Fifteen and a half centuries ago, in a doctrinal development of the Nicene affirmation of the Personal consubstantiality of Jesus with the Father, the Council of Chalcedon dismissed a long-standing dispute between Antiochene and Alexandrine theologians over the union of divinity and humanity in Jesus the Christ. More than a century earlier, the Council of Nicaea, in affirming the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and his consequent full divinity, had condemned the Arian restriction of divinity to the Father. More than fifty years elapsed before the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father was reaffirmed as normative doctrine by the First Council of Constantinople. Even then, the attribution of the homoousion to the Holy Spirit by the Provincial Council of Alexandria in 362, nearly twenty years earlier, was not reaffirmed.
This failure manifests the incomprehension of the homoousion of the Son with the Father by those who, at I Constantinople, were determined to block the attribution to the Holy Spirit of the homoousion with the Father, and succeeded. Their homoiousian resistance to the Nicene Creed was the final faint echo of the Arian subordinationism which had infested most of the Orient in the fourth century. The recognition of Mary as Theotokos at Ephesus in 431 together with the affirmation two years later, by the Formula of Union, of the full divinity, full humanity, and Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, had as its corollary his consubstantiality “with us” (ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν), as well as with the Father.
The ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν is also the corollary of the definitive assertion by the Symbol of Chalcedon in 451 of the subsistence of Jesus the Lord in the divine and in the human substance, the one and the same Son of the Father and of Theotokos. The Symbol of Chalcedon entailed his consubstantiality with the Members of both the divine Substance, the Trinity, and with our human substance, whose unity is its creation in Christ, its Head, which cannot but be at once single and substantial.
The modalist use of “homoousios” by Paul of Samosata, the bishop of Antioch, in the latter half of the third century, evidently to support his adoptionist Christology, had lent this term a Sabellian or quasi-unitarian flavor, to the extent that the affirmation by the Council of Nicaea of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father aroused the suspicions of conservative bishops, particularly in Palestine, in the provinces of Asia Minor and Syria where, sixty years earlier, Paul of Samosata had used “homoousios” to deny what the Nicene Council used it to affirm, the full divinity of Jesus Christ the Son.[1]
The Oriental bishops had condemned Paul’s adoptionist interpretation of homoousios at two synods held in Antioch in 265 and 268. Eusebius, since 313 the bishop of Caesarea, the seaport city in Palestine, had studied Origen’s theology under the martyred Pamphilius, and by his publication of the Ecclesiastical History before the turn of the fourth century had attained a scholarly pre-eminence among the Oriental bishops. A close associate of the martyred Phamphilius, he had inherited Pamphilius’ library, originally Origen’s, as enlarged by Pamphilius, and certainly had every reason to be considered the authoritative interpreter of Origen’s theology. In fact, however, he imposed his own commitment to cosmology upon Origen’s commitment to soteriology, i.e., to the Christian faith, and so interpreted the Trinitarian doctrine which Origen had set out in the Peri Archon (the De Principiis of Rufinus’ translation), as a subordinationist identification of the Father with the divine Substance, with its corollary, the creaturely standing of the Son and the Holy Spirit.
This was essentially the Arian doctrine; Eusebius supported it all his life, condemning those who opposed it as “Sabellians” who, like Paul of Samosata, denied the Trinity.
Consequently, after the Council of Nicaea, the conservative Eastern bishops, whose conservatism was rather cultural than Christian, particularly in their devotion to the unity of the Empire under the universal authority of the emperor, followed Eusebius of Caesarea in refusing to accept Nicene assertion that the Son is consubstantial with the Father: ὁμοὐσιος τῷ πατρí. The Eusebian rejection of the legitimacy of the Nicene Council’s authoritative ecclesial defense of the faith that Jesus is the Lord, with the consequent condemnation of Arianism by the some three hundred bishops attending the Council, rested upon the subordination of the authority of the Church to the unqualified authority of the emperor.
It had never occurred to Eusebius of Caesarea, nor to his namesake of Nicomedia, that there could be a universal religious authority in the Roman empire other than the Roman emperor. Neither did it occur to their followers, the Eusebian homoiousians who until the First Council of Constantinople, called by the pro-Nicene Emperor Theodosius, continued to submit the Church’s doctrinal tradition to the plenary authority of the emperor, and so to the negotiation of the political propriety of the Christian tradition with the imperial powers that be.
The Nicene affirmation of the consubstantiality, the homoousion, of the Son with the Father remained a suspect proposition for most of the next half a century, on what were finally Arian grounds. This suspicion was promoted by Arianizing bishops close to the imperial throne, successors in interest to Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia. Chief among them were Valens of Mursa, Ursacius of Singidunum, Acacius of Caesarea, and Eudoxius of Constantinople. These bishops were all rather Arian than Christian; all were supporters of the homoean doctrine which Eusebius of Nicomedia had persuaded the Emperor Constantius to impose on the empire in the name of religious unity. Their insolence and arrogance prompted an extremism, and consequently a reaction. A brilliant Arian master of Aristotelian logic, Aetius, and his devoted disciple, the bishop Eunomius, rationalized the Arian heresy into a radical distinction between the divine substance, i.e., the Arian mono-Personal divinity, and the substance of all else. This ‘hetero-ousian’ doctrine began to be acceptable. George of Laodicea, a friend of Basil of Ancyra (now Ankara, the capital of Turkey), a Eusebian who succeeded Marcellus to that See after the latter’s condemnation and deposition in 336 at the instance of Eusebius of Caesarea, was present at a Homoean Council held in Antioch in 357; there he heard it confirm this extremism. His report of it prompted Basil of Ancyra to call a local quasi-council at Ancyra early in 358. It produced the foundational document of the ‘homoiousian” compromise with the homoean reduction of the Son to the mere generic likeness─homoios─to the Father which had been taught by the second Council of Sirmium the year before.
Basil proposed an anti-Arian alternativeto the homoean doctrine; this was his “single concept of likeness,” (see endnote 423), the “similarity in substance” homoios kat’ousian (ὅμοιος κατ’οὐσίαν) which he thought could alone provide for the divinity of the Son. However his defense of the divinity of the Son excluded the personal divinity of the Holy Spirit, who in consequence could not be homoious kat’ ousion to the Father without being identical to the Son. Basil’s homoiousian formula barred any provision for the divinity of the Holy Spirit, because the “similarity in substance” that he had in mind was equivalently the eternal begetting of the Son by the eternal Father, which could have no application to the Holy Spirit. Basil’s formula made no concession to the Nicene Creed; he remained a Eusebian and consequently a subordinationist, but his proposal of a doctrine alternative to that of the imperial Arianism, viz., a “single concept of likeness” broke the Eusebian ranks. While it seemed to provide a means of affirming the divinity of the Son against the Arians, it remained aloof from the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father represented in the West by Julius of Rome, and in the Orient by bishops Athanasius of Alexandria and Marcellus, the deposed bishop of Ancyra whose See had been given to Basil in 336. The rejection of the Nicene Creed as Sabellian would be indispensable to the doctrinal posture of some of the followers of Basil of Ancyra whom Epiphanius of Salamis later dubbed “Semi-Arians” by reason of their denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit; Basil’s homoiousian disciples did not deny the divinity of the Holy Spirt, but they denied his Personal divinity: in their theology identified him with the divine substance, whom they identified with the divine substance to which the Son was similar: homoious kat’ ousian (ὅμοιος κατ’οὐσίαν) .
Basil of Ancyra, as a Eusebian, loyal to the anti-Nicene caesaropapism, hoped to persuade the emperor, Constantius II, to approve his doctrine in a general council. He failed on both counts: the preliminary approval of his homoiousian doctrine by bishops Valns of Mursa and Ursacius of Singidunum, the emperor’s theological advisors, had raised Basil’s hopes, but they, intent upon a more comprehensive establishment of Arianism, ignored Basil and persuaded Constantius to call two Councils instead of the one they had originally approved. One of the councils, to be attended by the Oriental bishops, would be held at Seleucis on the southern coast of Phrygia; while the Western bishops would meet at Rimini, south of Ravenna on the east coast of Italy. Both councils met in 359. Valens and Ursacius were able to browbeat the divided opposition, whether Nicene or homoiousian, into approving a homoean creed, which was officially promulgated a year later, in 360 at the Arian Council of Constantinople, as the official religion of the empire.
Constantius died a year later, in 361, leaving his throne to his nephew, Julian the Apostate, so called because, nominally a Christian, he then undertook to return the empire to its pagan past. To this end he annulled Constantius’ sentencing of orthodox bishops to exiles, hoping that the encounter of the returning bishops with the Arian usurpers of their Sees would issue in a conflict destructive of both. This failed, particularly in the case of Athanasius, whose diocese, whether he were resident in Alexandria or in exile, had remained loyal to him. Julian disappeared in a battle at Adrianople a year later. By then, early in 362, Athanasius had returned to Alexandria and called the Council of Alexandria; his third exile had been annulled by Julian’s cancellation of all of Constantius’ orders of exile.
The remnant of the Alexandrine pro-Nicene bishops who had been able to attend the Council of Seleucia three years earlier (359) had there found themselves in an ad hoc anti-Arian alliance with a group of schismatic Meletian bishops who, having rejected their early cooperation with Arianism, had passed over into the homoiousian camp. The homoiousian bishops as well as the pro-Nicenes asserted with vigor the divinity of Christ the Lord, albeit obviously upon incompatible grounds. The report to Athanasius by his loyal suffragans of their experience at Seleucia encouraged his pursuit of the project he had already planned, the calling of the Council of Alexandria in an attempt to convert the homoiousian majority in Antioch to the faith of the Nicene Creed, which he knew to be indispensable to the ecclesial unity which he presumed they sought. Hence his Tome to the Antiochenes (362), which presents an almost classic failure in communication. His Tome supposed the homoiousian clergy in Antioch to be willing to reject the authority of the nominal bishop of Antioch, Meletius, in order to rejoin the unity of the Christian Church, which he knew to rest upon the definitive statement of the faith by the Council of Nicaea.
However, the Antiochene homoiousians received Athanasius’ Tome as a political document proposing their political subordination to Alexandria, to which they would never consent. Nineteen years earlier, Pope Julius’ calling of the Council of Serdica had been similarly misunderstood by the Eastern bishops. Two entirely incompatible concepts of ecclesial unity were at odds, and remain so today. Either the unity of the Church rests upon the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, and therefore is a doctrinal and finally liturgical unity, or it rests upon the royal power, potestas regalis, of the princeps, however embodied, and is a political unity. .
The homoiousian clergy in Antioch to whom Athanasius addressed his Tome to the Antiochenes, accepted the authority of bishop Meletius of Antioch who in 360 had returned from a brief exile and re-established his claim to the See of Antioch. Athanasius’ Tome failed to persuade the homoiousian disciples of Meletius that the Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father is indispensable to the faith that “Jesus is Lord.” They continued routinely to assemble with Meletius for worship at the “old place,” a church built in 314. Conversion from their anti-Nicene animus would wait upon the confirmation of the Nicene Creed at the First Council of Constantinople, as summoned in 381 by the Nicene Emperor Theodosius. His accession to the throne, together with his confirmation of the authority of the Council of Nicaea, removed the foundation upon which rested the homoiousian resistance to Nicaea, viz., the subordination of the Church to the imperial authority, The unforeseen succession of a pro-Nicene emperor to the throne did not end the Arian and Semi-Arian (homoiousian) rejection of the faith that Jesus is the Lord and that the emperor is not, for the last Arian emperor, Valens (364-368), succeeded to the throne upon the death of the pro-Nicene emperor Jovian and remained there until his own death in battle at Adrianople in 368. During his brief reign he thus restored the Arian fortunes as to their bishops a majority in the See of Constantinople when Theodosius summoned the First Council of Constantinople and ordered their deposition.
The loss of this imperial support did not eliminate the political dimension of the homoiousian theology. The melding of the doctrine of Nicaea with Basil of Ancyra’s homoios kat’ousian by Meletius in his Council of Antioch in 363 had been endorsed by Basil of Caesarea, and a dozen years later found expression in Basil’s failure, in the De Spiritu Sancto, to attribute Personal consubstantiality with the Father to the Holy Spirit. Gregory of Nazianzen had broken with Basil on this point, but Gregory of Nyssa had not, as became clear at I Constantinople. Had their ever been a “Cappadocian Settlement,” in the sense of an acceptance by the Cappadocian homoiousians of the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father as establishing the substantial unity of God and the full divinity of the Father, Son and Spirit, it could only have been by their abandoning the homoiousian tradition. Basil of Caesarea was unable to do this; his De Spiritu Sancto, written in 375, four years before his death in 379, does not accept the hypostatic (i.e., Personal) divinity of the Holy Spirit; in this he was followed by his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and by Diodore of Tarsus; their homoiousian resistance to the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit frustrated the efforts of Gregory of Nazianzen, as president of First Council of Constantinople, to persuade the Council to declare explicitly the homoousion, the Personal divinity, of the Holy Spirit. . . Gregory of Nyssa, surviving his brother Basil of Caesarea (+379), made the homoousion of Jesus with the Father the foundation of his Trinitarian theology, but only as Basil had understood it, viz., as compatible with the anti-Nicene homoiousion proposed by Basil of Ancyra, and approved in 363 at the homoousian Council of Antioch called by Basil’s friend and admirer, Meletius, and upheld by Gregory of Nyssa at the First Council of Constantinople in 381.
Amphilocius, from 373 the bishop of Iconium, stands apart from this confusion, although Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto was written for him and dedicated to him. Amphilocius was a cousin of Gregory of Nazianzen and an admirer of his theology. He accompanied him to I Constantinople in 379, and there supported his couisin’s futile attempt to persuade the Council to affirm the homoousion of the Holy Spirit. Thus the Creed of the First Council of Constantinople (381) does not attribute to the Holy Spirit the Personal consubstantiality with the Father which the Nicene Creed attributes to the Son. Nonetheless the definition of the divinity of the Holy Spirit by I Constantinople clearly relies upon the Nicene doctrine of the consubstantiality of Jesus with the Father, for its Creed incorporated the Nicene Creed. This bars any homoiousian (i.e., binitarian) reading of the Conciliar assertion of the Holy Spirit’s divinity. The promulgation of what came to be called the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was followed fifty years later by the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus, which defined that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the “Theotokos,” the Mother of God. This was the first step in the doctrinal development of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of Jesus the Lord. The Formula’s further definition of the consubstantiality of the Christ with every human person anticipated the mature expression of the Church’s Christological faith in the Symbol of the Council of Chalcedon (451). The Symbol, or Creed, of the Council of Chalcedon taught the consubstantiality of Jesus not only with the Father as divine but, also, his consubstantiality, as human, with all human persons: i.e., he is fully human by his consubstantiality, “ὁμοούσιος ἡμῖν,” i.e., “cum nobis” “with ourselves.”
The Council of Nicaea had made it clear that consubstantiality must be said of persons, not of substances. The Conciliar emphasis upon the divine “mia ousia , mia hypostasis” permits no doubt that the definition of the “homoousios” of the Son means that he is of the “same substance,” not simply of the “one substance” as the term is too often mistranslated. The Nicene doctrine of the “homoousion” of Jesus with the Father does not affirm the Son’s identity with the Trinity but rather affirms his Personal possession, co-equally with the Father, of the fullness of divinity. Thus also, the Chalcedonian doctrine of Jesus’ consubstantiality “with us” is not his identification with human substance; rather, it affirms his Personal possession of the fullness of humanity, co-equally with all other human persons. As he is fully divine by his numerical consubstantiality with the Father, so he is fully human by his numerical consubstantiality with each of us: i.e., with those for whom he died, of whom he is the head. Quite as the Father, as its head, is the source of the free, numerical unity of the one divine substance, the Trinity, so the Son, as its head, is the source of the free numerical unity of the one human substance in which he subsists. It is by his subsistence in as its head that he is the source of its free unity.. As his subsistence in it is single, so the substance which owes its origin to him must be single: were he not numerically of the same substance in which we subsist, he would not be our head, he could not be the source of our free unity, and could not restore that free unity by its “recapitulation,” i.e., its redemption by its head.
The substantial unity of mankind is historically actual by the headship of the risen Lord of history, quite as the substantial unity of the Trinity is actual by the headship of the Father. As the heresy of tritheism is the fragmentation of the divine Substance, so the fragmentation of the human substance is a comparably heretical denial of the headship of Jesus the Christ.
Thus Chalcedon went further than had the Council of Nicaea in linking personal consubstantiality to personal subsistence in a single communal substance. The Symbol of Chalcedon taught that, as Jesus is Personally consubstantial with the Father by his subsistence in the one divine substance, that is, in the Trinitarian Community of the divine Persons, so also Jesus is consubstantial with us by his subsistence in the one human substance, the community of human persons.
In that development of the meaning of consubstantiality as applied to Jesus, the Council of Chalcedon ascribed to the human substance a communal meaning analogous to that which Nicaea had ascribed to the divine Substance. Thus the human substance in which Jesus subsists can only be the entirety of the human community, i.e. the unqualified “us” with whom Jesus is Personally consubstantial by his free and Lordly subsistence in our free substantial unity. While the Chalcedonian Symbol does not mention the point, Paul had long since made it clear in I Cor. 11:3, developed further in Colossians and Ephesians, that Jesus subsists in our humanity as its head, i.e., as the source of a free unity which can only be substantial, thus as humanity’s Archē, its Creator and Lord, quite as the Father freely subsists in the Trinity as the Head, the Source (ἀρχἡ) and Principle (πηγἡ), of the free unity of the uncreated divine Substance, the Trinity of the divine Persons.
Chalcedon taught that as Jesus our Lord is a single, unique Person, so he is a single, unique subsistence, that of the “one and the same Son,” of the Father and of our Lady, his mother. It is by his Personal unity, his unique Personal subsistence at once in divinity and in humanity, that Jesus is Lord. It is then evident that his divinity and his humanity are unified in his Person without prejudice to either: he is “one and the same Son,” eternally begotten by the Father, conceived by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Virgin Mary and born of her, Theotokos.
This Personal union of divinity and humanity in Jesus is finally ineffable: the crucial lines of the Symbol describe it only negatively:[2]
16. This one and the same Jesus Christ the Lord, only-begotten Son (of God
17. in two natures
18. must be confessed to be (in two natures) unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably (united)]
19. and nowhere is the distinction of the natures taken away by that union
20. but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved
21. and being united in one Person and subsistence,
22. not separated or divided into two persons
23. 16. This one and the same Jesus Christ the Lord, only-begotten Son (of God)
24. God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ
The Symbol of Chalcedon
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
Second Series
The Seven Ecumenical Councils, 264A-265B
Following the holy Fathers we teach with one voice that the Son [of God] and our Lord Jesus Christ is to be confessed as one and the same [Person], that he is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, very God and very man, of a reasonable soul and [human] body consisting, consubstantial with the Father as touching his Godhead, and consubstantial with us as touching his manhood; made in all things like us, sin only excepted; begotten of his Father before the worlds according to his Godhead; but in these last days for us men and for our salvation born [into the world] of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God according to his manhood. This one and the same Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son [of God] must be confessed to be in two natures,1 unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably [united], and that without the distinction of natures being taken away by such union, but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved and being united in one Person and subsistence, not separated or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and only-begotten, God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets of old have spoken concerning him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ hath taught us, and as the Creed of the Fathers hath delivered to us.
1.Vide parallel note from Hefele (263a-264b.
These things, therefore, having been expressed by us with the greatest accuracy and attention, the Holy Ecumenical Synod defines that no one shall be suffered to bring forward a different faith (ἐτέραν πίστιν), nor to write, nor to put together, nor to excogitate, nor to teach it to others. But such as dare either to put together another faith, or to bring forward or to teach or to deliver a different Creed [ἐτέραν σύμβολον] to such as wish to be converted to the knowledge of truth from the Gentiles, or Jews or any heresy whateve, if they be Bishops or clerics let them be deposed, the bishops from the Episcopate, and the clerics from the clergy, but if they be monks or laics, let them be anathematized.
After the reading of the definition, all the most religious Bishops cried out: This is the faith of the fathers: let the metropolitans forthwith subscribe it: let them forthwith, in the presence of the judges, subscribe it: let that which has been well defined have no delay: this is the faith of the Apostles: by this we all stand: thus we all believe.
1Vide parallel note from Hefele, defending ‘in two natures’ as opposed to “out of two natures.”
The Chalcedonian doctrine of the union of divinity and of humanity in the one Person who is Jesus was implicit in the proclamation twenty years earlier by the Council of Ephesus that Mary, the mother of Jesus the Lord, is thereby the mother of God, the “Theotokos.” Cyril, the great bishop of Alexandria, was the first to develop, at the Council of Ephesus, the doctrinal import of Jesus’ “communication of idioms,”[3] in order to defend the full divinity of the Christ against Nestorius, whose Aristotelianizing mentor, Theodore of Mopsuestia, had persuaded him that Jesus could not be the Son of God because, as fully human he is personally human; a man. not Personally the Son of God. Twenty years later, the Fathers at Chalcedon understood that the defense of the Christ’s full humanity against Dioscorus and Eutyches required that Jesus be consubstantial with his mother’s humanity if she is to be literally the mother of God―of Jesus the Lord, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, consubstantial with the Father.” The ascription to Our Lady of the title “Theotokos” carried the implication that Mary, his mother, in and by her humanity, is personally consubstantial with her Son, Jesus her Lord, the Head from whom primordially she proceeds as the second Eve, as his glory.
Consequently, Mary’s human consubstantiality with her Lord is a proximate inference from her historical motherhood of Jesus: it is her primordial standing as the second Eve, the bride of the second Adam, proceeding from him as from her head, that accounts for her personal human consubstantiality with him, quite as her Son’s eternal procession from his Head, the Father, the his source, accounts for his divine and Personal consubstantiality with his Father. Mary’s procession as the primordial second Eve, from her head, the primordial second Adam, is at the same time her primordial union in One Flesh with him. In history, Mary’s nuptial union, plena gratia, with her Lord is her integral, immaculate self-expression, her wholly free historical Fiat, whose freedom, unsullied, undiminished by any sin, utters Wisdom into the world.
Historically the second Eve proceeds from her source as the Immaculate Conception, the prolepsis of the sinless Church. The unconditioned freedom of her historical sinlessness is indispensable to the freedom of her utterance of the “Fiat” by which her Son is covenantally immanent in our fallen world and fallen history as our Head, our Redeemer, our Lord. Were the freedom of Mary’s “fiat” qualified by sin, Jesus’ lordship of history would not be that of her Head, her Bridegroom, thereby it would not be covenantal, not redemptive, not gratia Christi, not divine mercy and benefaction, but an impersonal exercise of divine omnipotence in the manner of the mythical impositions of Zeus upon humanity, an impersonal dominance of a radically passive world to which he remains entirely alien, unrelated, absolute in the pagan sense of a Deus otiosus. Mary’s maternal relation to her Son, her conception of Jesus, is the first expression in our fallen history of the second Eve’s adoration of her Lord: it pervades all history as the Eucharistic worship of the Church.
We have seen Mary entitled the “second Eve,” albeit implicitly, by the author of II Clement in the mid-second century, and more clearly by Justin Martyr (Dial. 100); their reference of this title to Mary, given the Pauline presentation, in Eph. 5:23-7, of the Church as the immaculate bride of Christ the Head, is a very early intuition of her personal integrity and immaculate sinlessness. The fallen fragmentation of feminine integrity into the distinct and mutually exclusive expressions―daughter, bride, virgin, and mother―proper to feminine existence in fallen history has no application to the integral femininity of Our Lady. Her primordial nuptial union with the second Adam, the Christ, is integral, at once her motherhood of her Lord, her virginity, her role as the “little girl,” the “beloved daughter” who is created Wisdom in the primordial good creation: cf. Proverbs 8:30.[4] All these dimensions of Mary’s historical integrity have their full expression in the unqualified freedom of her primordial nuptial union with her Lord, with whom she subsists “in the Beginning,” in the free substantial unity of their One Flesh, concretely antecedent to original sin and the fall. It is thus that she is homoousios with her Son, for it is thus that Jesus is Lord. The created immaculate freedom of her “Fiat mihi” is the historical expression of the full outpouring of the Spiritus Creator which Jesus was sent by the Father to give. His Mission is achieved in that primordial union with the second Eve; its offer of free unity to all creation is the precondition of the original sin, and so of our fallen history. Jesus’ Mission in our fallen history is complete in his offering of the One Sacrifice, the institution of the New Covenant, the creative Event immanent in and transcending our fallen history through its Eucharistic representation. By this Eucharistic representation of his One Sacrifice, Jesus is the Lord of history and its redeemer, its Alpha and its Omega, its Beginning and its End. As Eucharistic, his Lordship is covenantal, the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, his nuptial union with the second Eve, the full outpouring of the Holy Spirit. A properly sacramental theological anthropology will find here its Eucharistic foundation, for this One Flesh is the human substance, the free, nuptial community, in which Jesus subsists as head, and in which, by that subsistence, he is consubstantial with each of us.
At Chalcedon, the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord achieved its mature doctrinal statement. The Fathers at Chalcedon completed the Nicene conversion of the classic Greek metaphysics and its determinist rationality, whose uncritical identification of “person” with a unique, mono-personal intellectual substance would bar the rational appropriation by theologians both of Jesus’ Personal divinity and his Personal humanity. Arius, whose theology was locked into that monist rationality, identified the divine Substance with the divine Self of the Father, and consequently could not admit the divinity of the Son without a departure from monotheism, a departure which for him as for his orthodox contemporaries was unthinkable: polytheism was never an option for either party during the Arian controversy. Arius’ supposition that divinity must be mono-personal was refused by the Council of Nicaea’s teaching of the consubstantiality, the “homoousion,” of the Son with the Father. This doctrine required that the divine Substance be, not a Monas, a divine Self, but the Trinitarian Community of divine Selves―the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.[5] For the dominant Platonism of that period, this doctrine made no sense, for it rested upon the radical rejection of the monism instinctive to the determinist Greek rationality. Specifically, the Nicene definition of the homoousios of the Son with the Father rejected the pagan identification of person with intellectual substance upon which Sabellius, Paul of Samosata and Arius had each relied.
Thus the Council of Nicaea affirmed Jesus’ full divinity by accepting the Trinitarian implication of Jesus the Lord’s full divinity, and consequently rejecting the Platonic identification of “self” with “substance” as incompatible with the Personal consubstantiality of the Jesus with the Father. His “homoousion” required that the one God, the divine “intellectual substance,” be the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit.
The Council Fathers at Chalcedon would assert Jesus’ full humanity in the same context, that of his consubstantiality with the personal members of a multi-personal intellectual substance: the human community. In affirming Jesus’ consubstantiality “with us” the Fathers used a term whose meaning had been canonized by the Nicene Creed. There, Jesus’ consubstantiality with the Father is Personal, as is the Father’s consubstantiality with him: i.e., neither Jesus nor the Father nor the Holy Spirit can be identified with a monadic divine Substance, a cosmological absolute, simply because in each his Personal consubstantiality imports and requires a community of consubstantial Persons: in short, the one God is the Trinity because the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial with each other.
Because Jesus is consubstantial with the Person of the Father, the Head, the Archē of the Trinity, he possesses, as does the Father, the fullness of divinity. Similarly, by his consubstantiality with each of us, Jesus possesses, as the head of the human substance, the source of its free unity and thus its creator, the fullness of humanity. His headshiop requires that the human substance be neither an abstraction, a species, nor a single human person; The human substance is the historically and concretely free human community: ultimately it is the Church, the Bride of Christ who, as Bride, is also the Body of her head: Augustine recognized in Sermo 341 that the head-body relation is identically the bridegroom-bride relation: both are nuptial and therefore free, for there is no other free relation in history: apart from this graced nuptiality the contradiction between the one and the many, between personal and communal unity, cannot be transcended.
Chalcedon affirmed against Eutyches and Nestorius the communal reality of the human substance, in affirming teaching that each of us is consubstantial with Jesus’ fully human Person, whose Personal human consubstantiality with us would otherwise cease, for it must be Personal and consequently must be communal: his human consubstantiality is not his subsistence in a monadic human substance as its Self, but is rather his subsistence in the communal human substance for whom he died as its Head. However, Jesus’ consubstantiality with us is precisely his nuptial headship of his bridal Church for, while we are created in him, the head who is the source of our being, nonetheless our solidarity with him is free, for it is the radical gratia Christi, gratia Capitis, a gift which cannot be imposed but freely, personally, must be appropriated. The Church comprises all who accept that Gift of creation in him, who affirm his headship, who exist in Christ, and are free to live in freedom.
Thus, the final exposition in the Symbol of Chalcedon of the primitive faith that Jesus is Lord is at once a rejection of and a conversion from the cosmological postulate of the irreducibility of the one and the many which barred the doctrinal development of the Trinitarian faith of the Church. At Chalcedon, as earlier in the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus, the “one and the same Son” was taught to be Personally consubstantial with every human being. This means that Jesus is a human Person―a conclusion still unacceptable to much of contemporary theology.
It is nonetheless inexorable that Jesus is, as Irenaeus taught, “one and the same Son; his consubstantiality with us would not otherwise be Personal. Chalcedon’s application of the homoousion to humanity forces the doctrinal conversion of Greek metaphysical equation of person with the human substance which, with the Conciliar proclamation of that doctrine, ceased to be comprehensible as mono-personal, and thereafter to be understood as a free nuptially-ordered unity, and therefore as triune: i.e., as head, body, and marital bond constituting a covenantal substance, in such wise that the New Covenant, the union in One Flesh of Christ the head and his bridal Church, is quite simply the New Creation of humanity in the image of God, foreshadowed in Genesis 1:26 and 2:21-24.[6]
As God is no longer to be known as a lonely self, neither is man: the Trinitarian perichōresis (περιχώρησις) is imaged by the nuptial order of our covenantal fidelity. The pagan postulate of the Greek metaphysical tradition, the necessary unity of substance, had been taken for granted since the second century by every Christian with the exception of the giants among them: Clement of Rome, Ignatius Martyr, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen. Justin’s anti-gnostic apologetics focused upon the Jesus the Lord: Irenaeus founded his soteriology upon the recapitulation of all things in the Jesus as the second Adam, Tertullian’s una persona, duae substantia Christology, like Origen’s much-maligned systematic enterprise, took for granted and rested upon the communication of idioms―of Names, as Origen has it―in Jesus the Lord. Their theological foundation was resolutely historical. Apart from those few however, under the influence of middle Platonism, early theologians such as those who read adoptionism into Origen’s Christology could not but have.understood the assertion in John 1:14: “and the Word was made flesh” to refer, not to Jesus, but to a theological construct, i.e., to a non-human eternal Logos-Son, of whom the Catholic liturgical, scriptural, and doctrinal tradition knows nothing. This construct was imagined in terms of the Stoic-Platonic Logos doctrine, wherein the Logos, or Word, was the first emanation from a transcendent source, all too simply identified with the Father.
From the beginnings of Greek theological speculation it was the Word, thus interpreted in Stoic-Platonic terms, as in some manner divine but not as human, who was understood to have “became flesh,” in the sense of becoming human. This language has entered into the Nicene and Nicene-Constantinopolitan creeds, whose texts paradoxically assert of Jesus that he “became man:”―homo factus est”―which is literal nonsense: it is obvious that the primordial head of humanity does not become a man, for from the Beginning he is “man” par excellence. The Creed however is a historical assertion of the historical faith: Jesus’ kenōsis is his Incarnation, his becoming a fallen man, a historical man, submitted to our fallen historicity. Unfortunately this is not the usual understanding of the kenōsis of Jesus. Its perennial dehistoricization, the perennial supposition that Jesus’ pre-existence is not primordial but eternal, therefore not human but only divine, posed and continues to pose the insoluble problem of providing for the antecedent possibility of a divine Person’s so changing as to “become flesh” (and for us men and for our salvation) without thereby ceasing to be divine. Inasmuch as divinity connotes immutability, it is evident a priori that God cannot change without ceasing to be God.
Read simply at the letter, i.e., abstractly, “incarnatus est et homo factus est” is nonsense. Jesus, the primordially preexistent head of humanity, the subject of the Incarnation (Jn. 1:14), the subject of the kenōsis (Phil. 2:6-7) could not and did not “become human” by reason of his incarnation except in the sense of his Personal kenōsis, his Personal becoming “flesh,” whereby he―the primordially pre-existing Jesus the Christ, not the “immanent Son, the Son, sensu negante―enters into our historical humanity, our fallenness, our heritage, our solidarity with the fallen Adam, in all ways except sin, accepting the form of a slave, imprisoned like all men by the fear of death. This the creeds affirm: Jesus became man only in the historical sense of becoming flesh, i.e., fallen. “Flesh” names the historically fallen condition of the Good Creation, whose goodness is its creation in Christ, by whose One Sacrifice that goodness is restored.
