Whoever wishes to be saved

The Text

A creed that begins by telling you what happens if you do not hold it is already a different kind of document from the Apostles’ or the Nicene. The Apostles’ Creed begins I believe; the Nicene begins We believe; the Athanasian Creed begins Whoever wishes to be saved — and within one breath has named the stake as eternal perdition. The two opening words, Quicumque vult, are not only the creed’s name but its whole character: this is a confession written as a test, framed front and back by the warning that failing the test is fatal.

Everything contested about the Athanasian Creed is contested here, in the first two verses, before a single Trinitarian or Christological assertion has been made. The body of the creed — the non tres … sed unus drill of the Trinity, the two-natures precision of the Incarnation — is, in its dogmatic substance, the common faith of catholic Christianity, held without controversy by Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Methodist alike. What is not held without controversy is the frame: the claim that this faith, in this precision, is the condition of salvation, and that whoever does not keep it whole and undefiled will without doubt perish for ever. The clause has been called the most uncharitable sentence in the church’s liturgical inheritance and the most honest. It is the reason the Eastern church never received the creed, the reason the Victorian Church of England nearly broke over it, and the reason John Wesley struck the entire creed from American Methodism in 1784. To read it well is to refuse both the easy dismissal and the easy defense.

Translation Notes

Quicumque vult salvus esse — “Whoever wishes to be saved.” The relative quicumque is universal and individual: not “the church” and not “heretics” but anyone at all. The present subjunctive vult — “wishes,” “wills” — locates the clause in the will: it addresses the one who wants salvation and tells that person the condition. The creed takes its name from these words; the title Athanasian is medieval and inaccurate (see Historical Context).

ante omnia opus est — “before all things it is needful.” The phrase ranks the requirement first: before everything else, this. Some manuscripts and later liturgical texts read necesse est (“it is necessary”); the sense is the same. The 1662 rendering “before all things it is necessary that he hold” is exact.

teneat catholicam fidem — “let him hold the catholic faith.” Catholica here is the ancient word for the whole, universal faith of the undivided church — Vincent of Lérins’s quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus (“what has been believed everywhere, always, by all”). It does not yet mean the Roman communion as distinct from others; the creed predates that usage. The verb teneat (“hold,” “keep a grip on”) is custodial, not merely cognitive: the faith is something one holds fast, not merely assents to once.

quam nisi quisque integram inviolatamque servaverit — “which faith unless each one shall have kept whole and inviolate.” The two adjectives are not redundant. Integram — “entire” — forbids subtraction: you may not keep part of the faith and discard the rest. Inviolatam — “unviolated, unimpaired” — forbids adulteration: you may not keep the words while emptying them. The faith is presented as an indivisible whole that perishes if either reduced or distorted.

absque dubio in aeternum peribit — “without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.” This is the comminatory clause proper, and the whole interpretive history of the creed turns on five words. Absque dubio — “without doubt” — is the phrase that gives the sentence its certainty; it is what distinguishes a warning (“you risk perishing”) from a verdict (“you will perish”). In aeternum peribit — “shall perish unto eternity” — names the loss as final and total. The 1662 “without doubt he shall perish everlastingly” preserves both the certainty and the finality; the 1979 contemporary text changes not a single degree of the severity, but the 1979 Book of Common Prayer quarantines the whole creed into a section titled “Historical Documents of the Church” — a translation decision made not with words but with the table of contents.

The same formula recurs deliberately. Verse 28: “He therefore that will be saved must thus think of the Trinity.” Verses 42–44: “they that have done evil into everlasting fire. This is the catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved.” The creed is a structure with three load-bearing warnings — opening, hinge, and close — and the first one sets the terms for all of them.

Historical Context

Almost nothing the title says about this creed is true. It is not by Athanasius; it is not Greek; it is not, in the strict sense, a creed.

Not Athanasius. Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373) wrote in Greek and died a century and a half before this text can be securely dated. The Athanasian Creed is Latin, and it presupposes theology Athanasius did not live to see: the Augustinian doctrine of the Trinity articulated through relations within a single substantia (Augustine’s De Trinitate was completed c. 420), and the two-natures Christology of the Council of Chalcedon (451). A document that presupposes Chalcedon cannot have been written by a man who died in 373. The attribution is medieval: by the ninth century the text circulates as the fides Athanasii, attached to his name because its content is “Athanasian” in the loose sense of being fiercely anti-Arian. Erasmus and later critical scholarship recognized the misattribution; the Reformers retained the creed for its content while knowing the title was honorary.

