Skip to content

Chapter IX. Theological Controversies, and Development of the Ecumenical Orthodoxy

§ 127. The Nicene Doctrine of the Consubstantiality of the Son with the Father

Page 131 of 185

Comp. the literature in §§ 119 and 120, especially the four Orations of Athanasius against the Arians, and the other anti-Arian tracts of this "father of orthodoxy."

The Nicene, Homo-ousian, or Athanasian doctrine was most clearly and powerfully represented in the East by Athanasius, in whom it became flesh and blood;1379 and next to him, by Alexander of Alexandria, Marcellus of Ancyra (who however strayed into Sabellianism), Basil, and the two Gregories of Cappadocia; and in the West by Ambrose and Hilary.

The central point of the Nicene doctrine in the contest with Arianism is the identity of essence or the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and is expressed in this article of the (original) Nicene Creed: "[We believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God; who is begotten the only-begotten of the Father; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God, and Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father."1380

The term homoousios, consubstantial, is of course no more a biblical term,1381 than trinity;1382 but it had already been used, though in a different sense, both by heathen writers1383 and by heretics,1384 as well as by orthodox fathers.1385 It formed a bulwark against Arians and Semi-Arians, and an anchor which moored the church during the stormy time between the first and the second ecumenical councils.1386 At first it had a negative meaning against heresy; denying, as Athanasius repeatedly says, that the Son is in any sense created or produced and changeable.1387 But afterwards the homoousion became a positive testword of orthodoxy, designating, in the sense of the Nicene council, clearly and unequivocally, the veritable and essential deity of Christ, in opposition to all sorts of apparent or half divinity, or mere similarity to God. The same divine, eternal, unchangeable essence, which is in an original way in the Father, is, from eternity, in a derived way, through generation, in the Son; just as the water of the fountain is in the stream, or the light of the sun is in the ray, and cannot be separated from it. Hence the Lord says: "I am in the Father, and the Father in Me; He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father; I and My Father are one." This is the sense of the expression: "God of God," "very God of very God." Christ, in His divine nature, is as fully consubstantial with the Father, as, in His human nature, He is with man; flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone; and yet, with all this, He is an independent person with respect to the Father, as He is with respect to other men. In this view Basil turns the term homoousiosagainst the Sabellian denial of the personal distinctions in the Trinity, since it is not the same thing that is consubstantial with itself, but one thing that is consubstantial with another.1388 Consubstantiality among men, indeed, is predicated of different individuals who partake of the same nature, and the term in this view might denote also unity of species in a tritheistic sense.

But in the case before us the personal distinction of the Son from the Father must not be pressed to a duality of substances of the same kind; the homoousion, on the contrary, must be understood as identity or numerical unity of substance, in distinction from mere generic unity. Otherwise it leads manifestly into dualism or tritheism. The Nicene doctrine refuses to swerve from the monotheistic basis, and stands between Sabellianism and tritheism; though it must be admitted that the usage of ousiaand hupostasis?still wavered for a time, and the relation of the consubstantiality to the numerical unity of the divine essence did not come clearly out till a later day. Athanasius insists that the unity of the divine essence is indivisible, and that there is only one principle of Godhead.1389 He frequently illustrates the relation) as Tertullian had done before him, by the relation between fire and brightness,1390 or between fountain and stream; though in these illustrations the proverbial insufficiency of all similitudes must never be forgotten. "We must not," says he, "take the words in : 'I am in the Father and the Father in Me' as if the Father and the Son were two different interpenetrating and mutually complemental substances, like two bodies which fill one vessel. The Father is full and perfect, and the Son is the fulness of the Godhead."1391 "We must not imagine," says he in another place, "three divided substances1392 in God, as among men, lest we, like the heathen, invent a multiplicity of gods; but as the stream which is born of the fountain, and not separated from it, though there are two forms and names. Neither is the Father the Son, nor the Son the Father; for the Father is the Father of the Son, and the Son is the Son of the Father. As the fountain is not the stream, nor the stream the fountain, but the two are one and the same water which flows from the fountain into the stream; so the Godhead pours itself, without division, from the Father into the Son. Hence the Lord says: I went forth from the Father, and come from the Father. Yet He is ever with the Father, He is in the bosom of the Father, and the bosom of the Father is never emptied of the Godhead of the Son."1393