The creeds are historical assertions of the historical faith: Jesus’ κενωσις (kenōsis) is his ἐνσάρκωσις (ensarkōsis), his ‘enfleshment,’ his becoming a fallen man, a historical human Person. It is thus, by becoming flesh, that he is made man, ἐνανθροπήσαντα, submitted to our fallen historicity. Unfortunately this is not the usual, i.e., Thomist, understanding of the kenōsis of Jesus, for there the kenōsis is applied to the dehistoricized subject of the Incarnation, the eternal Son, who is not man, but “assumes” a human nature. The corollaries of this error are in the first place a denial of the goodness of creation, for otherwise the relation of humanity to the eternal, i.e., nonhistorical Son would not be a kenōsis. Secondly, the Thomist rationale denies Jesus’ Personal pre-existence or primordiality. As dehistor-icized, “Son” refers, not to the primordial Personal union in him of God and Man, but to his divinity alone, with the consequence that his pre-existence is also dehistoricized and thereby not primordial but eternal, therefore not human but only divine. In consequence the Son is not the head of our humanity, which is then not created in him. Jesus is then not the head of all creation, and creation as such is undone.
This dehistoricization of Jesus the Lord has posed and continues to pose the insoluble problem of providing for the antecedent possibility the divine Person, abstractly understood as a cosmological absolute, changing so drastically as to “become flesh” without ceasing to be divine. Inasmuch as divinity, thus cosmologized, dehistoricized, abstracted from the economy of salvation, connotes immutability, it is evident a priori that God cannot change without ceasing to be God.
This cosmologically-induced confusion has dominated Christological speculation since the close of the thirteenth century. Its current expression in Roman Catholic theology is the division between the adherents of “high” and of “low” Christologies: that is, between those who would safeguard the divinity of Jesus by limiting or denying his humanity, and those who would safeguard his humanity by limiting or denying his divinity. These emphases are effectively those which in the fifth century divided the Alexandrine followers of Eutyches from the Antiochene disciples of Nestorius,. Their irreconcilable conflict prompted the summoning of the Council of Chalcedon by Emperor Marcian on the authority of Pope Leo I―Leo the Great―one of the four great Latin Fathers, whose “Dogmatic Letter” maintaining the full divinity, full humanity, and full unity of Jesus the Lord was a major source of the Chalcedonian Symbol.
Under pressure from Marcian, the Chalcedonian Fathers finally composed a Christological doctrine, the “Symbol of Chalcedon” which simply refused to consider theological dispute confronting them. The Chalcedonian Fathers had nothing to say conceerning an “immanent Son.” Their concern as bishops, as standing in the apostolic succession, was to uphold the ancient faith that “Jesus is Lord” against its perceived denial by the disputing theologians. The Symbol affirmed, following the Council of Nicaea, that Jesus is fully divine, consubstantial with the Father. It affirmed, following the Council of Ephesus, that Jesus has a human mother, who is “the Mother of God,” repeating the title “Theotokos” given Mary at Ephesus, which had aroused the impassioned protest of the Nestorians. But the Fathers at Chalcedon did not rest content with the doctrinal affirmation of Jesus’ full humanity: they went further, to teach the further implication of the homoousion of the Son with the Father and with us: viz., that his divinity and his humanity are united in him at the level of his Person, i.e., at the level of his single unique Subsistence in two substances by which he is consubstantial respectively and at once with the Trinitarian Persons and with the human persons who subsist, respectively, in divinity and in humanity. The doctrine taught by Council of Nicaea, that Jesus homoousios with the Father, is intelligible except insofar as Personal, i.e., insofar as Jesus Personally subsists in the divine substance and Personally subsists in the human substance, in the divine Community and in the human community. Once again, we have here to do with the meaning of Jesus’ consubstantiality with the Father. As defined at Nicaea, his consubstantiality with the Father is inescapably Personal: it can exist at no other level, and cannot but engage his Personal unity, whether as human or as divine.
This was not a speculative theological discovery: it was the doctrinal expression, at Chalcedon as a century and a quarter earlier at Nicaea, of the liturgically mediated Revelation that Jesus is Lord. The Conciliar assertion of the Personal unity of divinity and humanity in Jesus the Lord gave ground neither to the Alexandrine monism nor to the Antiochene dualism, for these theologies agreed in supposing the unity of Jesus to be on the level of substance (nature), not at the level of Person: the latter possibility was anticipated by Tertullian’s as-of-course association of ‘name’ with ‘person, echoed by Origen a generation later.’
Before Tertullian, the implication of this apostolic identification of the Name of Jesus with his Person had never been seriously considered by theological community, whether Latin or Greek. Those Eastern theologians who either reject the Chalcedon Symbol outright or find it inadequate, and those in the West who have come to doubt its adequacy, share this mistake. For example, St. Thomas’ Christological assessment of Jesus as a “composite Person” is a retrogression to that rationalizing mentality which must find a prior possibility of the mystery of faith: that Jesus is the Lord. That quest is nonhistorical, and cannot bear upon the historical Jeus the Lord, and so os not theological: it seeks to go behind the historical revelation of the Mystery to seek a higher truth. This is the program of the Enlightenment: it underlies the Protestant and Modernist dehistoricization of the Catholic tradition.
It is solely from this nonhistorical stance that the Chalcedonian proclamation of the union of God and man in Jesus at the level of “Person” is seen to be inadequate, for it did not solve and does not pretend to solve the time-honored but pseudo-theological problem of providing for the antecedent possibility of the Incarnation which had preoccupied the fifth-century Antiochene and Alexandrine schools, and which continues to preoccupy theologians of the East and the West in our own time. This perennial dehistoricizing and rationalist mentality takes for granted that any such union must be at the level of “nature,” for theologians on both sides accept without question the Platonizing and dehistoricizing reading of the “Logos sarx egeneto” of Jn. 1:14, which eliminates a priori a Personal unity in Jesus the Christ, posing the false problem of explaining how God could become man, and does so in the inescapable context of the traditional metaphysics which, prior to Nicaea, knew no conceptual distinction between possessing a rational nature and subsisting in it uniquely, i.e., to the exclusion of any other subsistence. Each human being was assumed by that monism to be at once and indistinguishably an individual human nature and the person who uniquely subsists in that nature. The impossible cosmological problem of providing for inter-substantial communication between substantially complete rational creatures was simply ignored, and in much of contemporary theological anthropology it continues to be ignored.[7]
Consequently the Nestorians, recognizing the rational impossibility of a natural union of divine and human natures, had to deny the divinity of Jesus, while the Eutychians, supposing such a union of divine and human “natures” to be indispensable to the redemption of the fallen world, postulated a Monophysism, a composite or melded divine-human nature (physis), an imagined compatibility of incompatibles, whose theological defense, Apollinarian in principle, would limit the humanity of that physis in order to affirm of its full divinity, to end with a composite neither divine nor human.
The liturgical affirmation that Jesus is Lord is the refusal of this false dilemma. However, that refusal of the cosmological quandary is free; it is not the product of a demonstrated rational necessity, a matter merely of correct inference. Its affirmation expresses a free conversion to the free Personal unity of two radically distinct substances, the divine and the human. Only with that conversion can theological inquiry into the free Revelation in Christ begin. Without it, Christological speculation never emerges from its cosmological posture and therefore never becomes theological.
Over the past century Catholic theologians have become accustomed to a distinction between religious and intellectual conversion. There is ample room for the distinction, but only in the sense that the religious conversion, understood as participation in the Catholic liturgical proclamation of the Lordship of Jesus, is personal entry into the free rationality of the faith, which is to say, into the mystery revealed in Christ. This liturgically-informed conversion to the free truth of the Revelation cannot but entail the rejection of the cosmological pursuit of supposedly necessary reasons underlying the Mysterium fidei, the apostolic faith that Jesus is the Lord, for it has none. Its Truth is Personal, and supremely free with the freedom of the Mission of the Son, Jesus the Lord. The Chalcedonian Symbol partakes of that free rationality: it invites and requires a free theological inquiry, one not locked into the determinism of the fallen mind, of fallen rationality.
This freedom of inquiry is spontaneous, the free reception of our most fundamental grace. By our creation in Christ, the head, we are created also in the freedom of which he is the only source, but it is a freedom which can be refused, particularly as its acceptance cannot but in some manner be morally difficult for a fallen humanity whose personal temptation is always to “be like God;” i.e., like the god of the pagans, whose divinity is his autonomy: Nietzsche’s plaint, “If there were a god, how could I bear not to be god?” finds an immediate resonance in each of us. The standing temptation to turn away from the freedom of truth is simply our solidarity with the fallen Adam, whose supreme foolishness was his denial of God in order to “be like god,” to be autonomous, his own divinity.
But while this temptation is universal, it is only a temptation, and its remedy is at hand: the liturgically-mediated faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord. This is the faith of Chalcedon: conversion to it is an entry into the Catholic responsibility for the freedom of truth. It is then an intellectual conversion from the cosmological conviction that the pursuit of truth is a flight from the irrationality of history to the ideal absolute unity of truth and goodness. This monadic notion of the divine unity has entered Catholic theology as the Deus Unus, Ipsum Esse Subsistens, the impersonal Absolute who is naturally (i.e., necessarily) known by the correct use of formal logic.
It is evident that the Lord of history, who has revealed himself, by his immanence in history to be its Lord and Savior, cannot be identified with this paganized divinity, who is incapable per se of any relation to what is other than himself.
The Chalcedonian Fathers reaffirmed seven times that Jesus, the eternal Son of the eternal Father and the historical Son of Our Lady, is “one and the same” (ἕνα καὶ τὸν αὐτὸν), a summary expression of the Personal humanity of Jesus coined by Irenaeus, whose concern for Jesus as the historical second Adam anticipated by two and a half centuries the Chalcedonian doctrine of the concrete, factual unity of divinity and humanity in the historical unity of his Person, in the Son. It is thus, in the unity of his Person, as the one and the same Son, that Jesus is the Lord.
The Fathers recognized in Jesus’ Lordship the radical mystery of the faith which, as mystery, cannot have the prior “natural” possibility which the Antiochene and the Alexandrine disputants both vainly sought. The free truth, the mystery of the faith, as revelation and as gift, can have no prior possibility into which theologians might inquire. Those who affirm in faith the mystery of Christ enter freely into an utterly novel―because at once free and historical―intellectual universe, whose novelty is precisely its historical freedom. It is for that freedom, that free participation in the free historical mediation of eternal life, that Jesus the Christ has made us free: “for freedom we are freed.”
All pagan discourse rested and yet rests upon the supposition that truth can be true only insofar as it can be shown to be antecedently possible and necessary, shown to rest upon a foundation of necessary causes. Within that pagan rationality, necessity and possibility are at one: no novelty can arise. The faith that Jesus is the Lord broke that intellectual universe, whose adepts had long since fled from the “irrationality” of history to an ideal unity and truth in which freedom had no place, and who now would impose their servility upon the world at large to fashion those Utopias of irresponsibility which in sum are the permanent alternative to the good creation whose goodness is its freedom in Christ.
The Fathers at Chalcedon went on to affirm, with Nicaea, that it is Jesus who subsists from eternity in the free unity of the divine Substance, the Trinity, and who thereby is consubstantial with his eternal Source, the Father. In the same sentence, the Fathers taught that Jesus subsists with the same Personal freedom in our humanity, in our human substance, and thereby is consubstantial with us. Paul, in I Corinthians 11:3, had pointed out the analogy between the subsistence of the Father in the Trinitarian Community and the subsistence of Jesus in the human community: both subsist as the “Head,” as the Source of the free unity of the communal substance of which each is the head: the Father as the Archē of the uncreated Trinity, Jesus as the Archē of our created humanity, thus as its creator and its redeemer, whose Mission from the Father is simply to give the Holy Spirit, the Spiritus Creator. Jesus the Lord’s first outpouring of the Holy Spirit terminates in the Good Creation, in which he subsists and of which he is the Head. As has already been pointed out, the Good Creation is free, but its freedom cannot be imposed; this is simply a matter of definition. Its acceptance is the office of its head, the first Adam, the affirmation of whose unity in one flesh with the first Eve would be that acceptance, for the Good Creation is fulfilled only by which it is “very good,” the creation of that which images God:
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. And so God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps upon the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation
Gen. 1:26-2:3
Jesus the Christ’s second gift of the Holy Spirit terminates in his offering on the Altar and on the Cross of his One Sacrifice, his redemptive restoration of the free unity of the fallen creation which, as fallen, has none.
Chalcedon did not develop this insight into Jesus’ headship, whose infinity of implications still awaits serious exploration by theological community. It does seem fairly evident that our creation in the image of the Trinity, “Male and female they created them,” is at one with our Trinitarian creation in Christ the head sent by the Father, whose created headship, analogously Trinitarian, is the source of our free substantial unity, fidelity to which can only be our worship of the freedom of the Truth who is Christ, Eucharistically immanent in the Church which he founded on the Altar and on the Cross. This consideration has been and remains the preoccupation of these volumes.
