Father Dave answers an anonymous question regarding a prayer often said at Mass. The listener asks, “What is meant by ‘Light from Light’ in the Nicene Creed?”
Father Dave explains how this creed was the result of the Council of Nicaea. “The original councils in the first few centuries of the Church almost always were responding to some crisis of faith or some big controversy,” he says, noting that misinformation would often spread and turn to heresy.
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The issue at the Council of Nicaea related to questions about Jesus’ humanity and divinity. “Some strands of thought that developed erred more on the side of that Jesus was really just God playing human. We could see and relate to him, but then he went back to being God after he did this little 33-year thing,” Father Dave says. “Others would say that Jesus was the son of God, but he was human; if he had divinity in him, it was just a little bit. So there were all these different questions about how human and how divine Jesus was. It’s not the most obvious and logical answer to [correctly] say he was 100% human and 100% divine.”
“When all this controversy started stirring up, the leaders of the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, came together to say, ‘Let’s really talk about this and pray about this,’” he continues. “[They asked], ‘Was Jesus created by God?’ That’s when we get to those statements in the creed that talk about Jesus. ‘God from God, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. Begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.’ All of those things are slightly different ways of saying the very same and important thing that needed to be reiterated and clarified at that time that Jesus is not a creature, meaning he was not created by God.”
Father Dave explains the use of the line “Light from Light.” He says, “One of the reasons why they chose to use that is because we see many times in the Scriptures the important metaphor of light. Darkness is not a different thing from light, it is only the absence of light. Light itself is pure and good. So when we say ‘Light from Light,’ it’s essentially using it as a synonym for the eternal and the divine – for God.”
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He says how this image would resonate due to humanity’s familiarity with the sun. “When we look up to the sun in the sky and we see that bright orange ball and the light that’s falling all around us, it’s the same thing. The sun doesn’t create separate light,” Father Dave says. “We also now say ‘consubstantial with the Father,’ or of the same substance of the father. That’s, again like light that comes from the sun.”
“It’s meant to reiterate this imperceptible concept of the three persons of the Trinity,” he continues. “It reiterates the notion that the second person of the Trinity, Christ, who was born as Jesus always existed along with God and was not created a separate time. Jesus is consubstantial with, or the same substance of, God the Father. That’s what they wrestled with for years during the time of the Council of Nicaea, and they wanted to codify that in language that people repeated again and again for centuries, so that these other heresies would not spring up again.”
