I concili nella Chiesa antica, la forgia di una istituzione imperiale

In this essay I propose to search within the concept of synodal consensus for the actual historical problem of the so-called “Constantinian shift”. While Nicaea I (325) represents the rst signi cant step toward a process of transforming councils from provincial realities into ecumenical assemblies, it also enacts the sentiment of an admittedly unprecedented community in which East and West are interpenetrated as never before, and which recognizes itself as such to the extent that it looks to the emperor as it seeks to determine its own destiny, in the face of dramatic and profound fractures, not by consoling itself with the promise of the coming kingdom, but by acting actively, in the common suffering of crisis, to heal the evil of the present moment.