The Nicene Creed: the Prayer in Full, Line by Line

The words you hear at Mass. The Creed at the top of this page is the traditional Catholic English, printed in American prayer books and hand missals long before the Second Vatican Council, with “Holy Spirit” as Catholics say it today. At Sunday Mass you will hear the English of the Roman Missal used in the United States since 2011. It is the same Creed in more modern English: “God from God” for “God of God,” “through him” for “by whom,” “is seated” for “sitteth,” and “became man” for “was made man.” Both translate the same Latin, both are the Church’s Creed, and neither is wrong. If you are learning the Creed to pray with your parish, or teaching it to a child, learn the Missal’s wording too, since that is what your parish prays.

The word everyone notices. “Consubstantial” is in both. The old missals said it, and the 2011 Missal brought it back; for about forty years before that, American Catholics said “one in Being” in its place. Many other English versions, Protestant and ecumenical, say “of one Being with the Father,” or “of one substance.” All of them translate the same Greek word, homoousios, explained further down this page.

“I believe” or “We believe”? The bishops at Nicaea wrote “We believe,” and some English versions keep the plural. The Latin Mass has always said Credo, “I believe,” and in 2001 the Holy See asked that English translations follow the Latin, “including the use of the first person singular” (Liturgiam authenticam 65). The Catechism holds the two together: “We believe” is “the faith of the Church confessed by the bishops assembled in council” and by every assembly at prayer, and “I believe” is each of us saying it as our own (CCC 167).

Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit? Both name the same Person; “ghost” is the old English word for spirit. The prayer books this page follows said “Holy Ghost,” and this page says “Holy Spirit,” as the Missal does. AngelGuard’s page on the Apostles’ Creed explains the two names in more detail.

The Creed has three parts, one for each Person of the Trinity; the third, on the Holy Spirit, goes on to the Church, Baptism and the life to come, which are his work in us (CCC 190). The Catechism follows the shorter Apostles’ Creed in its own outline and keeps turning to this one, “which is often more explicit and more detailed” (CCC 196). Each paragraph below ends with the Catechism paragraphs to read next.

“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” The Creed begins where the faith of Israel begins: there is one God. “Visible and invisible” spells out what “heaven and earth” already means, the whole of creation, including what we cannot see (CCC 325). The invisible creation includes the angels, real creatures of God, made by him like everything else (CCC 328). (CCC 198–354)

“And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.” The Son is not a creature who came later. He is begotten of the Father eternally, before time began, the Word of whom St. John writes: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1, Douay-Rheims). Arius, a priest of Alexandria, had taught that there was a time when the Son did not exist; the Council of Nicaea condemned exactly that. (CCC 422–455)

“God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God; begotten, not made; consubstantial with the Father, by whom all things were made.” This is the heart of the Creed of 325, and it piles up its words on purpose so that no one can mistake them. Light that comes from light is not less than its source. A son is begotten and shares his father’s nature; a thing is made and does not. So the Son is God as the Father is God, “one only God with him” (CCC 242), and everything that exists was made through him: “All things were made by him” (John 1:3, Douay-Rheims). (CCC 242, 465)

“Who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” Here the Creed turns from who the Son is to what he did, and why: for us. “Incarnate” means made flesh. The Church calls “Incarnation” the fact that the Son of God “assumed a human nature in order to accomplish our salvation in it” (CCC 461). He did not stop being God; he is “true God and true man” (CCC 464). The angel told Mary, “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee” (Luke 1:35, Douay-Rheims). So Mary conceived him by the power of the Holy Spirit, without a human father, and he was truly her child; because the one she bore is the eternal Son of God, the Church calls her truly “Mother of God” (CCC 495–497). At these words the whole church bows; the section on bowing explains why. (CCC 456–483)

“He was crucified also for us, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was buried. The third day He rose again according to the Scriptures.” “For us” comes back: his death, like his birth, was for our sake. “According to the Scriptures” is St. Paul’s own phrase, from the oldest summary of the Gospel we have: “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures: and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day, according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4, Douay-Rheims). (CCC 571–658)

“Consubstantial with the Father” means that the Son is of the same substance, the same being, as the Father: not a lesser god, not a creature, but God, as the Father is God. The word comes from the Latin consubstantialis, which renders the Greek word the Council of Nicaea chose in 325, homoousios: homo, “the same,” and ousia, “being” or “substance.” The Catechism gives the council’s words: the Son is “begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father” (CCC 465).

It does not mean that the Father and the Son are the same Person, or that each is a part of God. The Catechism puts it plainly: “We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons” (CCC 253). The Son is a distinct Person, begotten of the Father; what he shares with the Father is not a likeness but the one divine nature. Jesus said it in one line: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30, Douay-Rheims).