Provenance. The scholarly consensus, established by Germain Morin and consolidated by J.N.D. Kelly’s The Athanasian Creed (1964) — still the standard study — places the text in southern Gaul, around the year 500. Its vocabulary and concerns are continuous with the milieu of Lérins and Arles: Vincent of Lérins’s Commonitorium (434) shares its language, and Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) is among its earliest witnesses. An older theory (Künstle) sought a Spanish, anti-Priscillianist setting; the Gallic placement has prevailed. The creed was written where it was needed: in a Latin West whose Visigothic and Burgundian rulers were Arian Christians, where the Trinitarian and Christological precision of the text was not academic but a boundary between the catholic population and the Arian court.

Liturgical career. The creed entered the Western Office and was recited at Prime, especially on Sundays. The English Books of Common Prayer of 1549, 1552, and 1662 appointed it to be said at Morning Prayer, in place of the Apostles’ Creed, on a fixed list of thirteen feast days. Luther held it in high esteem; the Book of Concord (1580) prints it first among the three catholica et oecumenica symbola. The Roman tradition received it; the Council of Trent presupposed it. The Eastern church alone never received it — partly on the filioque of verse 23, partly on the comminatory clauses, whose universal-individual form the East does not append to a symbol of faith.

The Victorian crisis. The warning clauses had long made Latitudinarian Anglicans uneasy — Archbishop Tillotson is reported to have wished the church “well rid of it.” The storm broke between 1867 and 1873. The Royal Commission on Ritual reopened the question of the creed’s compulsory recitation; Dean Stanley of Westminster led a campaign to remove it or at least the damnatory clauses; Pusey and Liddon led the defense, Pusey declaring he would leave the Church of England if the creed were mutilated. The 1873 compromise — a Synodical Declaration of the Convocation of Canterbury — kept the creed but ruled that the warnings are “a solemn warning against the rejection of the Catholic Faith” and that the church “doth not herein pronounce judgment on particular persons.” The 1928 proposed Prayer Book made its use optional; the 1979 American Prayer Book moved it out of the liturgy altogether and into “Historical Documents.” The creed has not been condemned by any Western body; it has been quietly set down.

Lines of Interpretation

The disputed question on this clause is narrow and exact: what do the comminatory clauses mean, and what do they bind? Every tradition affirms the creed’s Trinitarian and Christological content. They divide on the frame.

Patristic / Early Medieval

Tradition: the Gallic milieu — Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium; Caesarius of Arles; the anti-Arian polemic of the sixth-century Latin West

For the creed’s own age the warning is a boundary marker of the one faith, addressed to the baptized and their teachers in a world where Arian Christianity held political power. “The catholic faith” is the Nicene-Chalcedonian confession over against the Arian and Nestorian alternatives that were not hypothetical but enthroned. The clause is, in its origin, a pastor’s defense of the flock against a present and powerful error.

Strengths

• Reads the clause in its actual historical occasion: a warning against a live, organized heresy, not abstract gatekeeping
• Accounts for the vehemence — the stakes really were the integrity of the gospel against an Arian establishment
• Keeps the creed’s content and its polemical frame together, as the author meant them

Weaknesses

• The universal, individual, present-tense phrasing — whoever, without doubt, for ever — outruns its occasion and is naturally read by later ages as a blanket consignment the author may not have intended in that form
• It supplies a context that explains the clause without softening what the clause actually says

Scholastic

Tradition: the medieval distinction of fides implicita and fides explicita; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q.2

The Schoolmen rescued the clause from absurdity by distinguishing the faith one must hold from the faith one must be able to articulate. The unlettered, the simple, and those who have never heard are not damned for failing to formulate Chalcedonian Christology; they are held to an implicit faith in what the church believes. What the creed binds is culpable rejection of the faith, not deficient comprehension of it.

Strengths

• Saves the clause from the manifest cruelty of damning infants, the uninstructed, and the invincibly ignorant for a metaphysical examination
• Supplies the conceptual tools the later church needed to keep the creed without monstrous implications

Weaknesses

• The implicit/explicit distinction is imported; the creed’s own words make no such qualification and admit none on their face
• To readers who hear the plain sense, the scholastic gloss can feel like special pleading constructed to save a text that means what it says

Lutheran

Tradition: the Book of Concord (1580), the Three Ecumenical Creeds; Luther’s high regard for the Quicumque

The Lutheran confessions receive the Athanasian Creed without qualification and place it first among the ecumenical symbols. The warning is read as the objective truth that there is no salvation apart from the true God truly confessed — the solus Christus requires that the Christ confessed be the true God of the creed. The clause states the content of saving faith, not a forecast of who in fact will be lost.