The Son is of the essence of the Father, not by division or diminution, but by simple and perfect self-communication. This divine self-communication of eternal love is represented by the figure of generation, suggested by the biblical terms Father and Son, the only-begotten Son, the firstborn.1394 The eternal generation is an internal process in the essence of God, and the Son is an immanent offspring of this essence; whereas creation is an act of the will of God, and the creature is exterior to the Creator, and of different substance. The Son, as man, is produced;1395 as God, he is unproduced or uncreated;1396 he is begotten1397 from eternity of the unbegotten1398 Father. To this Athanasius refers the passage concerning the Only-begotten who is in the bosom of the Father.1399

Generation and creation are therefore entirely different ideas. Generation is an immanent, necessary, and perpetual process in the essence of God himself, the Father's eternal communication of essence or self to the Son; creation, on the contrary, is an outwardly directed, free, single act of the will of God, bringing forth a different and temporal substance out of nothing. The eternal fatherhood and sonship in God is the perfect prototype of all similar relations on earth. But the divine generation differs from all human generation, not only in its absolute spirituality, but also in the fact that it does not produce a new essence of the same kind, but that the begotten is identical in essence with the begetter; for the divine essence is by reason of its simplicity, incapable of division, and by reason of its infinity, incapable of increase.1400 The generation, properly speaking, has no reference at all to the essence, but only to the hypostatical distinction. The Son is begotten not as God, but as Son, not as to his natura, but as to his idiotes, his peculiar property and his relation to the Father. The divine essence neither begets, nor is begotten. The same is true of the processio of the Holy Ghost, which has reference not to the essence, but only to the person, of the Spirit. In human generation, moreover, the father is older than the son; but in the divine generation, which takes place not in time, but is eternal, there can be no such thing as priority or posteriority of one or the other hypostasis. To the question whether the Son existed before his generation, Cyril of Alexandria answered: "The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he existed eternally, and eternally existed by generation." The Son is as necessary to the being of the Father, as the Father to the being of the Son.

The necessity thus asserted of the eternal generation does not, however, impair its freedom, but is intended only to deny its being arbitrary and accidental, and to secure its foundation in the essence of God himself. God, to be Father, must from eternity beget the Son, and so reproduce himself; yet he does this in obedience not to a foreign law, but to his own law and the impulse of his will. Athanasius, it is true, asserts on the one hand that God begets the Son not of his will,1401 but by his nature,1402 yet on the other hand he does not admit that God begets the Son without will,1403 or of force or unconscious necessity. The generation, therefore, rightly understood, is an act at once of essence and of will. Augustine calls the Son "will of will."1404 In God freedom and necessity coincide.

The mode of the divine generation is and must be a mystery. Of course all human representations of it must be avoided, and the matter be conceived in a purely moral and spiritual way. The eternal generation, conceived as an intellectual process, is the eternal self-knowledge of God; reduced to ethical terms, it is his eternal and absolute love in its motion and working within himself.

In his argument for the consubstantiality of the Son, Athanasius, in his four orations against the Arians, besides adducing the proof from Scripture, which presides over and permeates all other arguments, sets out now in a practical method from the idea of redemption, now in a speculative, from the idea of God.

Christ has delivered us from the curse and power of sin, reconciled us with God, and made us partakers of the eternal, divine life; therefore he must himself be God. Or, negatively: If Christ were a creature, he could not redeem other creatures from sin and death. It is assumed that redemption is as much and as strictly a divine work, as creation.1405

Starting from the idea of God, Athanasius argues: The relation of Father is not accidental, arising in time; else God would be changeable;1406 it belongs as necessarily to the essence and character of God as the attributes of eternity, wisdom, goodness, and holiness; consequently he must have been Father from eternity, and this gives the eternal generation of the Son.1407 The divine fatherhood and sonship is the prototype of all analagous relations on earth. As there is no Son without Father, no more is there Father without Son. An unfruitful Father were like a dark light, or a dry fountain, a self-contradiction. The non-existence of creatures, on the contrary, detracts nothing from the perfection of the Creator, since he always has the power to create when he will.1408 The Son is of the Father's own interior essence, while the creature is exterior to God and dependent on the act of his will.1409 God, furthermore, cannot be conceived without reason (alogos), wisdom, power, and according to the Scriptures (as the Arians themselves concede) the Son is the Logos, the wisdom, the power, the Word of God, by which all things were made. As light rises from fire, and is inseparable from it, so the Word from God, the Wisdom from the Wise, and the Son from the Father.1410 The Son, therefore, was in the beginning, that is, in the beginning of the eternal divine being, in the original beginning, or from eternity. He himself calls himself one with the Father, and Paul praises him as God blessed forever.1411

Finally Christ cannot be a proper object of worship, as he is represented in Scripture and has always been regarded in the Church, without being strictly divine. To worship a creature is idolatry.

