13 - Nicaea’s Frame: The Organisation of Creedal Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Modernity

Summary

This chapter examines the ways in which creeds have been collected in late sntiquity and in modern scholarship. Radde-Gallwitz first sketches the history of modern anthologies of creeds and argues that they have led to a conflation of distinct types of creeds, particularly in their portrait of a genealogical relation between creeds without anathemas and creeds containing anathemas. He argues that late-antique sources, by contrast, emphasise anathemas in their presentation of creeds. He examines sources such as canon collections and Athanasius’ De synodis and provides a new account of the afterlife of the anathema appended to the original Nicene Creed.