Strengths

• Takes the clause with full seriousness as a statement about the gospel’s content rather than diluting it
• Coheres with the Reformation conviction that a false Christ cannot save, which gives the warning a clear evangelical rationale

Weaknesses

• Tends to relocate the clause’s force into the objective order while leaving the existential sting (“you, without doubt, for ever”) under-addressed
• The confessional reception is doctrinal, not liturgical; Lutheran practice rarely makes the congregation actually say the warning, which leaves its pastoral edge untested

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin’s reception of the ancient creeds; the Belgic Confession Art. 9 (“we receive the three creeds”)

The Reformed bodies do not recite the creed liturgically but accept its doctrine. The instinct is to take the warning as the declaration that salvation is found nowhere but in the true God truly confessed, while referring the question of who is in fact lost to the hidden counsel of God rather than to a clause the church recites. The creed states the truth; God keeps the register.

Strengths

• Honors the clause’s seriousness without presuming to read the roll of the saved and lost
• Coheres with a theology that locates final judgment in God’s secret will, not in ecclesiastical formula

Weaknesses

• Risks emptying the clause of its catechetical bite by removing it entirely to the decretal and hidden
• Accepts the doctrine while declining the practice, which can look like receiving the creed by not using it

Anglican

Tradition: the 1662 retention and rubric; the 1867–1873 controversy; the 1873 Synodical Declaration; the 1928/1979 quarantine

Anglicanism is the tradition that argued this clause out in public, at length, and on the record. The 1873 Declaration is the worked result: the warnings are “a solemn warning against the rejection of the Catholic Faith,” and the church “doth not herein pronounce judgment on particular persons.” The creed was kept, then made optional, then moved to “Historical Documents.”

Strengths

• A rare, honest, documented case of a church metabolizing a hard inherited text rather than either silently dropping or absolutizing it
• The Declaration preserves the clause’s witness (the faith is not optional) while disclaiming the verdict on persons it had been heard to deliver

Weaknesses

• The Declaration arguably saves the creed by no longer letting it mean what it plainly says — a reinterpretation against the grain of absque dubio … in aeternum peribit
• The end state (the creed retained but quarantined and unused) resolves the tension by attrition rather than by judgment, leaving the church neither confessing nor disowning it

Roman Catholic

Tradition: Trent’s presupposition of the creed; Denzinger’s enumeration; Lumen Gentium 16; the “anonymous Christian” debates

Catholic teaching holds the creed’s doctrine firmly and has, in the modern period, developed an account of how the requirement of explicit faith coheres with the possibility of salvation for those who, through no fault of their own, do not hold it (Lumen Gentium 16). The clause states the necessity of the true faith; the church’s developed teaching addresses the case of inculpable ignorance without rescinding the necessity.

Strengths

• Holds together the objective necessity of the true faith and a serious account of those who never received it
• Keeps the creed in force as doctrine while supplying the pastoral framework the bare clause lacks

Weaknesses

• The development sits alongside the clause rather than in it; the creed itself still says what it says
• Critics within and without ask whether the modern qualification has so widened the gate that the clause’s own urgency is no longer audible

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: the non-reception of the Quicumque in the East

The Eastern church confesses the same Trinitarian and Christological faith and does not receive this creed. Two reasons: the filioque of verse 23, and the genre of the warning itself. The East attaches anathemas to named errors in conciliar acts; it does not append a universal-individual comminatory clause — “whoever … without doubt … for ever” — to a symbol of faith. A confession and a condemnation are different speech-acts, and the East declines to fuse them in a creed.

