ripidia) from the same custom.

The Creed stands where it does as the doorkeeper of the Anaphora, the great prayer of offering that follows immediately. The Eucharist is the meal of one faith: "with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (Romans 10:10), and the "one mind" the deacon asked for is about to offer one gift. Confession precedes communion.

It was not always there. For its first century and more the Creed's home was baptism, not the Liturgy. Its liturgical use appears around the year 500: a sixth-century tradition credits Peter the Fuller, patriarch of Antioch (471–488), with introducing it, and it was established at Constantinople under Patriarch Timothy around 511–515 — promoted at first, historians note, by opponents of the Council of Chalcedon eager to display their Nicene credentials. The Church kept the practice and made it universal; Rome did not adopt the Creed at Mass until 1014. Whatever its polemical beginnings, its meaning now is plain: at every Liturgy, each Orthodox Christian stands and renews the confession of his or her own baptism before approaching the common Cup. HolyStudy's article-by-article series walks through what each phrase means.