§3 (1) The Council of Nicæa (part 2 of 3)

What account then does Origen give of the beginning and the end of the great Drama of existence? He starts from the end, which is the more clearly revealed; God shall be all in all.' But the end must be like the beginning;' One is the end of all, One is the beginning. From 1 Cor. xv. he works back to Romans viii.: the one is his key to the eternity after, the other, to the eternity before (Bigg pp. 193 sq.). Into this scheme he brings creation, evil, the history of Revelation, the Church and its life, the final consummation of all things. The Universe is eternal: God is prior to it in conception, yet He was never other than Creator. But in the history of the Universe the material world which we know is but a small episode. It began, and will end. It began with the estrangement of Will from God, will end with its reconciliation: God, from Whom is the beginning of all, will be all in all.' (For Origen's eschatology see Bigg, 228-234.) From this point of view we must approach the two-sided Christology of Origen. To him the two sides were aspects of the same thing: but if the subtle presupposition as to God and the Universe is withdrawn, they become alternative and inconsistent Christologies, as we shall see to have actually happened. As God is eternally Creator, so He is eternally Father (Bigg, 160, note). The Son proceeds from Him not as a part of His Essence, but as the Ray from the Light; it cannot be rightly or piously said that He had a beginning, en hote ouk en (cf. De Princ. i. 2, iv. 28, and infr. p. 168); He is begotten from the Essence of the Father, He is of the same essence (homoousios) (Fragm. 3 in Heb., but see Bigg, p. 179), there is no unlikeness whatever between the Son and the Father (Princ. i. 2, 12). He was begotten ek tou thelematos tou Patros (but to Origen the thelema was inherent in the Divine Nature, cf. Bigg. 161, Harnack, p. 534 against Shedd, p. 301, note) not by probole or emanation (Princ. iv. 28, i. 2. 4), as though the Son's generation were something that took place once for all, instead of existing continuously. The Father is in the Son, the Son in the Father: there is coinherence.' On the other hand, the Word is God derivatively not absolutely, O logos en pros ton Theon, kai Theos en ho Logos. The Son is Theos, the Father alone ho Theos. He is of one ousia with the Father as compared with the creatures; but as contrasted with the Father, Who may be regarded as ep?keina ousias¹⁸ , and Who alone is autotheos, autoagathos, alethinos theos, the Son is ho deuteros theos (Cels. v. 39, cf. Philo's deutereuon theos). As the Son of God, He is contrasted with all geneta; as contrasted with the Ingenerate Father, He stands at the head of the series of genneta; He is metaxu tes tou agen[n]etou kai tes ton geneton phuseos¹⁹ . He even explains the Unity of the Father and the Son as moral (duo te hupostasei pragmata hen de te homonoi& 139; kai te tautoteti tou boulematos, Cels. viii. 12). The Son takes His place even in the cosmic process from Unity to Unity through Plurality, God is in every respect One and Simple, but the Saviour by reason of the Many becomes Many' (on John i. 22, cf. Index to this vol., s.v. Christ). The Spirit is subordinated to the Son, the Son to the Father (elatton para ton patera ho hui& 232;s...eti de hetton to pneuma to hagion, Princ. I. 3, 5 Gk.), while to the Spirit are subordinated created spirits, whose goodness is relative in comparison with God, and the fall of some of whom led to the creation of matter (see above). Unlike the Son and the Spirit they are mutable in will, subject to prokope, capable of embodiment even if in themselves immaterial.

The above slender sketch of the leading thoughts of Origen will suffice to show how intimately his doctrine of the Person of Christ hangs together with his philosophy of Religion and Nature. That philosophy is the philosophy of his age, and must be judged relatively. His deeply religious, candid, piercing spirit embodies the highest effort of the Christian intellect conditioned by the categories of the best thought of his age. Everywhere, while evading no difficulty, his strenuous speculative search is steadied by ethical and religious instinct. As against Valentinian and the Platonists, with both of whom he is in close affinity, he inexorably insists on the self-consciousness and moral nature of God, on human freewill. As against all contemporary non-Christian thought his system is pure monism. Yet the problem of evil, in which he merges the antithesis of matter and spirit, brings with it a necessary dualism, a dualism, however, which belongs but to a moment in the limitless eternity of God's all-in-allness before and after. Is he then a pantheist? No, for to him God is Love (in Ezek. vi. 6), and the rational creature is to be made divine and united to God by the reconciliation of Will and by conscious apprehension of Him. The idea of Will is the pivot of Origen's system, the centripetal force which forbids it to follow the pantheistic line which it yet undoubtedly touches. The moral' unity of the Father and the Son (see above, tautotes boulematos and ek tou thelematos) is Unity in that very respect in which the Creator stands over against the self-determining rational creature. Yet the immutability, the Oneness of God, must be reconciled with the plurality, the mutability of the creature; here the Logos mediates; dia ta polla ginetai polla: but this must be from eternity:—accordingly creation is eternal too. Here we see that the cosmological idea has prevailed over the religious, the Logos of Origen is still in important particulars the Logos of the Apologists, of Philo and the philosophers. The difference lies in His co-eternity, upon which Origen insists without wavering. The resemblance lies in the intermediate²⁰ position ascribed to Him between the agennetos, (ho Theos), and the geneta; He is, as Hypostasis, subordinate to the Father.

Now it is evident that the mere intellectual apprehension of a system which combines so many opposite tendencies, which touches every variety of the theological thought of the age (even modalism, for to Origen the Father is the Monas, the autotheos, while yet He is no abstraction but a God who exists in moral activity, supra) and subtly harmonises them all, must have involved no ordinary philosophical power. When we add to this fact the further consideration that precisely the fundamental ideas of Origen were those which called forth the liveliest opposition and were gradually dropped by his followers, we can easily understand that in the next generation Origenism was no longer either the system of Origen, or a single system at all.