Strengths

• A principled refusal to let a symbol of faith do the work of an anathema — preserving the distinction between confessing the truth and condemning persons
• Consistent with the East’s own practice, where conciliar anathemas name specific teachings rather than “whoever”

Weaknesses

• The East’s own liturgical anathemas (the Synodikon of Orthodoxy) are not gentle; the objection is partly to genre and Western provenance, which can make the filioque look like the operative reason
• Non-reception sidesteps rather than resolves the underlying question every tradition faces about the necessity of the true faith

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: Kelly, The Athanasian Creed (1964); Barth’s regard for the creed’s objectivity; Rahner and Lumen Gentium 16; the universalist–particularist debate

The historical-critical settlement (a Gallic instruction, c. 500, not Athanasius, not conciliar) lowered the creed’s authority-claim and reframed the warning: it is the church’s solemn testimony that the faith has determinate content and is not negotiable down to nothing — read now against pluralist and universalist pressure rather than against Arian kings. Barth admired the creed’s refusal of religious subjectivity; the broad modern reading is that the clause says truth matters for salvation without claiming to adjudicate individuals.

Strengths

• Lets the clause say something true and serious — the gospel has content; indifference to it is not safe — without the pastoral cruelty of a verdict on persons
• The historical work clarifies what kind of text this is and what authority it can bear

Weaknesses

• Risks the opposite error: so qualifying the clause that it no longer warns anyone of anything, which is not what absque dubio means
• Reframing a comminatory clause as a general statement that “truth matters” can become a way of keeping the words while discarding the act they perform

Wesleyan Voice

The decisive Wesleyan fact about the Athanasian Creed is an absence. When John Wesley prepared The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America (1784) — his abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer for the new American church — he kept the Apostles’ Creed, kept the Nicene in the Communion office, and struck the Athanasian Creed entirely, together with the rubric that had appointed it on feast days. The twenty-five Articles of Religion he sent over, trimmed from the Church of England’s thirty-nine, contain no analogue to it. From that day to this, the Athanasian Creed has never appeared in an American Methodist hymnal or Discipline. American Methodists have, for two hundred and forty years, simply not had this creed.

Wesley left no paragraph explaining this particular deletion, but his mind on it is legible from the parallel decisions of the same project. He also dropped Article III on Christ’s descent into hell; he cut the Thirty-Nine Articles to twenty-five; he removed what he judged speculative, contentious, or uncharitable, and gave the Americans a lean and irenic book. Three convergent reasons account for the cut.

First, the comminatory clauses. Wesley’s entire soteriology runs against absque dubio … in aeternum peribit as a clause the church recites over the unconverted. He preached the wrath of God without flinching, but it was God’s wrath, declared in the proclamation of the gospel, never the church’s verdict pronounced by formula on whoever has not kept a metaphysical confession “whole and undefiled.” The temper of his sermon “Catholic Spirit” — that we hold the essentials firmly and refuse to unchurch those who differ from us in opinions and modes — is exactly the temper the Athanasian frame offends. Wesley would damn no one by clause.

Second, the binding of the manner. In Sermon 55, “On the Trinity” (1775), Wesley defends the fact of the Three-One God as a truth he will not surrender — and in the same sermon refuses to bind the manner: “I dare not insist upon anyone’s using the word Trinity or Person.” The Athanasian Creed insists on precisely the manner — the non tres … sed unus drill, the exact metaphysical balance — and makes that precision the condition of salvation. Wesley believed the doctrine and declined the method.

Third, the logic of 1784 itself. The whole point of the abridgment was a usable, charitable, portable liturgy for a frontier church. A long, technical, combative creed framed by threats did not fit the book Wesley was making.

The honest counterweight must be stated as plainly as the deletion. Wesley did not deny the creed’s doctrine. “On the Trinity” affirms exactly the substance the Athanasian Creed states: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each fully God, one God, co-equal and co-eternal. What Wesley set aside was the creed’s form — the binding of the manner and the damnatory frame. That setting-aside is not doctrinal indifference; it is itself a doctrinal act, a considered Wesleyan judgment that the faith of the Athanasian Creed is to be held and sung but not imposed under threat. The empty place in the Methodist books where this creed would stand is not a gap in Methodist orthodoxy. It is a Methodist confession about how orthodoxy is to be kept.

Hymnody

Here the honest answer is a near-silence, and the silence is instructive. The Athanasian Creed’s companion in the medieval Office was the Te Deum — and the Te Deum became the church’s great Trinitarian song, sung at every festal Matins for fifteen centuries, set by Purcell and Handel and Berlioz and Bruckner and Walton. The Quicumque vult became, by contrast, the church’s great Trinitarian examination, and you cannot sing an examination. There is no living congregational hymn on the Athanasian Creed, and there is certainly none on its warning clauses. You cannot put a threat in a hymnal and expect a congregation to sing it back to God.

