Adolf Harnack · 4 of 19

1. From the Beginning of the Controversy to the Council of Nicæa · Part 2

The theology and christology of Athanasius are rooted in the thought of Redemption, and his views were not influenced by any subordinate considerations. Neither heathenism nor Judaism has brought men into fellowship with God, the point on which everything turns. It is through Christ that we are transported into this fellowship; He has come in order to make us divine, i e., to make us by adoption the sons of God and gods. But Christ would not have been able to bring us this blessing if He Himself had possessed it merely as a gift secundum participationem, for in this case He only had just as much as He needed Himself and so could not proceed to give away what was not His own. Therefore Christ must be of the substance of the Godhead and be one with it. Whoever denies that is not a Christian, but is either a heathen or a Jew. This is the fundamental thought which Athanasius constantly repeats. Everything else is secondary, is of the nature of necessary controversy. In the Son we have the Father; whoever knows the Son knows the Father. This confession is at bottom the entire Christian confession. The adoration of Christ, which according to tradition, has been practised from the first, and which has not been objected to by their opponents, already, he says, decides the whole question. God alone is to be adored; it is heathenish to worship creatures. Christ therefore shares in the divine substance. Athanasius did not draft any system of theology or christology. The real point at issue appeared to him to be quite simple and certain. We have to put together his doctrinal system for ourselves, and the attempts to construct such a system for him is not something to be entered upon lightly. A body of theoretical propositions resulted solely from the polemic in which he was engaged and also from his defence of the “Ὁμοούσιος.” Throughout, however, his thought in the final resort centres not in the Logos as such, but in the Divine, which had appeared in Jesus Christ. He has no longer any independent Logos doctrine, on the contrary he is a Christologist. We accordingly give merely some of the main lines of his teaching.

1. To acknowledge that the substantial or essential element in Christ is “God,” is to assert that there is nothing of the creature in this, that it does not therefore belong in any sense to what has been created. Athanasius insisted as confidently as Arius on the gulf which exists between created and uncreated. This constitutes the advance made by both in clearness. Arius, however, drew the dividing line in such a way that with him the Son belongs to the world side, while with Athanasius He, as belonging to God, stands over against the world.

2. Since the Divine, which has appeared in Christ, is not anything created, and since there can be no “middle” substance, it follows, according to the reasoning of Athanasius, that this Divine cannot in any sense be postulated as resulting from the idea of the creation of the world. God did not require any agent for the creation of the world; He creates direct. If He had required any such intervening agent in order to effect a connection with the creature that was to come into existence, this Divine could not have supplied Him with it, for it itself really belongs to His substance. In this way the idea of the Divine, which in Christ redeemed men, is severed from the world idea; the old Logos doctrine is discarded; Nature and Revelation no longer continue to be regarded as identical. The Logos-Son-Christ is at bottom no longer a world principle, but, on the contrary, a salvation principle.

3. Scripture and tradition know of only one Godhead; they, however, at the same time pronounce Christ to be God: they call the Divine which has appeared in Christ, Logos, Wisdom and Son; they thus distinguish it from God, the Father. Faith has to hold fast to this. But in accordance with this we get the following propositions:

(a) The Godhead is a unity (μονάς). Therefore the Divine which appeared in Christ, must form part of this unity. There is only one underived or unbegotten principle; this is the Father.

(b) The very name Father implies, moreover, that a second exists in the Godhead. God has always been Father, and whoever calls Him Father posits at the same time the Son; for the Father is the Father of the Son, and only in a loose sense the Father of the world and of men; for these are created, but the divine Trinity is uncreated, for otherwise it might either decrease again, or further increase in the future.

(c) This Son, the offspring of the Father (γέννημα τοῦ πατρὸς), was not, however, begotten in a human fashion as if God were corporeal. On the contrary, He has been begotten as the sun begets light and the spring the brook; He is called Son, because He is the eternal, perfect reflection of the Father, the image proceeding from the substance of the Father; He is called Wisdom and Logos not as if the Father were imperfect without Him, but as the creative power of the Father. “To be begotten” simply means completely to share by nature in the entire nature of the Father, implying at the same time that the Father does not therefore suffer or undergo anything.

(d) Consequently the assertions of the Arians that the Son is God, Logos, and Wisdom in a nominal sense only, that there was a time in which the Son was not, that He has sprung from the will of the Father, that He was created out of the non-existent or out of some other substance, that He is subject to change, are false. On the contrary He is (1) co-eternal with the Father and (2) He is of the substance of the Father, for otherwise He would not be God at all, (3) He is by His own nature in all points similarly constituted as the Father, and finally He is all this, because He has one and the same substance in common with the Father and together with Him constitutes a unity, but “substance” in reference to God means nothing else than “Being.” It is not the case that the Father is one substance by itself and the Son another substance by itself and that these two are similarly constituted. This would do away with the unity of the Godhead. On the contrary, the Father is the Godhead; this Godhead, however, contains in it a mystery which can only be approximately conceived of by men. It conceals within itself in the form of an independent and self-acting product something which issues from it and which also possesses this Godhead and possesses it from all eternity in virtue, not of any communication, but of nature and origin,—the true and real Son, the image which proceeds from the substance. There are not two divine ousias, not two divine hypostases or the like, but one ousia and hypostasis, which the Father and the Son possess. Thus the Son is true God, inseparable from the Father and reposing in the unity of the Godhead, not a second alongside of God, but simply reflection, express image, Son within the one Godhead which cannot and ought not to be thought of apart from reflection, express image, and Son. He has everything that the Father has, for He actually possesses the ousia of the Father; He is ὁμοούσιος, of the same substance. Only He is not actually the Father, for the latter is also His source and root, the Almighty Father, the only unbegotten principle.

(4) The language used of Christ in Scripture to express what is human and belonging to the creature, has, always and only, reference to the human nature which He took upon Him in order to redeem men. Since He who is by nature God took upon Him a body in order to unite with Himself what is by nature man in order that the salvation and deification of man might be surely accomplished, He also along with the body took to Himself human feelings. So complete, however, is the identity of the humanity of Christ with the nature of humanity as a whole that we may, according to Athanasius, refer the statements of Scripture as to a special endowment and exaltation of Christ, to the whole humanity. Complete too, however, was the union of the Son of God with humanity, which Athanasius, like Arius up to the time of the Apollinarian controversy, usually thought of as “Flesh,” “vesture of the Flesh.” Because the body of the Logos was really His own body—although we must discard the thought of variation, of change—and because this union had become already perfect in Mary’s body, everything that holds good of the flesh holds good of the Logos also, and this is true of all sufferings even,—although He was not affected by them so far as His Godhead is concerned,—and Mary is the mother of God. Athanasius also refers to the incarnate Logos the locus classicus of the Arians, Prov. VIII. 22, 23, with which Eustathius of Antioch likewise occupied himself. Finally, Athanasius spoke also of a προκοπή or progress in reference to the incarnate Logos, of an increase in the manifestation of God in the body of Christ, by which he means that the flesh was more and more completely irradiated by the Godhead: τὸ ἀνθρώπινον ἐν τῇ σοφίᾳ προέκοπτεν, (the human advanced in wisdom).

How are the two mutually opposed doctrines to be judged from the standpoint of history, of reason, and of the Gospel? Each party charged the other with holding doctrines which involved contradictions, and, what is of more consequence, they mutually accused each other of apostasy from Christianity, although the Arians never advanced this charge with such energy as the opposite party. We have first of all to ascertain definitely how much they had in common. Religion and doctrine are with both thoroughly fused together, and, indeed, formally considered, the doctrine is the same in both cases, i.e., the fundamental conceptions are the same. The doctrine of the pre-existent Christ, who as the pre-existent Son of God is Logos, Wisdom, and world-creating Power of God, seems to constitute the common basis. Together with this both have a common interest in maintaining the unity of God and in making a sharp distinction between Creator and creature. Finally, both endeavour to base their doctrines on Scripture and at the same time claim to have tradition on their side, as is evident in the case of Arius from the introduction to the Thalia. Both are, however, convinced that the final word lies with Scripture and not with tradition.