In one direction it could lend itself to no compromise; in spite of the justice done by Origen to the fundamental ideas both of modalism and of emanative adoptionism (cf. Harnack, pp. 548, note, and 586), to Monarchianism in either form he is diametrically opposed. The hypostatic distinctness of Son and Spirit is once for all made good for the theology of Eastern Christendom. We see his disciples exterminate Monarchianism in the East. On the left wing Dionysius refutes the Sabellians of Libya, on the right Gregory Thaumaturgus, Firmilian, and their brethren, after a long struggle, oust the adoptionist Paul from the See of Antioch. But its influence on the existing Catholic theology, however great (and in the East it was very great), inevitably made its way in the face of opposition, and at the cost of its original subtle consistency. The principal opposition came from Asia Minor, where the traditions of theological thought (see above, on Ignatius and Irenæus, below on Marcellus) were not in sympathy²¹ with Origen. We cannot demonstrate the existence of a continuous theological school in Asia; but Methodius (270-300) certainly speaks with the voice of Ignatius and Irenæus. He deals with Origen much as Irenæus dealt with the Gnostics, defending against him the current sense of the regula fidei, and especially the literal meaning of Scripture, the origination of the soul along with the body, the resurrection of the body in the material sense, and generally opposing realism to the spiritualism of Origen. But in thus opposing Origen, Methodius is not uninfluenced by him (see Socr. vi. 13). He, too, is a student of Plato (with little of his style or spirit'); his realism' is speculative.' He no longer defends the Asiatic Chiliasm, his doctrine of the Logos is coloured by Origen as that of Irenæus was by the Apologists. The legacy of Methodius and of his Origenist contemporaries to the Eastern Church was a modified Origenism, that is a theology systematised on the intellectual basis of the Platonic philosophy, but expurgated by the standard of the regula fidei. This result was a compromise, and was at first attended with great confusion. Origen's immediate following seized some one side, some another of his system; some were more, some less influenced by the orthodox' reaction against his teaching. We may distinguish an Origenist right' and an Origenist left.' If the Origenist view of the Universe was given up, the coeternity of the Son and Spirit with the Father was less firmly grasped. Origen had, if we may use the expression, levelled up.' The Son was mediator between the Ingenerate God and the created, but eternal Universe. If the latter was not eternal, and if at the same time the Word stood in some essential correlation to the creative energy of God, Origen's system no longer implied the strict coeternity of the Word. Accordingly we find Dionysius (see below, p. 173 sqq.) uncertain on this point, and on the essential relation of the Son to the Father. More cautious in this respect, but tenacious of other startling features of Origen, were Pierius and Theognostus, who presided over the Catechetical School at the end of the century²² .

On the other hand, very many of Origen's pupils, especially among the bishops, started from the other side of Origen's teaching, and held tenaciously to the coeternity of the Son, while they abandoned the Origenist paradoxes' with regard to the Universe, matter, pre-existence, and restitution. Typical of this class is Gregory Thaumaturgus, also Peter the martyr bishop of Alexandria, who expressly opposed many of Origen's positions (though hardly with the violence ascribed to him in certain supposed fragments in Routh, Rell. iv. 81) and Alexander himself. It was this wing' of the Origenist following that, in combination with the opposition represented by Methodius, bequeathed to the generation contemporary with Nicæa its average theological tone. The coeternity of the Son with the Father was not (as a rule) questioned, but the essential relation of the Logos to the Creation involved a strong subordination of the Son to the Father, and by consequence of the Spirit to the Son. Monarchianism was the heresy most dreaded, the theology of the Church was based on the philosophical categories of Plato applied to the explanation and systematisation of the rule of faith. This was very far from Arianism. It lacked the logical definiteness of that system on the one hand, it rested on the other hand on a different conception of God; the hypostatic subordination of the Son was insisted upon, but His true Sonship as of one Nature with the Father, was held fast. In the slow process of time this neo-Asiatic theology found its way partly to the Nicene formula, partly to the illogical acceptance of it with regard to the Son, with refusal to apply it to the Spirit (Macedonius). To the men who thought thus, the blunt assertion that the Son was a creature, not coeternal, alien to the Essence of the Father, was a novelty, and wholly abhorrent. Arius drew a sharper line than they had been accustomed to draw between God and the creature; so did Athanasius. But Arius drew his line without flinching between the Father and the Son. This to the instinct of any Origenist was as revolting as it would have been to the clear mind and Biblical sympathy of Origen himself. In theological and philosophical principles alike Arius was opposed even to the tempered Origenism of the Nicene age. The latter was at the furthest remove from Monarchianism, Arianism was in its essential core Monarchian; the common theology borrowed its philosophical principles and method from the Platonists, Arius from Aristotle. To anticipate, Arianism and (so-called) semi-Arianism have in reality very little in common except the historical fact of common action for a time. Arianism guarded the transcendence of the divine nature (at the expense of revelation and redemption) in a way that semi-Arianism,' admitting as it did inherent inequality in the Godhead, did not. They therefore tended in opposite directions; Arianism to Anomoeanism, semi-Arianism' to the Nicene faith; their source was different. Aristotle made men Arians,' says Newman with truth, Plato, semi-Arians' (Arians^4, p. 335, note): but to say this is to allow that if Arianism goes back to Lucian and so to Paul of Samosata, semi-Arianism is a fragment from the wreck of Origen.