There are antiquarian exceptions that prove the rule. Metrical versions of the creed appear in some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English psalters, bound in for the Office rather than for congregational praise, and they did not survive into living use. The German Reformation’s great credal hymn — Luther’s Wir glauben all an einen Gott — versifies the Nicene faith, not the Athanasian. The one place the Athanasian Creed’s doctrine sings is exactly where the Wesleyan instinct would put it: in Charles Wesley’s Hymns on the Trinity (1767), a collection of one hundred and eighty-eight hymns confessing precisely the co-equal, co-eternal Three-in-One that the creed defines — but breathing an entirely different air. The creed drills the doctrine; Charles Wesley adores it. Hail, holy, holy, holy Lord, / be endless praise to thee; / supreme, essential One, adored / in co-eternal Three is the Athanasian Creed’s metaphysics turned, without the loss of a single degree of precision, into doxology. That contrast — the same Three-One God examined by the creed and worshipped by the hymn — is the most truthful thing the hymnody has to say here, and it is the identical Wesleyan move that produced the 1784 deletion: keep the faith entire, and change the key from threat to praise.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

What is a Methodist congregation to do with a creed its own tradition deliberately set down? The answer is not to recite it (we do not, and we will not), and not to forget it (a tradition should know what it has chosen and why). The answer is to let the clause teach three things.

First, the faith has content, and the warning — stripped of its verdict on persons — is right about that. There is a difference between hearing “you must hold this or you are lost” as God’s roll-call of the damned, which Wesley refused and we refuse, and hearing it as the church’s testimony that the gospel is not infinitely negotiable, that it is possible to keep the words of Christian faith while emptying them until they cost nothing and exclude nothing and therefore mean nothing. The pastoral task is to recover the true half of the warning without the cruelty of the false half. Integram inviolatamque — whole and unadulterated — is a real demand even for those of us who will not append absque dubio to it.

Second, the Methodist deletion is itself a lesson worth teaching. To stand before a congregation and say, “Our tradition has a creed it does not use, and here is exactly why” is to teach the doctrine (we hold the Trinity, fully, with the whole church) and the discipline (we will not damn by formula) in a single move. The empty seat where the Athanasian Creed would sit is not an embarrassment to be hidden; it is a Wesleyan sentence to be read aloud.

Third, the warning, turned inward, still has an edge — and it cuts at us. The clause’s prophetic force, redirected from the unbeliever to the comfortable church, is this: a congregation that has quietly arranged to believe nothing in particular cannot perish for anything in particular, and that condition is not the safety it looks like. It is emptiness wearing the costume of charity. Wesley did not delete this creed in order to believe less; he deleted it in order to believe the same thing without threatening anyone, and a church that uses his deletion as cover for believing nothing has misunderstood him entirely. The Athanasian Creed, which we do not say, still asks the church that does not say it whether it could say what it does believe — whole and undefiled — if it had to. That question, and not the threat, is the clause’s enduring pastoral work among us.

Further Reading

• The Athanasian Creed (Quicumque vult), Latin text — in Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum; in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer; in the Book of Concord
• Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium (434) — the shared Gallic milieu and vocabulary
• Augustine, On the Trinity — the Trinitarian theology the creed presupposes
• The Council of Chalcedon (451), Definition of the Faith — the Christology the creed presupposes
• Caesarius of Arles, sermons — among the earliest witnesses to the creed’s use
• The Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552, 1662) — the rubric appointing the creed on feast days
• The Book of Common Prayer (1979), “Historical Documents of the Church” — the modern quarantine
• The Book of Concord (1580) — the Three Ecumenical Creeds, the Athanasian printed first
• Convocation of Canterbury, the Synodical Declaration on the Athanasian Creed (1873)
• John Wesley, The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America (1784) — note the deliberate omission of the creed
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 55, “On the Trinity” (1775); Sermon 39, “Catholic Spirit”
• Charles Wesley, Hymns on the Trinity (1767)
• J. N. D. Kelly, The Athanasian Creed (Adam & Charles Black / Harper & Row, 1964) — the standard critical study
• Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vols. 1 and 3 — the doctrinal and reception history
• Frances M. Young, The Making of the Creeds (SCM, 1991)
• Carl Volz and the modern liturgical commentaries on the 1979 BCP “Historical Documents” decision