When we attentively peruse the warm, vigorous, eloquent, and discriminating controversial writings of Athanasius and his co-laborers, and compare with them the vague, barren, almost entirely negative assertions and superficial arguments of their opponents, we cannot escape the impression that, with all their exegetical and dialectical defects in particulars, they have on their side an overwhelming preponderance of positive truth, the authority of holy Scripture, the profounder speculations of reason, and the prevailing traditional faith of the early church.1412

The spirit and tendency of the Nicene doctrine is edifying; it magnifies Christ and Christianity. The Arian error is cold and heartless, degrades Christ to the sphere of the creature, and endeavors to substitute a heathen deification of the creature for the true worship of God. For this reason also the faith in the true and essential deity of Christ has to this day an inexhaustible vitality, while the irrational Arian fiction of a half-deity, creating the world and yet himself created, long ago entirely outlived itself.1413

Notes

  1. 1379

    Particularly distinguished are his four Orations against the Arians, written in 356.

  2. 1380

    Kai eis hena Kurion Iesoun Christon, ton huion tou Theou; gennethenta ek tou Patros monogene; tout estin ek tes ousias tou Patros, Theon ek Theou kai phos ek photos, Theon alethinon ek Theou alethinou; gennethenta, ou poiethenta, homoousion to Patri, k.t.l.

  3. 1381

    Though John's Theos hen ho logos (), and Paul's to heinai isa Theo (), are akin to it. The latter passage, indeed, since i1sa is adverbial, denotes rather divine existence, than divine being or essence, which would be more correctly expressed by to heinai ison Theo?, or by isotheos. But the latter would be equally in harmony with Paul's theology. The Jews used the masc. isos, though in a polemical sense, when they drew from the way in which he called himself preeminently and exclusively the Son of God the logical inference, that he made himself equal with God, : Hoti ... patera idion elege ton Theon, ison heauton poion to Theo. The Vulgate translates: aequalem se faciens Deo.

  4. 1382

    The word triasand trinitas, in this application to the Godhead, appears first in Theophilus of Antioch and Athenagoras in the second century, and in Tertullianin the third. Confessions of faith must be drawn up in language different from the Scriptures—else they mean nothing or everything—since they are an interpretation of the Scriptures and intended to exclude false doctrines.

  5. 1383

    Bull, Def. fidei Nic., Works, vol. v. P. i. p. 70: " Homoousion a probatis Graecis scriptoribus id dicitur, quod ejusdem cum altero substantiae, essentiae, sive naturae est." He then cites some passages from profane writers. Thus Porphyry says, De abstinentia ab esu animalium, lib. i. n. 19: Eige homoousioi hoi ton zoon psuchai hemeterais, i.e., siquidem animae animalium sunt ejusdem cum nostris essentiae. Aristotle (in a quotation in Origen) speaks of the consubstantiality of all stars, homoousia panta astra, omnia astra sunt ejusdem essentiae sive naturae.

  6. 1384

    First by the Gnostic Valentine, in Irenaeus, Adv. haer. l. i. cap. 1, § 1 and § 5(ed. Stieren, vol. i. 67 and 66). In the last passage it is said of man that he is hulikos, and as such very like God, indeed, but not consubstantial, paraplesion men, all ouch homoousion to Theo. The Manichaeans called the human soul, in the sense of their emanation system, homoousion to. Theo. Agapius, in Photius (Bibl. Cod. 179), calls even the sun and the moon, in a pantheistic sense, homoousia Theo. The Sabellinas used the word of the trinity, but in opposition to the distinction of persons.

  7. 1385

    Origen deduces from the figurative description apaugasma, , the homoousion of the Son. His disciples rejected the term, indeed, at the council at Antioch in 264, because the heretical Paul of Samosata gave it a perverted meaning, taking oujsiva for the common source from which the three divine persons first derived their being. But towards the end of the third century the word was introduced again into church use by Theognostus and Dionysius of Alexandria, as Athanasius, De Decr. Syn. Nic. c. 25 (ed. Bened. i. p. 230), demonstrates. Eusebius, Ep. ad Caesarienses c. 7 (in Socr. H. E. i. 8, and in Athan. Opera i. 241), says that some early bishops and authors, learned and celebrated (ton palaion tinas logious kai epiphaneis epistopous kai sungrapheis ), used homoousion of the Godhead of the Father and Son. Tertullian(Adv. Prax.) applied the corresponding Latin phrase unius substantiae to the persons of the holy Trinity.