The Origenist bishops of Syria and Asia Minor had in the years 269-272, after several efforts, succeeded in deposing Paul of Samosata from the See of Antioch. This remarkable man was the ablest pre-Nicene representative of Adoptionist Monarchianism. The Man Jesus was inhabited by the Word,' i.e. by an impersonal power of God, distinct from the Logos or reason (wisdom) inherent in God as an attribute, which descended upon him at His Baptism. His union with God, a union of Will, was unswerving, and by virtue of it He overcame the sin of mankind, worked miracles, and entered on a condition of Deification. He is God ek prokopes (cf. Luke ii. 52) by virtue of progress in perfection. That is in brief the system of Paul, and we cannot wonder at his deposition. For the striking points of contact with Arianism (two Wisdoms,' two Words,' prokope: cf. Orat. c. Ar. i. 5, &c.) we have to account²³ . The theology of Arius is a compromise between the Origenist doctrine of the Person of Christ and the pure Monarchian Adoptionism of Paul of Samosata; or rather it engrafts the former upon the latter as the foundation principle, seriously modifying each to suit the necessity of combining the two. This compromise was not due to Arius himself but to his teacher, Lucian the Martyr. A native himself of Samosata, he stood in some relation of attachment (not clearly defineable) to Paul. Under him, he was at the head of a critical, exegetical, and theological school at Antioch. Upon the deposition of Paul he appears not so much to have been formally excommunicated as to have refused to acquiesce in the new order of things. Under Domnus and his two successors, he was in a state of suspended communion²⁴ ; but eventually was reconciled with the bishop (Cyril?) and died as a martyr at Nicomedia, Jan. 7, 312. The latter fact, his ascetic life, and his learning secured him widespread honour in the Church; his pupils formed a compact and enthusiastic brotherhood, and filled many of the most influential Sees after the persecution. That such a man should be involved in the reproach of having given birth to Arianism is an unwelcome result of history, but one not to be evaded²⁵ . The history of the Lucianic compromise and its result in the Lucianic type of theology, are both matters of inference rather than of direct knowledge. As to the first, whatever evidence there is connects Lucian's original position with Paul. His reconciliation with Bishop Cyril must have involved a reapproachment to the formula of the bishops who deposed Paul,—a thoroughly Origenist document. We may therefore suppose that the identification of Christ with the Logos, or cosmic divine principle, was adopted by him from Origenist sources. But he could not bring himself to admit that He was thus essentially identified with God the eternal; he held fast to the idea of prokope as the path by which the Lord attained to Divinity; he distinguished the Word or Son who was Christ from the immanent impersonal Reason or Wisdom of God, as an offspring of the Father's Will, an idea which he may have derived straight from Origen, with whom of course it had a different sense. For to Origen Will was the very essence of God; Lucian fell back upon an arid philosophical Monotheism, upon an abstract God fenced about with negations (Harnack 2^2, 195, note) and remote from the Universe. It was counted a departure from Lucian's principles if a pupil held that the Son was the perfect Image of the Father's Essence' (Philost. ii. 15); Origen's formula, distinct in hypostasis, but one in will,' was apparently exploited in a Samosatene sense to express the relation of the Son to the Father. The only two points in fact in which Lucian appears to have modified the system of Paul were, firstly in hypostatising the Logos, which to Paul was an impersonal divine power, secondly in abandoning Paul's purely human doctrine of the historical Christ. To Lucian, the Logos assumed a body (or rather Deus sapientiam suam misit in hunc mundum carne vestitam, ubi infra, p. 6), but itself took the place of a soul²⁶ ; hence all the tapeinai lexeis of the Gospels applied to the Logos as such, and the inferiority and essential difference of the Son from the Father rigidly followed.