I. We cannot understand Arianism unless we consider that it consists of two entirely disparate parts. It has, first of all, a Christ who gradually becomes God, who therefore develops more and more in moral unity of feeling with God, progresses and attains his perfection by the divine grace. This Christ is the Saviour, in so far as he has conveyed to us the divine doctrine and has given us an example of goodness perfectly realised in the exercise of freedom. When Arius calls this Christ Logos it appears as if he did this by way of accommodation. The conception of Arius here is purely Adoptian. But, secondly, with this is united a metaphysic which has its basis solely in a cosmology and has absolutely no connection with soteriology. This metaphysic is dominated by the thought of the antithesis of the one, inexpressible God, a God remote from the world, and the creature. The working-out of this thought accordingly perfectly corresponds with the philosophical ideas of the time and with the one half of the line of thought pursued by Origen. In order that a creation may become possible at all, a spiritual being must first be created which can be the means whereby a spiritual-material world can be created. This cannot be the divine reason itself, but only the most complete image of the divine reason stamped on a created, freely acting, independent being. With this we have arrived at the Neo-platonic origination. Whether in order to find a means of transition to the world we are to speak of “God, the essential νοῦς of God, the created Logos,” or “God, the created Logos, the world-spirit,” or are to arrange the terms in some other way, is pretty much a matter of indifference, and to all appearance Arius laid little stress on this. It is the philosophical triad, or duad, such as we meet with in Philo, Numenius, Plotinus etc. These created beings which mediate between God and the creature are, however, according to Arius, to be adored, i.e., it is only as a cosmologist that he is a strict monotheist, while as a theologian he is a polytheist. This again perfectly corresponds to the dominant Hellenic view. Arius in fact occupies a place, so to speak, on the extreme left, for the energetic way in which he emphasises the thought that the second ousia has been created out of the free will of God, that it is foreign to the substance of God, that as a creaturely substance it is capable of change and definable, and, above all, the express assertion that this “Logos” and “Son” is “Logos” and “Son” merely nominally, that in no sense whatever is an emanation or anything of that kind to be thought of here, but simply a creation, is surprising even in the sphere of Hellenic philosophy. That this created Logos which made possible the further creation has appeared in Jesus Christ and has in human vesture developed into God and has therefore not been lowered, but on the contrary has been exalted by His being man, is accordingly what constitutes the uniting thought between the two parts of the system.

In the other case, as here, the expressions “pre-existent Son of God,” “Logos,” “Wisdom” are plainly only an accommodation. They are unavoidable, but not necessary, in fact they create difficulties. It clearly follows from this, however, that the doctrine of Origen does not constitute the basis of the system—in so far as its Christology is concerned—and that what it has in common with the orthodox system is not what is really characteristic of it, but is on the contrary what is secondary. The Arian doctrine has its root in Adoptianism, in the doctrine of Lucian of Samosata, as is proved, above all, by the strong emphasis laid on the creaturehood of the Redeemer and by the elimination of a human soul. We know what signification this had for Origen. Where it is wanting we can no longer speak of Origenism in the full meaning of the word. But it is correct that the cosmological-causal point of view of Origen, this one side of his complicated system, was appropriated by Arius, that is by Lucian. Meanwhile it has to be added that it was not peculiar to Origen. He made an effort to get beyond it; he balanced the causal-cosmological point of view, according to which the Logos is a heavenly κτίσμα, by the soteriological, according to which He is the essential and recognisable image of the Father, which constitutes an essential unity with the Father. Of this there is nothing in Arius.