Arius and the Council of Nicaea. About the year 319, Arius, a priest of Alexandria in Egypt, was teaching that the Son of God was the first of God’s creatures: divine in a lesser sense, made out of nothing, with a beginning. The dispute split the churches of the East. In 325 the emperor Constantine, newly sole ruler of the empire, called the bishops to Nicaea, a town in Asia Minor (today İznik, in Turkey). St. Athanasius, who was there, gave their number as 318. The council wrote a creed confessing the Son “consubstantial” with the Father and condemned those who said there was a time when he did not exist. It is the first ecumenical council of the Church, and with the Council of Constantinople it gives this Creed its “great authority” (CCC 195).

The Council of Constantinople. The quarrel did not end at Nicaea. For more than fifty years bishops and emperors argued, and Athanasius, by then bishop of Alexandria, was driven into exile again and again for defending the council’s word. By 381 a new question had come up: some who accepted that the Son is God denied it of the Holy Spirit. The emperor Theodosius called the bishops of the East to Constantinople in May 381. About 150 bishops confirmed the faith of Nicaea, and the Creed we pray today, with its long article on the Holy Spirit, has been known as theirs ever since.

In the Creed of 381 the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father.” In the Latin Church the Creed says he proceeds “from the Father and the Son,” in Latin Filioque. The one word has been at the heart of one of the oldest disagreements between Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

What it means. The Catholic Church teaches that the Father is the first origin of the Spirit, and that the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son together, as from one principle (CCC 246, 248). The Eastern tradition says the same mystery another way: by confessing the Spirit as he “who proceeds from the Father,” it affirms “that he comes from the Father through the Son” (CCC 248). The Catechism calls the two a “legitimate complementarity” that, provided it does not become rigid, does not affect the identity of the faith both confess (CCC 248). St. Paul speaks of the Spirit as the Son’s own: “God hath sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts” (Galatians 4:6, Douay-Rheims).

How it entered the Creed. The words were not in the Creed confessed at Constantinople in 381 (CCC 247). The teaching itself is older (Pope St. Leo I confessed it in 447, CCC 247), but the words first appear in the Creed in Spain, where the Visigoths gave up Arianism at the Third Council of Toledo in 589; insisting that the Son is equal to the Father in everything was a way of guarding against Arius. From Spain the Filioque spread to the Frankish churches. When Charlemagne’s bishops, meeting at Aachen in 809, asked Pope Leo III to approve it, he accepted the teaching but advised them not to add the word to the Creed, and he had the Creed engraved without it, in Greek and Latin, on two silver shields in St. Peter’s. Rome took the Filioque into its own Creed only in the eleventh century; most historians date it to Benedict VIII, in 1014. The Catechism sums it up: the formula was admitted into the Latin liturgy “between the eighth and eleventh centuries” (CCC 247).

Everyone stands for the Creed. At the words “and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man,” everyone makes a profound bow, a bow from the waist. On two days of the year, the Annunciation (March 25) and Christmas, everyone genuflects, going down on the right knee, at those words instead. That is the rule of the Roman Missal (GIRM 137).

The reason is the mystery itself. These words say that God became a man, in the womb of a young woman of Nazareth. It is the moment St. John describes: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, Douay-Rheims). The bow is the body’s way of saying what the words say. On the Annunciation and at Christmas, the two feasts of exactly this mystery, the Church goes down on one knee.

They profess the same faith, and the Catechism gives them a special place among all the creeds (CCC 193). The Apostles’ Creed is the ancient baptismal creed of the Church of Rome: short, Western, and the creed of the Rosary. The Nicene Creed comes from the first two ecumenical councils, is shared by East and West, and is about twice as long, because it had to answer two great questions: whether the Son is truly God, and whether the Holy Spirit is. Where the Apostles’ Creed says “His only Son, our Lord,” the Nicene Creed adds “God of God, Light of Light… consubstantial with the Father.” Where the Apostles’ Creed says “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” the Nicene Creed adds “the Lord and Giver of life.”

This is the Latin as the Holy See prints it in the appendix of common prayers to the Compendium of the Catechism. The accents mark the stressed syllable. Sung, it is the Credo of the Latin Mass.

At Mass. The Creed is not a pause between the homily and the Prayer of the Faithful. It is the whole congregation saying yes to the word of God it has just heard (GIRM 67). Say it aloud, with the people around you, and mean the bow.

At home. The Creed is a good prayer for a morning, or for a day when faith feels thin. Say it slowly, one part at a time: the Father, then the Son, then the Holy Spirit and the Church. Stop at the line that catches you. For many people it is “for us men, and for our salvation”; for some it is “of whose kingdom there shall be no end.”

When you doubt. You do not have to feel every word to say it. You say the Creed with the whole Church, which has said it for seventeen centuries, through councils, persecutions and divisions, and still says it in every language every Sunday. Saying it is already an act of faith.

A prayer of our own, to say after the Creed: