but then the heresy was al/ 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 Caesarea, 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 Father3. 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 there+, 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, 6 d¢’Ap. weraypdibas dé5wxe rots idiots. The extant writings of Arius are his letters to Eus. Nic. and to Alexander, preserved by Theodoret and Epiph. Her. 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 zdea of God and the predicate ‘Son.’
God is above all things uncreated, or unoriginate, ayév[v]nros, (the ambiguity of the derivatives of yevvac@a: and 7 amoavvaywyos éwervey, Alex. Alexand. in Thdt.}; the objections of Gwatkin, p. 18, note, are generously meant rather than convincing: the ‘creed of Lucian’ is not usable without discrimination for Lucian’s position: see discussion by Caspari A.u.N.Q. p. 42, note.
x It was pointed out clearly by Newman, Arians, pp. 8, 403, but with an eagerly drawn inference to the discredit of the later Antiochene School and of the genuine principles of exegesis as recognised at the present day by Protestants and Catholics alike (see Wetzer und Welte-Kaulen, Airchen-Lexicon, i. 953 sqg., iv. 1116, and Patrizzi as abridged in Cornel. a Lap. 2% Afoc. ed. Par. 1859, pp. xvi. sgg. The Lucianic origin of Arianism was denied by Gwatkin in his Studies, but the denial is tacitly withdrawn in his Avian Controversy. Harnack, Dogimgesch. 11. 598, ii2, 183 sgg. must, I think, convince any open mind of the fact. Consult his article on Lucian in Herzog2. viii. 767 (the best investigation), also Neander 7. Z£. ii. 198, iv. 108; Maller K.G. i. 226, D.C.B. iti. 748; Kélling, vol. 1, pp. 27—31, who makes the mistake of taking the ‘ Lucianic creed’ as his point of departure, _? This is ascribed to Lucian by Epiph. Amcor. 33, and there is no reason whatever to doubt it. The tenet was part of the Arian system from the first, and was attacked already by Eustathius, Fragm. apud That. Dial. iii., but often overlooked, e.g. even by Athanasius in his writings before 362, but see p. 352, note s. It came to the front in the system of Eunomius, and was much discussed in the last decade of the life of S. Athan. The system of Apollinaris was different. (See pp. 570, note x, 575, note r.)
3 amapddAaxTov eikéva, which an Arian would be prepared to admit as the result of the mpoxom7j. (See below, § 6, on the Creeds of 341). I cannot regard Asterius as a ‘ semi-Arian:’ the only grounds for it are the above phrase and the statement (Z2b. Syn.) that he attended the Council of 341 with the Conservative Dianius. But Asterius was as ready to compromise with conservatism as he had formerly been with heathenism, and his anxiety for a bishopric would carry him to even greater lengths in order to attend a council under influential patronage.
4 The letter of Alexander to his namesake of Byzantium in That. i. 4, cannot be exempted from this generalisation.
THEOLOGY OF ARIUS, XXIX yeverOa area very important element in the controversy. See p. 475, note 5, and Lightfoot, Zena. ii. p. 90 sag.
Everything else is created, yeynrdv. The name ‘Son’ ata cys act of Aropreations: Therefore, ie a a 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, ray yevntSv, He came into being from non-existence (é ovk dvtwy), and before that did not exist (ob jv mply yévnrat). 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 ayevunoia unlike that of the Father; (&évos rod viot kar? odolay 5 Mathp br. &vapxos): their substances (6moordoets) are avemluixrot,—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 povoyerhs eds (Joh. i. 14). He is not the eternal Adyos, reason, of God, but @ Word (and God has spoken many): but yet He is ¢he Word by grace; is no Jonger, what He is dy 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 ae ca but probably He was placed between the Son and the other «ricuata (yet see Harnack ii.
, note 2).
Arian Literature. Beside the above-mentioned letters and fragments of Arius, our early Arian documents arescanty. Very important is the letter of Eus. Nic. to Paulinus, referred to above, § 3(1), pp. xvi., xvili., other fragments of letters, p. 458 sy. The writings 5 of ASTERIUS, if preserved, would have been an invaluable source of information °. 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 Czsarea. 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 Docetze, most Gnostics, and Manichzeans, 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, Irenseus, Methodius, founded upon the Joannine tradition. The profound Ignatian idea of Christ as the Adyos amd ovyijs mpocA@év is in impressive concae with the shallow challenge of the 7zalia, ‘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 Gop. 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 dropfa: 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 theology?, 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, 5 They appear to have comprised the Arian appeal to Scripture of which (considering the Biblical learning of Lucian and what we hear of the training of Aetius, to say nothing of the exegetical chair held by Arius at Alxa.) their use must be pronounced meagre and superficial. In the O.T. they harped upon three texts, Deut. vi. 4 (Wonotheism), Ps. xlv. 8 (Adopiionism), and Prov. viii. 22, LXX. (the Word a Creature). In the N.T. they appeal for Monotheism (in their sense) to Luke xviii. 19, ohn xvii. 33 The Son a Creature, Acts il. 36, 1 Cor. i. 24, Col. 1. 15, Heb. iii. 2; Adoptionism, Matt. xii. 28; mpoxomn, Luke ii. 52; also Matt. xxvi. 41, Phil. il. 6, sg., Heb. i. 4; The Son tpentos, &c., Mark xiii. 32, John xiil. 31, x1. 345 inferior to the Father, John xiv. 48, Matt. xxvii, 46, also x1, 27 a, Xxvl. 29, xxviii. 18, John xii. 27, and 1 Cor. xv. 28 (cf. pp. 407, sg.). In this respect Origen is immeasurably superior.