The above account of Lucian is based on that of Harnack, Dogmg. ii. 184, sqq. It is at once in harmony with all our somewhat scanty data (Alexander, Epiphanius, Philostorgius, and the fragment of his last confession of faith preserved by Rufin. in Eus. H. E. ix. 9, Routh, Rell. iv. pp. 5-7, from which Harnack rightly starts) and is the only one which accounts for the phenomena of the rise of Arianism. We find a number of leading Churchmen in agreement with Arius, but in no way dependent on him. They are Eusebius of Nicomedia, Maris, Theognis, Athanasius of Anazarba, Menophantus; all Lucianists. The first Arian writer, Asterius (see below), is a Lucianist. (The Egyptian bishops Secundus and Theonas cannot be put down to any school; we do not know their history; but they are distinguished from the Lucianists by Philost. ii. 3.) It has been urged that, although Arius brought away heresy from the school of Lucian, yet he was not the only one that did so. True; but then the heresy was all of the same kind (list of pupils of Lucian in Philost. ii. 14, iii. 15). Aetius, the founder of logical ultra-Arianism and teacher of Eunomius, was taught the exegesis of the New Testament by the Lucianists Athanasius of Anazarba and Antony of Tarsus, of the Old by the Lucianist Leontius. This fairly covers the area of Arianism proper. But it may be noted that some Origenists of the left wing,' whose theology emphasized the subordination, and vacillated as to the eternity of the Son, would find little to shock them in Arianism (Eusebius of Cæsarea, Paulinus of Tyre), while on the other hand there are traces of a Lucianist right wing,' men like Asterius, who while essentially Arian, made concessions to the conservative' position chiefly by emphasising the cosmic mediation of the Word and His exact likeness' to the Father²⁷ . The Theology of the Eastern Church was suffering from the effort to assimilate the Origenist theology: it could not do so without eliminating the underlying and unifying idea of Origenism; this done, the overwhelming influence of the great teacher remained, while dissonant fragments of his system, vaguely comprehended in many cases, permeated some here, some there²⁸ . Meanwhile the school of Lucian had a method and a system; they knew their own minds, and relied on reason and exegesis. This was the secret of their power. Had Arius never existed, Arianism must have tried its strength under such conditions. But the age was ready for Arius; and Arius was ready. The system of Arius was in effect that of Lucian: its formulation appears to have been as much the work of Asterius as of Arius himself. (Cf. p. 155, §8, ho de 'Ar. metagrapsas dedoke tois idiois. The extant writings of Arius are his letters to Eus. Nic. and to Alexander, preserved by Theodoret and Epiph. Hær. 69, and the extracts from the Thalia' in Ath., pp. 308-311, 457, 458; also the confession' in Socr. i. 26, Soz. ii. 27. Cf. also references to his dicta in Ath. pp. 185, 229, &c.) Arius started from the idea of God and the predicate Son.' God is above all things uncreated, or unoriginate, agen[n]etos, (the ambiguity of the derivatives of gennasthai and genesthai are a very important element in the controversy. See p. 475, note 5, and Lightfoot, Ignat. ii. p. 90 sqq.) Everything else is created, geneton. The name Son' implies an act of procreation. Therefore, before such act, there was no Son, nor was God properly speaking a Father. The Son is not coeternal with Him. He was originated by the Father's will, as indeed were all things. He is, then, ton geneton, He came into being from non-existence (ex ouk onton), and before that did not exist (ouk en prin genetai). But His relation to God differs from that of the Universe generally. Created nature cannot bear the awful touch of bare Deity. God therefore created the Son that He in turn might be the agent in the Creation of the Universe—created Him as the beginning of His ways,' (Prov. viii. 22, LXX.). This being so, the nature of the Son was in the essential point of agennesia unlike that of the Father; (xenos tou huiou kat' ousian ho Pater hoti anarchos): their substances (hupostaseis) are anepimiktoi,—have nothing in common. The Son therefore does not possess the fundamental property of sonship, identity of nature with the Father. He is a Son by Adoption, not by Nature; He has advanced by moral probation to be Son, even to be monogenes theos (Joh. i. 14). He is not the eternal Logos, reason, of God, but a Word (and God has spoken many): but yet He is the Word by grace; is no longer, what He is by nature, subject to change. He cannot know the Father, much less make Him known to others. Lastly, He dwells in flesh, not in full human nature (see above, p. xxviii. and note 2). The doctrine of Arius as to the Holy Spirit is not recorded, but probably He was placed between the Son and the other ktismata (yet see Harnack ii. 199, note 2).

Arian Literature. Beside the above-mentioned letters and fragments of Arius, our early Arian documents are scanty. Very important is the letter of Eus. Nic. to Paulinus, referred to above, §3 (1), pp. xvi., xviii., other fragments of letters, p. 458 sq. The writings²⁹ of Asterius, if preserved, would have been an invaluable source of information³⁰ . Asterius seems to have written before the Nicene Council; he may have modified his language in later treatises. He was replied to by Marcellus in a work which brought him into controversy (336) with Eusebius of Cæsarea. With the creeds and Arian literature after the death of Constantine we are not at present concerned.

Arianism was a novelty. Yet it combines in an inconsistent whole elements of almost every previous attempt to formulate the doctrine of the Person of Christ. Its sharpest antithesis was Modalism: yet with the modalist Arius maintained the strict personal unity of the Godhead. With dynamic monarchianism it held the adoptionist principle in addition; but it personified the Word and sacrificed the entire humanity of Christ. In this latter respect it sided with the Docetæ, most Gnostics, and Manichæans, to all of whom it yet opposes a sharply-cut doctrine of creation and of the transcendence of God. With Origen and the Apologists before him it made much of the cosmic mediation of the Word in contrast to the redemptive work of Jesus; with the Apologists, though not with Origen, it enthroned in the highest place the God of the Philosophers: but against both alike it drew a sharp broad line between the Creator and the Universe, and drew it between the Father and the Son. Least of all is Arianism in sympathy with the theology of Asia,—that of Ignatius, Irenæus, Methodius, founded upon the Joannine tradition. The profound Ignatian idea of Christ as the Logos apo siges proelthon is in impressive contrast with the shallow challenge of the Thalia, Many words hath God spoken, which of these was manifested in the flesh?'

Throughout the controversies of the pre-Nicene age the question felt rather than seen in the background is that of the Idea of God. The question of Monotheism and Polytheism which separated Christians from heathen was not so much a question of abstract theology as of religion, not one of speculative belief, but of worship. The Gentile was prepared to recognise in the background of his pantheon the shadowy form of one supreme God, Father of gods and men, from whom all the rest derived their being. But his religion required the pantheon as well; he could not worship a philosophic supreme abstraction. The Christian on the other hand was prepared in many cases to recognise the existence of beings corresponding to the gods of the heathen (whether 1 Cor. viii. 5 can be quoted here is open to question). But such beings he would not worship. To him, as an object of religion, there was one God. The one God of the heathen was no object of practical personal religion; the One God of the Christian was. He was the God of the Old Testament, the God who was known to His people not under philosophical categories, but in His dealings with them as a Father, Deliverer, He who would accomplish all things for them that waited on Him, the God of the Covenant. He was the God of the New Testament, God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, manifesting His Righteousness in the Gospel of Christ to whosoever believed. In Christ the Christian learned that God is Love. Now this knowledge of God is essentially religious; it lies in a different plane from the speculative aporiai as to God's transcendence or immanence, while yet it steadies the religious mind in the face of speculations tending either way. A God who is Love, if immanent, must yet be personal, if transcendent, must yet manifest His Love in such a way that we can know it and not merely guess it. Now as Christian instinct began to be forced to reflexion, in other words, as faith began to strive for expression in a theology³¹ , it could not but be that men, however personally religious, seized hold of religious problems by their speculative side. We have seen this exemplified in the influence of Platonic philosophy on the Apologists and Alexandrine Fathers. But to Origen, with all his Platonism, belongs the honour of enthroning the God of Love at the head and centre of a systematic theology. Yet the theology of the end of the third century assimilated secondary results of Origen's system rather than his underlying idea. On the one hand was the rule of faith with the whole round of Christian life and worship, determining the religious instinct of the Church; on the other, the inability to formulate this instinct in a coherent system so long as the central problem was overlooked or inadequately dealt with. God is One, not more; yet how is the One God to be conceived of, what is His relation to the Universe of genesis and phthora? and the Son is God, and the Spirit; how are they One, and if One how distinct? How do we avoid the relapse into a polytheism of secondary gods? What is—not the essential nature of Godhead, for all agreed that that is beyond our ken—but the proton hemin, the essential idea for us to begin from if we are to synthesise belief and theology, pistis and gnosis?

Arianism stepped in with a summary answer. God is one, numerically and absolutely. He is beyond the ken of any created intelligence. Even creation is too close a relation for Him to enter into with the world. In order to create, he must create an instrument (pp. 360 sqq.), intermediate between Himself and all else. This instrument is called Son of God, i.e. He is not coeternal (for what son was ever as old as his parent?), but the result of an act of creative will. How then is He different from other creatures? This is the weak point of the system; He is not really different, but a difference is created by investing Him with every possible attribute of glory and divinity except the possession of the incommunicable nature of deity. He is merely anointed above His fellows.' His divinity' is acquired, not original; relative, not absolute; in His character, not in His Person. Accordingly He is, as a creature, immeasurably far from the Creator; He does not know God, cannot declare God to us. The One God remains in His inaccessible remoteness from the creature. But yet Arians worshipped Christ; although not very God, He is God to us. Here we have the exact difficulty with which the Church started in her conflict with heathenism presented again unsolved. The desperate struggle, the hardly earned triumph of the Christians, had been for the sake of the essential principle of heathenism! The One God was, after all, the God of the philosophers; the idea of pagan polytheism was realised and justified in Christ³² ! To this Athanasius returns again and again (see esp. p. 360); it is the doom of Arianism as a Christian theology.

If Arianism failed to assist the thought of the Church to a solution of the great problem of God, its failure was not less conspicuous with regard to revelation and redemption. The revelation of the Gospel stopped short in the person of Christ, did not go back to the Father. God was not in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, we have access in Christ to a created intelligence, not to the love of God to usward, not to the everlasting Arms, but to a being neither divine nor human. Sinners against heaven and before God, we must accept an assurance of reconciliation from one who does not know Him whom we have offended; the kiss of the Father has never been given to the prodigal. Men have asked how we are justified in ascribing to the infinite God the attributes which we men call good: mercy, justice, love. If Christ is God, the answer lies near; if He is the Christ of Arius, we are left in moral agnosticism. Apart from Christ, the philosophical arguments for a God have their force; they proffer to us an ennobling belief, a grand perhaps'; but the historical inability of Monotheism to retain a lasting hold among men apart from revelation is an impressive commentary on their compelling power. In Christ alone does God lay hold upon the soul with the assurance of His love (Rom. v. 5-8; Matt. xi. 28; John xvii. 3). The God of Arius has held out no hand toward us; he is a far-off abstraction, not a living nor a redeeming God.

The illogicality of Arianism has often been pointed out (Gwatkin, pp. 21 sqq. esp. p. 28); how, starting from the Sonship of Christ, it came round to a denial of His Sonship; how it started with an interest for Monotheism and landed in a vindication of polytheism; how it began from the incomprehensibility of God even to His Son, and ended (in its most pronounced form) with the assertion that the divine Nature is no mystery at all, even to us. It is an insult to the memory of Aristotle to call such shallow hasty syllogising from ill-selected and unsifted first principles by his name. Aristotle himself teaches a higher logic than this. But at this date Aristotelianism proper was extinct. It only survived in the form of pure' logic, adopted by the Platonists, but also studied for its own sake in connection with rhetoric and the art of arguing (cf. Socr. ii. 35). Such an instrument might well be a cause of confusion in the hands of men who used it without regard to the conditions of the subject-matter. An illogical compromise between the theology of Paul of Samosata and of Origen, the marvel is that Arianism satisfied any one even in the age of its birth. What has been said above with regard to the conception of God in the early Church may help to explain it; the germ of ethical insight which is latent in adoptionism, and which when neglected by the Church has always made itself felt by reaction, must also receive justice; once again, its inherent intellectualism was in harmony with the dominant theology of the Eastern Church, that is with one side of Origenism. Where analogous conditions have prevailed, as for example in the England of the early eighteenth century, Arianism has tended to reappear with no one of its attendant incongruities missing.