  8. 1386

    Cunningham (Hist. Theology, i. p. 291) says of homoousios: " The number of these individuals who held the substance of the Nicene doctrine, but objected to the phraseology in which it was expressed, was very small [?]—and the evil thereof, was very inconsiderable; while the advantage was invaluable that resulted from the possession and the use of a definite phraseology, which shut out all supporters of error, combined nearly all the maintainers of truth, and formed a rallying-point around which the whole orthodox church ultimately gathered, after the confusion and distinction occasioned by Arian cunning and Arian persecution had passed away."

  9. 1387

    Athanas. Epist. de Decretis Syn. Nicaenae, cap. 20 (i. p. 226); c. 26 (p. 231); and elsewhere.

  10. 1388

    Basil. M. Epist. lii. 3 (tom. iii. 146): Aute de he phone kai to tou Sabelliou kakon epanorthoutai; anairei gar ten tautoteta tes hupostaseos kai eisagei taleian ton prosopon ten ennoian: (tollit enim hypostaseos identitatem perfectamque personarum notionem inducit) ou gar auto ti estin heauto homoousion, all heteron hetero (non enim idem sibi ipsi consubstantiale est, sed alterun alteri).

  11. 1389

    Orat. iv. contra Arianos, c. 1 (tom. i. p. 617): HuOste duo men heinai patera kai huion, monada de theotetos adiaireton kai aschiston ... mia arche theotetos kai ou duo archai, hothen kurios kai monarchia estin.

  12. 1390

    E.g., Orat. iv. c. Arianos, c. 10 (p. 624): Esto de paradeigma anthropinon to pur kai to ex autou apaugasma (ignes et splendor ex eo ortus), Duo men to einai [this is not accurate, and strictly taken would lead to two ousiai] kai horasthai, hen de to ex autou kai adiaireton einai to apaugasma autou.

  13. 1391

    0rat. iii. c. Arian. c. 1 (p. 551): Pleres kai teleios estin ho pater, kai pleroma theotetos estin ho Huios .

  14. 1392

    Treis hupostaseis [here, as often in the Nicene age, synonymous with ousiai] memerismenas kath heautas. Athan. Expos. Fidei or Ekthesis pisteos, cap. 2 (Opera, ed. Bened. i. p. 100).

  15. 1393

    Expositio Fidei, cap. 2: Hos gar ouk estin he pege potamos , oude ho potamos pege, amphotera de hen kai tauton estin hudor to ek tes peges metecheuomenon, houtos he ek tou patros eis ton huion theotes arrheustos kai adiairetos tunchanei, k.t.l.

  16. 1394

    Pater, huios, monogenes huios(frequent in John), prototokos pases ktiseos(). Waterland (Works, i. p. 368) says of this point of the Nicene doctrine, "that an explicit profession of eternal generation might have been dispensed with: provided only that the eternal existence of the logos. as a real subsisting person, in and of the Father, which comes to the same thing, might be secured. This was the point; and this was all."

  17. 1395

    Genetos(not to be confounded with gennetos), poietos, factus. Comp. : Ho logos sarx egeneto.

  18. 1396

    Agenetos, ou poietheis, non-factus, increatus; not to be confounded with agennetos, non-genitus, which belongs to the Father alone.

  19. 1397

    Gennetos, or, as in the Symb. Nic. gennetheis, genitus.

  20. 1398

    Agennetos, non-genitus. This terminology is very frequent in the writings of Athanasius, especially in the Orat. i. contra Arianos, and in his Epist. de decretis Syn. Nic.

  21. 1399

    : Ho monogenes huios , ho on (a perpetual or eternal relation, not hen) eis(motion, in distinction from en) ton k'olpon tou patros. Comp. Athanas. Epist. de decr. S. N. c. 22 (tom. i. p. 227): Ti gar allo to en kolpois semainei, he ten gnesian ek tou patros tou huiou gennesin?

  22. 1400

    Bishop John Pearson, in his well-known work: An Exposition of the Creed (Art. ii. p. 209, ed. W. S. Dobson, New York, 1851), thus clearly and rightly exhibits the Nicene doctrine in this point: "In human generations the son is of the same nature with the father, and yet is not the same man; because though he has an essence of the same kind, yet he has not the same essence; the power of generation depending on the first prolifical benediction, increase and multiply, it must be made by way of multiplication, and thus every son becomes another man. But the divine essence, being by reason of its simplicity not subject to division, and in respect of its infinity incapable of multiplication, is so communicated as not to be multiplied; insomuch that he who proceeds by that communication, has not only the same nature, but is also the same God. The Father God, and the Word God; Abraham man and Isaac man: but Abraham one man, Isaac another man; not so the Father one God and the Word another, but the Father and the Word both the same God."

  23. 1401

    Me ek bouleseos.

  24. 1402

    Phusei.

  25. 1403

    Abouletos and atheletos.

  26. 1404

    Voluntas de voluntate. De trinit. xv. 20.

  27. 1405

    Comp. particularly the second oration contra Arianos, c. 69 sqq.

  28. 1406

    Orat. i. contra Arianos, c. 28 (p. 433): Dia touto aei pater kai ouk epigegone (accidit) to Theo to pater, hina me kai treptos einai nomisthe. Ei gar kalon to einai auton patera, ouk aei de en pater, ouk aei ara to kalon en auto. Though to this it might be objected that by the incarnation of the Logos and the permanent reception of human nature into fellowship with the divine, a certain change has passed, after all, upon the deity.

  29. 1407

    Orat. ii. c. Arianos, c. 1 sqq. (p. 469 sqq.); Orat. iii. c. 66 (p. 615), and elsewhere.

  30. 1408

    This last argument, in the formally logical point of view, may not be perfectly valid; for there may as well be a distinction between an ideal and real fatherhood, as between an ideal and real creatorship; and, on the other hand, one might reason with as good right backwards from the notion of essential omnipotence to an eternal creation, and say with Hegel: Without the world God is not God. But from the speculative and ethical point of view a difference must unquestionably be admitted, and an element of truth be acknowledged in the argument of Athanasius. The Father needed the Son for his own self-consciousness, which is inconceivable without an object. God is essentially love, and this realizes itself in the relation of Father and Son, and in the fellowship of the Spirit: Ubi amor ibi trinitas.

  31. 1409

    Orat. i. c. 29 (p. 433): To poiema exothen tou poiountos estin ... ho de huios idion tes ousias gennema esti; dio kai to men poiema ouk ananke aei einai, hote gar bouletai ho demiourgos ergazetai, to de gennema ou boulesei hupokeitai, alla te's ousias estin idiotes .

  32. 1410

    Comp. the 4th Oration against the Arians, cap. 1 sqq. (p. 617 sqq.)

  33. 1411

    The Theosin the well-known passage, , is thus repeatedly by Athanasus, e.g., Orat. i. contra Arianos, c. 11; Orat. iv. c. 1, and by other fathers (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Chrysostom), as well as by the Reformers and most of the orthodox expositors, referred to Christ. This interpretation, too, is most suitable to the connection, and in perfect harmony with the Christology of Paul, who sets forth Christ as the image of God, the possessor of the fulness of the divine life and glory, the object of worship (; ff.; ii. 9; ; ; ; ); and who therefore, as well as , could call him in the predicative sense Theos, i.e., of divine essence, in distinction from ho Theoswith the article.

  34. 1412

    We say the prevailing faith; not denying that the theological knowledge and statement of the doctrine of the trinity had hitherto been in many respects indefinite and wavering. The learned bishop Bull, indeed, endeavored to prove, in opposition to the Jesuit Petavius, that the ante-Nicene fathers taught concerning the deity of the Son the very same things as the Nicene. Comp. the Preface to his Defensio fidei Nicaenae, ed. Burton, Oxf. 1827, vol. v. Pars. 1, p. ix.: "De summa rei, quam aliis persuadere volo, plane ipse, neque id temere, persuasus sum, nempe, quod de Filii divinitate contra Arium, idem re ipsa (quanquam aliis fortasse nonnunquam verbis, alioque loquendi modo) docuisse Patres ac doctores ecclesiae probatos ad unum omnes, qui ante tempora synodi Nicaenae, ab ipsa usque apostolorum aetate, floruerunt." But this assertion can be maintained only by an artificial and forced interpretation of many passages, and goes upon a mechanical and lifeless view of history. Comp. also the observations of W. Cunningham, Historical Theology, vol. i. p. 269 ff.

  35. 1413

    Dorner, l.c. i. p. 883, justly says: "Not only to the mind of our time, but to all sound reason, does it seem absurd, nay, superstitious, that an under-god, a finite, created being, should be the creator."

Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume 3: Nicene and Post-Nicene Christianity, AD 311–600 (1884). Public domain. Text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.