6 They are regarded by Athan., a generation after they were written, as the representative statement of ‘ the case’ for Arianism (pp. 459 S¢-3 324 sgg., 361, 363, 368, &c., from which passages and Eus. c. Marcell. a fragmentary restoration might be attempted). For what is known of his history (not in D.C.B.) see Gwatkin, p. 72, note; for his doctrinal position see above, p- Xxviii.
7 A theology which aims at consistency must bo1row a method, a philosophy, from outside the sphere of religion. The most developed system of Catholic theology, that of S. Thomas Aquinas, borrows its method from the same source as did Arius,—Aristotle.
PROLEGOMENA, CHAPTER IL, § 3 (2).
XXX what is His relation to the Universe of yéveois and p@dpa? 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 mp@rov juiv, the essential idea for us to begin from if we are to synthesise belief and theology, rieris and yvaots?, 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 sgg.), 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. Howthen 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 tous. The One God remains in His inaccessible remoteness from the creature. But yet Arians worshipped Christ; although not very God, He is God tous. 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 Christ®! 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 zo¢ 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 sgg. 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 arid 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 Niczea 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, Asa 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 yaturalism, 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.
The distinction, which in the foregoing discussion we have frequently had under our notice, between the 8 This illustrates the famous paradox of Cardinal Newman (Development, ed. 1878, pp.142-4), that the condemnation of Arian Christology /eft vacant a throne in heaven which the medieval Church legitimately filled with the Blessed Virgin; that the Nicene condemnation of the Arian theology is the vindication of the medieval; that ‘the votaries of Mary do not exceed the true faith, unless the blasphemers of her Son come up to it.’ But the qestion here was one of worship, not of theology. The Arians worshipped Christ, whom they regarded as a created being: therefore, the Nicene fathers urge with one consent, they were idolaters. The idea of a created being capable of being worshipped was an Arian legacy to the Church, no doubt. But this very idea, to Athanasius and Hilary, marked them out as idolaters. It was reserved for later times ‘to find a subject for an Arian predicate’ (Mozley). The argument is an astonishing admission.
t The enormous literature of the subject is partly given by Harnack, ii. p. 182, Schaff, Micene Christ. §§ 119, 120. The student will find great help from Bigg, Bamfz. Lect. pp. 179, note, THE HOMOUSION: ITS MEANING. XXXi r a mes = yvaors of the early Church, the mior.s common to all, and formulated in the /essera or rule of faith, the yvaors 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, Cxesarea 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 tulers isa Rule of Faith moulded by theological reflexion, one in which the yrdois of Se Church supplements her wiotis, is a momentous fact; a fact for which we have to thank not Athanasius but: rius. The miotis of the Fathers repudiated Arianism as a novelty; but to exclude it from the Church some ee indispensable; and to find a test was the task of theology, of yv@o1s. 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 é« tis ovolas Tod matpds, bpoovotuy 7@ Marpi, and again in the condemnation of the formula é& érépas Sroardcews 7 ovotas. 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, a The objections felt to the word duoovevoy at the council were (1) philosophical, based on the identification of ovata with either eldos (i.e. as implying a “formal essence’ prior to Father and Son alike) or An; (2) dogmatic, based on the identification of ovcia with 7éSe 71, and on the consequent Sabellian sense of the éuoodcioy; (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 dona fide, although Arians would of course make the most of them. The subsequent history will shew 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 tpios reAela, &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, ovata (cf. dudévupos, sharing the same name, &c. &c.). What then is otcfa? 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 cf quality, quantity, relation and the rest attach, and which itself attaches to nothing; in Aristotle’s words it alone is self-existent, ywpiordv, whereas all that comes under any of the other categories is &yapioTov, non-existent except as a property of some odaia. But here the difficulty begins. We may look at a concrete term as denoting either this or that individual simply (réde 7), or as expressing its nature, and so as common to more individuals than one. Now properly (xpétws) ovcta 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 dedrepar ovata, the wider class being less truly ovcfo: than the narrower. In fact we here detect the transition of the idea of obaia from the category of ovota proper to that of rody (cf. Athan. p. 478 sg.; he uses ovcla freely in the secondary sense for nontheological purposes in contra Gentes, where it is often best rendered ‘nature ’). Aristotle accordingly uses ovola freely to designate what we call substances, whether simple or compound, such as iron, gold, earth, the heavens, 7d kxlyytov, &c., &c. Corresponding again, to the logical distinction of ‘yévos and éidos is the metaphysical distinction (not exactly of matter and form, but) of matter simply, regarded as rd imoxenwevov, and matter regarded as existing in this or that form, 7d rowdy 7d ev rH odcig, 7d 7/ av eivas, the meeting-point of logic and metaphysics in Aristotle’s system. Agreeably to this distinction, odoia is used sometimes of the latter—the concrete thing regarded in its essential nature, sometimes of the former 4 broxemévn ovata &s An, An being in fact the semmum 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 éuootovov 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, éewéxewa méons ovaias, adopted by Origen and by Athanasius contra Gentes, appears to retain something of the idea of odoia 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 duoovc.or is expressly applied by Origen, as we have seen, to the Father and the