But for all that, the doom of Arianism was uttered at Nicæa and verified in the six decades which followed. Every possible alternative formula of belief as to the Person of Christ was forced upon the mind of the early Church, was fully tried, and was found wanting. Arianism above all was fully tried and above all found lacking. The Nicene formula alone has been found to render possible the life, to satisfy the instincts of the Church of Christ. The choice lies—nothing is clearer—between that and the doctrine of Paul of Samosata. The latter, it has been said, was misunderstood, was never fairly tried. As a claimant to represent the true sense of Christianity it was I think once for all rejected when the first Apostles gave the right hand of fellowship to S. Paul (see above, p. xxii.); its future trial must be in the form of naturalism, as a rival to Christianity, on the basis of a denial of the claim of Christ to be the One Saviour of the World, and of His Gospel to be the Absolute Religion. But Arianism, adding to all the difficulties of a supernatural Christology the spirit of the shallowest rationalism and the fundamental postulate of agnosticism, can surely count for nothing in the Armageddon of the latter days,

Spiacente a Dio ed a' nemici suoi.

(b) The homoousion as a theological formula³³ .

The distinction, which in the foregoing discussion we have frequently had under our notice, between the pistis and gnosis of the early Church, the pistis common to all, and formulated in the tessera or rule of faith, the gnosis the property of apologists and theologians aiming at the expression of faith in terms of the thought of their age, and at times, though for long only slightly, reacting upon the rule of faith itself (Aquileia, Cæsarea, Gregory Thaumaturgus), makes itself felt in the account of the Nicene Council. That the legacy of the first world-wide gathering of the Church's rulers is a Rule of Faith moulded by theological reflexion, one in which the gnosis of the Church supplements her pistis, is a momentous fact; a fact for which we have to thank not Athanasius but Arius. The pistis of the Fathers repudiated Arianism as a novelty; but to exclude it from the Church some test was indispensable; and to find a test was the task of theology, of gnosis. The Nicene Confession is the Rule of Faith explained as against Arianism. Arianism started with the Christian profession of belief in our Lord's Sonship. If the result was incompatible with such belief, it was inevitable that an explanation should be given, not indeed of the full meaning of divine Sonship, but of that element in the idea which was ignored or assailed by the misconception of Arius. Such an explanation is attempted in the words ek tes ousias tou patros, homoousian to Patri, and again in the condemnation of the formula ex heteras hupostaseos e ousias. This explanation was not adopted without hesitation, nor would it have been adopted had any other barrier against the heresy, which all but very few wished to exclude, appeared effective. We now have to examine firstly the grounds of this hesitation, secondly the justification of the formula itself.

The objections felt to the word homoousion at the council were (1) philosophical, based on the identification of ousia with either eidos (i.e. as implying a formal essence' prior to Father and Son alike) or hule; (2) dogmatic, based on the identification of ousia with tode ti, and on the consequent Sabellian sense of the homoousion; (3) Scriptural, based on the non-occurrence of the word in the Bible; (4) Ecclesiastical, based on the condemnation of the word by the Synod which deposed Paul at Antioch in 269.

All these objections were made and felt bona fide, although Arians would of course make the most of them. The subsequent history will show that their force was outweighed only for the moment with many of the fathers, and that to reconcile the conservatism' of the Asiatic bishops to the new formula must be a matter of time. The third or Scriptural objection need not now be discussed at length. Precedent could be pleaded for the introduction into creeds of words not expressly found in Scripture (e.g. the word catholic' applied to the Church in many ancient creeds, the creed of Gregory Thaumaturgus with trias teleia, &c. &c.); the only question was, were the non-scriptural words expressive of a Scriptural idea? This was the pith of the question debated between Athanasius and his opponents for a generation after the council; the conservative' majority eventually came round to the conviction that Athanasius was right. But the question depends upon the meaning of the word itself.

The word means sharing in a joint or common essence, ousia (cf. homonumos, sharing the same name, &c. &c.). What then is ousia? The word was introduced into philosophical use, so far as we know, by Plato, and its technical value was fixed for future ages by his pupil Aristotle. Setting aside its use to express existence' in the abstract, we take the more general use of the word as indicating that which exists in the concrete. In this sense it takes its place at the centre of his system of categories,' as the something to which all determinations of quality, quantity, relation and the rest attach, and which itself attaches to nothing; in Aristotle's words it alone is self-existent, choriston, whereas all that comes under any of the other categories is achoriston, non-existent except as a property of some ousia. But here the difficulty begins. We may look at a concrete term as denoting either this or that individual simply (tode ti), or as expressing its nature, and so as common to more individuals than one. Now properly (protos) ousia is only appropriate to the former purpose. But it may be employed in a secondary sense to designate the latter; in this sense species and genera are deuterai ousiai, the wider class being less truly ousiai than the narrower. In fact we here detect the transition of the idea of ousia from the category of ousia proper to that of poion (cf. Athan. p. 478 sq.; he uses ousia freely in the secondary sense for non-theological purposes in contra Gentes, where it is often best rendered nature'). Aristotle accordingly uses ousia freely to designate what we call substances, whether simple or compound, such as iron, gold, earth, the heavens, to akineton, &c., &c. Corresponding again, to the logical distinction of genos and eidos is the metaphysical distinction (not exactly of matter and form, but) of matter simply, regarded as to hupokeimenon, and matter regarded as existing in this or that form, to poion to en te ousi& 139;, to ti en einai, the meeting-point of logic and metaphysics in Aristotle's system. Agreeably to this distinction, ousia is used sometimes of the latter—the concrete thing regarded in its essential nature, sometimes of the former he hupokeimene ousia hos hule, hule being in fact the summum genus of the material world.