Arianism is a new doctrine in the Church; it labours under quite as many difficulties as any other earlier Christological doctrine; it is, finally, in one important respect, really Hellenism which is simply tempered by the constant use of Holy Scripture. It is a new doctrine; for not only is the frank assertion of the creaturehood and changeableness of the Logos in this sharply defined form, new, spite of Origen, Dionysius Alex., Pierius and so on, but, above all, the emphatic rejection of any essential connection of the Logos with the Father. The images of the source and the brook, the sun and the light, the archetype and the type, which are almost of as old standing in the Church as the Logos-doctrine itself, are here discarded. This, however, simply means that the Christian Logos- and Son-of-God-doctrine has itself been discarded. Only the old names remain. But new too, further, is the combination of Adoptianism with the Logos-cosmology, and if the idea of two distinct Logoi and two Wisdoms is not exactly new, it is a distinction which had never before this been permitted.

Athanasius exposed the inner difficulties and contradictions, and in almost every case we may allow that he has right on his side. A son who is no son, a Logos who is no Logos, a monotheism which nevertheless does not exclude polytheism, two or three ousias which are to be revered, while yet only one of them is really distinct from the creatures, an indefinable being who first becomes God by becoming man and who is yet neither God nor man, and so on. In every single point we have apparent clearness while all is hollow and formal, a boyish enthusiasm for playing with husks and shells, and a childish self-satisfaction in the working out of empty syllogisms. This had not been learned from Origen, who always had facts and definite ends in view when he speculated.

But all this might be put up with if only this doctrine were in any way designed to shew how communion with God is arrived at through Christ. This is what we must necessarily demand; for what the ancient Church understood by “redemption” was in part a physical redemption of a very questionable kind, and it would not necessarily have been anything to be regretted if anyone had emancipated himself from this “redemption.” But one has absolutely nowhere the impression that Arius and his friends are in their theology concerned with communion with God. Their doctrina de Christo has nothing whatever to do with this question. The divine which appeared on earth is not the Godhead, but one of its creations. God Himself remains unknown. Whoever expresses adherence to the above propositions and does this with unmistakable satisfaction, stands up for the unique nature of God, but does this, however, only that he may not endanger the uniformity of the basis of the world, and otherwise is prepared to worship besides this God other “Gods” too, creatures that is; whoever allows religion to disappear in a cosmological doctrine and in veneration for a heroic teacher, even though he may call him “perfect creature,” κτίσμα τέλειον, and revere in him the being through whom this world has come to be what it is, is, so far as his religious way of thinking is concerned, a Hellenist, and has every claim to be highly valued by Hellenists.

The admission that the Arians succeeded in getting a grasp of certain features in the historical Christ presented to us by the New Testament, cannot in any way alter this judgment. In this matter they were far superior to their opponents; but they were absolutely unable to make any religious use of what they perceived. They speak of Christ as Paul of Samosata does, but by foisting in behind the Christ who was exalted to be Lord, the half divine being, logos-creature, λόγος-κτίσμα, they deprived the most valuable knowledge they had of all practical value. Paul could say in a general way: τὰ κρατούμενα τῷ λόγῳ τῆς φύσεως, οὐκ ἔχει ἔπαινον· τὰ δὲ σχέσει φιλίας κρατούμενα ὑπεραινεῖται (what was accomplished by the Logos of nature deserves no praise, but what was accomplished in the state of love is to be praised exceedingly). Such a statement was made impossible for the Arians by the introduction of cosmological speculation. What dominates Paul’s whole view of the question—namely, the thought that the unity of love and feeling is the most abiding unity, scarcely ever finds an echo amongst the Arians, for it is swallowed up by that philosophy which measures worth by duration in time and thinks of a half-eternal being as being nearer God than a temporal being who is filled with the love of God. We cannot therefore finally rate very high the results of the rational exegesis of christological passages as given by the Arians; they do not use them to shew that Jesus was a man whom God chose for Himself or that God was in the man Jesus, but, on the contrary, in order to prove that this Jesus was no complete God. Nor can we put a high value on their defence of monotheism either, for they adored creatures. What is alone really valuable, is the energetic emphasis they lay on freedom, and which they adopted from Origen, but even it has no religious significance.

Had the Arian doctrine gained the victory in the Greek-speaking world, it would in all probability have completely ruined Christianity, that is, it would have made it disappear in cosmology and morality and would have annihilated religion in the religion. “The Arian Christology is inwardly the most unstable, and dogmatically the most worthless, of all the Christologies to be met with in the history of dogma.” Still it had its mission. The Arians made the transition from heathenism to Christianity easier for the large numbers of the cultured and half-cultured whom the policy of Constantine brought into the Church. They imparted to them a view of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity which could present no difficulty to any one at that period. The Arian monotheism was the best transition from polytheism to monotheism. It asserted the truth that there is one supreme God with whom nothing can be compared, and thus rooted out the crude worship of many gods. It constructed a descending divine triad in which the cultured were able to recognise again the highest wisdom of their philosophers. It permitted men to worship a demiurge together with the primal substance, πρώτη οὐσία; it taught an incarnation of this demiurge and, on the other hand again, a theopoiesis. and was able skilfully to unite this with the worship of Christ in the Church. It afforded, in the numerous formulæ which it coined, interesting material for rhetorical and dialectic exercises. It quickened the feeling of freedom and responsibility and led to discipline, and even to asceticism. And finally, it handed on the picture of a divine hero who was obedient even to death and gained the victory by suffering and patience, and who has become a pattern for us. When transmitted along with the Holy Scriptures, it even produced a living piety amongst Germanic Christians, if it also awakened in them the very idea to which it had originally been specially opposed, the idea of a theogony. What was shewn above—namely, that the doctrine was new, is to be taken cum grano salis; elements which were present in the teaching of the Church from the very beginning got here vigorous outward expression and became supreme. The approval the doctrine met with shews how deeply rooted they were in the Church. We cannot but be astonished at the first glance to find that those who sought to defend the whole system of Origen partly sided with Arius and partly gave him their patronage. But this fact ceases to be striking so soon as we consider that the controversy very quickly became so acute as to necessitate a decision for or against Arius. But the Origenists, moreover, had a very strong antipathy to everything that in any way suggested “Sabellianism”; for Sabellianism had no place for the pursuit of Hellenic cosmological speculation, i.e., of scientific theology. Their position with regard to the doctrine of Athanasius was thereby determined. They would rather have kept to their rich supply of musty formulæ, but they were forced to decide for Arius.

II. Nothing can more clearly illustrate the perverse state of the problem in the Arian-Athanasian controversy than the notorious fact that the man who saved the character of Christianity as a religion of living fellowship with God, was the man from whose Christology almost every trait which recalls the historical Jesus of Nazareth was erased. Athanasius undoubtedly retained the most important feature—namely, that Christ promised to bring men into fellowship with God. But while he subordinated everything to this thought and recognised in redemption a communication of the divine nature, he reduced the entire historical account given of Christ to the belief that the Redeemer shared in the nature and unity of the Godhead itself, and he explained everything in the Biblical documents in accordance with this idea. That which Christ is and is for us, is the Godhead; in the Son we have the Father, and in what the Son has brought, the divine is communicated to us. This fundamental thought is not new, and it corresponds with a very old conception of the Gospel. It is not new, for it was never wanting in the Church before the time of Athanasius. The Fourth Gospel, Ignatius, Irenæus, Methodius, the so-called Modalism and even the Apologists and Origen—not to mention the Westerns—prove this; for the Apologists, and Origen too, in what they say of the Logos, emphasised not only His distinction from the Father, but also His unity with the Father. The Samosatene had also laid the whole emphasis on the unity, although indeed he was not understood. But not since the days in which the Fourth Gospel was written do we meet with anyone with whom the conviction is so definite, thought out with such an assurance of victory, expressed so strongly and so simply, and of such an absolute kind, as it is with Athanasius. All the rest by introducing qualifying thoughts in some way or other, brought an element of uncertainty into their feeling of its truth, and impaired its strength. That in the age of Constantine during the greatest revolution which the Church has experienced and which was so fraught with consequences, the faith represented by Athanasius was confessed with such vigour, is what saved the Christian Church. Its faith would probably have got entirely into the hands of the philosophers, its confession would have become degraded or would have been turned into an imperial official decree enjoining the worship of the “clear-shining Godhead”, if Athanasius had not been there and had not helped those who shared his views to make a stand and inspired them with courage.

But at the beginning of the Fourth Century the form of expression for the belief in the unity of the eternal Godhead and its appearance in Jesus Christ was already sketched out. It was as little allowable to think of a unity of living feeling, of will and aim alone, as of the perfect identification of the persons. The doctrines of the pre-existing Son of God, of the eternal Logos, but, above all, the view that everything valuable is accomplished in the nature only, of which feeling and will are an annex, were firmly established. Athanasius in making use of these presuppositions in order to express his faith in the Godhead of Christ, i.e., in the essential unity of the Godhead in itself with the Godhead manifested in Christ, fell into an abyss of contradictions.

Unquestionably the old Logos doctrine too, and also Arianism, strike us to-day as being full of contradictions, but it was Athanasius who first arrived at the contradictio in adjecto in the full sense of the phrase. That the Godhead is a numerical unity, but that nevertheless Son and Father are to be distinguished within this unity as two—this is his view. He teaches that there is only one unbegotten principle, but that nevertheless the Son has not come into being. He maintains that the Divine in Christ is the eternal “Son”, but that the Son is as old as the Father. This Son is not to be thought of either as created, or as an attribute of God, or as an emanation or a part of God, and is therefore something wholly indefinable. The thought of a theogony is rejected as emphatically as that of a creation, and yet the thought of an active attribute is not in any sense to be entertained. The Father is perfect for Himself and is sufficient for Himself; indeed, although Father and Son have one substance, in the sense of a single nature, in common, still the Father alone is “the God”, and is the principle and root of the Son also. Quot verba, tot scandala!

Whatever involves a complete contradiction cannot be correct, and everyone is justified in unsparingly describing the contradiction as such. This the Arians sufficiently did, and in so far as they assumed that a contradiction cannot be seriously accepted by anyone, and that therefore the view of Athanasius must at bottom be Sabellian, they were right. Two generations and more had to pass before the Church could accustom itself to recognise in the complete contradiction the sacred privilege of revelation. There was, in fact, no philosophy in existence possessed of formulæ which could present in an intelligible shape the propositions of Athanasius. What he called at one time Ousia and at another Hypostasis, was not an individual substance in the full sense of the word, but still less was it a generic conception.

If anything is clear, it is the fact that the thought of Athanasius—namely, the unity of the Godhead which rested in and appeared in Christ, could not be expressed under the traditional presuppositions of the pre-existing Son of God and the personal Logos existing from all eternity. We have here to do with the most important point in the whole question. The very same series of ideas which created the most serious difficulties for the Arians and which have been shewn to occupy a secondary place in their system, seriously hamper the doctrinal utterances of Athanasius; namely, the Logos doctrine of Origen and the cosmological-metaphysical conceptions which form the background of statements regarding an historical person. The Arians required to have a created being, created before the world, changeable, of the same nature as men, for their Christ, and had to banish all other determinations from their conception, and so they could not make use of the Logos of Philo and the Apologists; Athanasius required a being who was absolutely nothing else than the Godhead, and so the Logos referred to did not in any sense fit in with his doctrine. In both cases the combined Logos doctrine of Philo and Origen was the disturbing element. And at bottom,—though unfortunately not actually,—they both discarded it; Arius when he distinguishes between the Logos nuncupativus which Christ is, and the actual Logos of God; Athanasius when he banishes the world-idea from the content of the substance which he adores in Christ. In the view of Arius, Christ belongs in every sense to the world, i.e., to the sphere of created things; in that of Athanasius he belongs in every sense to God, whose substance He shares.