Now the use of the word in Christian theology had exemplified nearly every one of the above senses. In the quasi-material sense homoousion had been used in the school of Valentinian to express the homogeneity of the two factors in the fundamental dualism of the Universe of intelligent beings. In a somewhat similar sense it is used in the Clementine Homilies xx. 7. The Platonic phrase for the Divine Nature, epekeina pases ousias, adopted by Origen and by Athanasius contra Gentes, appears to retain something of the idea of ousia as implying material existence; and this train of associations had to be expressly disclaimed in defending the Nicene formula. In the sense of homogeneity the word omoousion is expressly applied by Origen, as we have seen, to the Father and the Son: on the other hand, taking ousia in the primary' Aristotelian sense, he has heteros kat' ousian kai hupokeimenon In the West (see above on Tertullian and Novatian) the Latin substantia (Cicero had in vain attempted to give currency to the less euphonious but more suitable essentia) had taken its place in the phrase unius substantiæ orcommunio substantiæ, intended to denote not only the homogeneity but the Unity of Father and Son. Accordingly we find Dionysius of Rome pressing the test upon his namesake of Alexandria and the latter not declining it (below, p. 183). But a few years later we find the Origenist bishops, who with the concurrence of Dionysius of Rome deposed Paul of Samosata, expressly repudiating the term. This fact, which is as certain as any fact in Church history (see Routh Rell. iii. 364 &c., Caspari Alte u. Neue. Q., pp. 161 sqq.), was a powerful support to the Arians in their subsequent endeavours to unite the conservative East in reaction against the council. Scholars are fairly equally divided as to the explanation of the fact. Some hold, following Athanasius and Basil, that Paul imputed the omoousion (in a materialising sense) to his opponents, as a consequence of the doctrine they opposed to his own, and that the 80' in repudiating the word, repudiated the idea that the divine nature could be divided by the emanation of a portion of it in the Logos. Hilary, on the other hand, tells us that the word was used by Paul himself (male omoousion Paulus confessus est, sed numquid melius Arii negaverunt?') If so, it must have been meant to deny the existence of the Logos as an ousia (i.e. Hypostasis) distinct from the Father. Unfortunately we have not the original documents to refer to. But in either case the word was repudiated at Antioch in one sense, enacted at Nicæa in another. The fact however remains that the term does not exclude ambiguity. Athanasius is therefore going beyond strict accuracy when he claims (p. 164) that no one who is not an Arian can fail to be in agreement with the Synod. Marcellus and Photinus alone prove the contrary. But he is right in regarding the word as rigidly excluding the heresy of Arius.

This brings us to the question in what sense ousia is used in the Nicene definition. We must remember the strong Western and anti-Origenist influence which prevailed in the council (above, p. xvii.), and the use of hupostasis and ousia as convertible terms in the anathematism (see Excursus A, pp. 77, sqq. below). Now going back for a moment to the correspondence of the two Dionysii, we see that Dionysius of Rome had contended not so much against the subordination of the Son to the Father as against their undue separation (memerismenai hupostaseis). In other words he had pressed the homoousion upon his namesake in the interest rather of the unity than of the equality of the Persons in the Holy Trinity. At Nicæa, the problem was (as shewn above) to explain (at least negatively) how the Church understood the Generation of the Son. Accordingly we find Athanasius in later years explaining that the Council meant to place beyond doubt the Essential Relation of the Divine Persons to one another (to idion tes ousias, tautotes, see de Decr. pp. 161, 163 sq., 165, 168, 319; of course including identity of Nature, pp. 396, 413, 232), and maintaining to the end (where he expresses his own view, p. 490, &c.) the convertibility of ousia and hupostasis for this purpose. By the word ho theos or theos he understands ouden heteron e ten ousian tou ontos (de Decr. 22). The conclusion is that in their original sense the definitions of Nicæa assert not merely the specific identity of the Son with the Father (as Peter qua man is of one ousia with Paul, or the Emperor's statue of one form with the Emperor himself, p. 396), but the full unbroken continuation of the Being of the Father in the Son, the inseparable unity of the Son with the Father in the Oneness of the Godhead. Here the phrase is balanced' by the ek tes [hupostaseos e] ousias tou Patros, not as though merely one ousia had given existence to another, but in the sense that with such origination the ousia remained the same. This is a first approximation to the mysterious doctrine of the perichoresis' coinherence, or circuminsessio,' which is necessary to guard the doctrine of the Trinity against tritheism, but which, it must be observed, lifts it out of the reach of the categories of any system of thought in which the workings of human intelligence have ever been able to organise themselves. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity vindicated by the Nicene formula on the one hand remains, after the exclusion of others, as the one direction in which the Christian intellect can travel without frustrating and limiting the movement of faith, without bringing to a halt the instinct of faith in Christ as Saviour, implanted in the Church by the teaching of S. Paul and of S. John, of the Lord Himself: on the other hand it is not a full solution of the intellectual difficulties with which the analysis of that faith and those instincts brings us face to face. That God is One, and that the Son is God, are truths of revelation which the category of substance' fails to synthesise. The Nicene Definition furnishes a basis of agreement for the purpose of Christian devotion, worship, and life, but leaves two theologies face to face, with mutual recognition as the condition of the healthy life of either. The theology of Athanasius and of the West is that of the Nicene formula in its original sense. The inseparable Unity of the God of Revelation is its pivot. The conception of personality in the Godhead is its difficulty. The distinctness of the Father, Son, and Spirit is felt (allos ho Pater allos ho hui& 231;s), but cannot be formulated so as to satisfy our full idea of personality. For this Athanasius had no word; prosopon meant too little (implying as it did no more than an aspect possibly worn but for a special period or purpose), hupostasis (implying such personality as separates Peter from Paul) too much. But he recognised the admissibility of the sense in which the Nicene formula eventually, in the theology of the Cappadocian fathers, won its way to supremacy in the East. To them hupostasis was an appropriate term to express the distinction of Persons in the Godhead, while ousia expressed the divine Nature which they possessed in common (see Excursus A. p. 77 sqq.). This sense of ousia approximated to that of species, or eidos (Aristotle's secondary' ousia), while that of hupostasis gravitated toward that of personality in the empirical sense. But in neither case did the approximation amount to complete identity. The idea of trine personality was limited by the consideration of the Unity; the perichoresis was recognised, although in a somewhat different form, the prominent idea in Athanasius being that of coinherence or immanence, whereas the Cappadocians, while using, of course, the language of John xiv. 11, yet prefer the metaphor of successive dependence hosper ex haluseo. (Bas. Ep. 38, p. 118 D). To Athanasius, the Godhead is complete not in the Father alone, still less in the Three Persons as parts of the one ousia, but in each Person as much as in all. The Cappadocian Fathers go back to the Origenist view that the Godhead is complete primarily in the Father alone, but mediately in the Son or Spirit, by virtue of their origination from the Father as pege or aitia tes theotetos. To Athanasius the distinct Personality of Son and Spirit was the difficulty; his difference from Origen was wide, from Marcellus subtle. To the Cappadocians the difficulty was the Unity of the Persons; to Marcellus they were toto cælo opposed, they are the pupils of Origen³⁴ . Accordingly when Basil makes a distinction between ousia and hupostasis in the Nicene anathematism, he is giving not historical exegesis but his own opinion.

The Nicene definition in this sense emphasized the Unity of the Godhead in Three Persons, against the Arian division of the Son from the Father. How then did it escape the danger of lending countenance to Monarchianism? Athanasius feels the difficulty without solving it, for the distinction given by him, p. 84, between homoousios and monoousios is without real meaning (we say with Tertullian of one substance'). On the whole in mature years he held that the title Son' was sufficient to secure the Trinity of Persons. By the name Father we confute Arius, by the name of Son we overthrow Sabellius' (p. 434; cf. p. 413); and we find that the council in its revision of the Cæsarean creed shifted hui& 231;s to the principal position where it took the place of logos. Beyond this the Creed imposed no additional test in that direction (the ek tes ousias is important but not decisive in this respect). This was felt as an objection to the Creed, and the objection was pointed by the influence of Marcellus at the council. The historical position of Marcellus is in fact, as we shall see, the principal key to the conservative' reaction which followed. The insertion into the conservative creeds of a clause asserting the endlessness of Christ's Kingdom, which eventually received ecumenical authority, was an expression of this feeling. But a final explanation between the Nicene doctrine and Monarchianism could not come about until the idea of Personality had been tested in the light of the appearance of the Son in the Flesh. The solution, or rather definition, of the problem is to be sought in the history of the Christological questions which began with Apollinarius of Laodicea.

The above account of the anti-Arian test formulated at Nicæa will suffice to explain the motives for its adoption, the difficulties which made that adoption reluctant, and the fact of the reaction which followed. One thing is clear, namely that given the actual conditions, nothing short of the test adopted would have availed to exclude the Arian doctrine. It is also I think clear, that not only was the current theology of the Eastern Church unable to cope with Arianism, but that it was itself a danger to the Church and in need of the corrective check of the Nicene definition. Hellenic as was the system of Origen, it was in its spirit Christian, and saturated with the influence of Scripture. It could never have taken its place as the expression of the whole mind of the Church; but it remains as the noblest monument of a Christian intellect resolutely in love with truth for its own sake, and bent upon claiming for Christ the whole range of the legitimate activity of the human spirit. But the age had inherited only the wreck of Origenism, and its partial victory in the Church had brought confusion in its train, the leaders of the Church were characterised by secular knowledge rather than grasp of first principles, by dogmatic intellectualism rather than central apprehension of God in Christ. Eusebius of Cæsarea is their typical representative. The Nicene definition and the work of Athanasius which followed were a summons back to the simple first principles of the Gospel and the Rule of Faith. What then is their value to ourselves? Above all, this, that they have preserved to us what Arianism would have destroyed, that assurance of Knowledge of, and Reconciliation to, God in Christ of which the divinity of the Saviour is the indispensable condition; if we are now Christians in the sense of S. Paul we owe it under God to the work of the great synod. Not that the synod explained all; or did more than effectually block off false forms of thought or avenues of unbalanced inference' which challenged the acceptance of Christian people.' The decisions of councils are primarily not the Church saying "yes" to fresh truths or developments or forms of consciousness; but rather saying "no" to untrue and misleading modes of shaping and stating her truth,' (Lux Mundi, ed. i. p. 240, cf. p. 334). It is objected that the Nicene Formula, especially as understood by Athanasius, is itself a false form of thought,' a flat contradiction in terms. That the latter is true we do not dispute (see Newman's notes infra, p. 336, note 1, &c.). But before pronouncing the form of thought for that reason a false one, we must consider what the terms' are, and to what they are applied. To myself it appears that a religion which brought the divine existence into the compass of the categories of any philosophy would by that very fact forfeit its claim to the character of revelation. The categories of human thought are the outcome of organised experience of a sensible world, and beyond the limits of that world they fail us. This is true quite apart from revelation. The ideas of essence and substance, personality and will, separateness and continuity, cause and effect, unity and plurality, are all in different degrees helps which the mind uses in order to arrange its knowledge, and valid within the range of experience, but which become a danger when invested with absolute validity as things in themselves. Even the mathematician reaches real results by operating with terms which contain a perfect contradiction (e.g. ·, and to some extent the calculus of operations'). The idea of Will in man, of Personality in God, present difficulties which reason cannot reconcile.