It has been noted that Christological doctrine of the Symbol of Chalcedon is much criticized for a supposed failure to have resolved theological dispute between the Antiochene and the Alexandrine Christologies. This academic criticism misses the crucial point: the Council Fathers did not fail to resolve theological impasse thus presented; rather, they rejected it out of hand as irrelevant to their magisterial responsibility, a responsibility not academic but liturgical, not theological but doctrinal. The Chalcedonian Christology does not attempt to provide an explanation of the antecedent possibility of the Personal union of God and man in Jesus the Christ, and this for the very simple reason that the basic mystery of the Catholic faith is that Jesus is Lord. This free foundation grounds all theological rationality. As foundational, it is not subject to any critical analysis, to any scholarly oversight, for its truth, the radical mystery of the faith, transcends theologycal inquiry as foundational to its radically historical proclamation of the faith. The truth of the faith is mediated by the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth. This mediation is liturgical; its acme is the priestly offering in the Eucharist of the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Christ, by which we are redeemed. The human mind cannot plumb this mystery: its revelation, as the object of faith, is not a subject of theological scrutiny, but of personal, intellectual worship in truth of Truth. In short, the Lordship of Jesus has no antecedent possibility to be explored: rather, the task of theology is to explore its historical implication, the limitless significance of the apostolic faith that Jesus Christ is Lord.
The academic failure to grasp this point has had catastrophic conesquences. It is not too much to say that it has perpetuated the Christological confusion which then divided Antioch and Alexandria, and which now divides Eastern as well as Western Christianity.[8]
Oddly enough, the simple and indeed obvious fact that the Fathers at Chalcedon met a magisterial responsibility transcending the concerns of theology has never been accepted by theological community. Without significant exceptions theologians of the East and of the West have judged the doctrine of Chalcedon to be incomplete, unsatisfactory insofar as failing to have resolved the antecedent theological dispute for whose resolution, as they suppose, the Council was called. It is commonly held that for this reason the Symbol of Chalcedon has not been “received,” not accepted as a matter of faith, as though the truth of the faith waited upon a theological consensus not yet at hand, a proposition on its face absurd: Catholics and Orthodox are baptized into the historical Church, whose liturgical and doctrinal traditions are integral with her historical reality, her Eucharistic worship of her Lord. A “cafeteria Catholicism” as also a “cafeteria Orthodoxy,” entails a rejection of the baptismal faith, for its liturgical mediation, as liturgical, is indivisible, a single analogia fidei.
The reasons for the unwillingness of Catholic theologians to accept the authority of the Symbol of Chalcedon amount to a misunderstanding of the task of theology. This misunderstanding is explicit in the ancient misreading of Jn. 1:14, which assumes that it is the non-human Logos, the dehistoricized divine Son, who is subject of the “logos sarx egeneto,” whereupon the single task of theology becomes accounting for the Son’s becoming historical, thus for his becoming, not flesh, i.e., fallen, which presupposes his human pre-existence, but man, which presupposes that his pre-existence is not human, but only divine . Under this latter systematic aegis, there can be no theological interest in the historical Lordship of Jesus, i.e., no possible concern for the radical affirmation of the Church’s faith in that Lordship, until this prior problem is resolved. Inasmuch as this is a false problem precisely because of its postulated dehistoricization of its only subject, Jesus the Christ, Christology cannot proceed from this point. In fact, for the bulk of Christian theologians, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox, it has not done so. The palmary Christological puzzlement is still posed by their reading of the Logos sarx egeneto as the recital of the passage of the eternal Son into history. This flat refusal of the apostolic faith rests upon a pagan refusal of the historicity of truth; it has no other justification.
This quasi-permanent subfuscation of the intellect is worth examination if only because it grounds the dehistoricizing rationalism whose current secular expression was a subject of the Pope Benedict’s lecture at Regensburg, but which has troubled the Church from the outset as one or another variant of the Gnostic conviction that the divine is thus absolute as to be incapable of free historical immanence in our fallen world. The Church’s faith that the historical Jesus the Lord is the one and the same Son of the Father and of Mary, affronts the Gnostic confidence that history is immune to God. The Catholic faith that Jesus is Lord stands athwart all those progressive projects of self-salvation now tempting the Western world. It is evident that the Church is the equally implacable opponent of salvation by the sword, whether of Islam or its secular analogues.
Were Benedict’s address to the academicians at Regensburg taken seriously by theologians, that is, were it understood personally, as addressed to themselves, they could hardly have failed to recognize that the Pope’s emphasis upon the free historicity of truth applies to their own vocation. Theology also must avoid the dehistoricizing of man and God that is the hallmark of the secular consciousness. Theology has as its subject the historical faith of the historical Church in the historical Lordship of Jesus the Christ. The focus of the Symbol of Chalcedon on this historical Lordship of Jesus cannot but be discomfiting to the practitioners of a theological method whose systematic disinterest in or dismissal of the human historicity of Jesus is lately confused with historical consciousness. It may be hoped that the Pope’s clarion call for the renewal of the loyalty to Truth, obviously indispensable to theological quaerens intellectum, will awaken theological community from its aprioristic slumbers, to a return to its proper quest, the systematic inquiry into the historical faith of the historical Church.
In the meantime, contemporary Christology assumes still to be in issue doctrines which have long since been solemnly defined at the Council of Chalcedon.[9] Without significant exception, both Catholic and Orthodox systematic theologians still suppose the diophysism of Antiochene Christology and the monophysism of the Alexandrine tradition to exhaust the possibilities of Christological speculation, with the current consensus clearly in favor of Antioch.[10] A sympathetic treatment of the Antiochene Christology has become the fashion over the fifty years since J. L. McKenzie rebuked Francis Sullivan’s criticism of Theodore of Mopsuestia.[11] During the same period, a parallel Trinitarian application of Aristotelian monism produced a Trinitarian theology similarly sympathetic to Theodore’s identification of the Father with the divine Substance.[12] Meanwhile, the Catholic academy’s interest in systematic theology prior to the Second Vatican Council had waned: the political theology which so largely replaced it has been committed to restating the Catholic tradition in a manner responsive to secular modernism. Its success has not been persuasive.[13]
Karl Rahner brought these tendencies to a focus in The Trinity, in which a Christology and Trinitarian theology reminiscent of Theodore of Mopsuestia’s are conjoined in a radical departure from the definitions of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, at Nicaea, and, at Chalcedon, with us.[14] The source of Rahner’s doctrinal dissonance is his uncritical supposetion that theology can and must consist in the subordination of the Catholic tradition to an unconverted Aristotelian metaphysics whose monism, for him, is simply a rational necessity. Thus understood, theology becomes the submission of the free truth of the deposit of faith to the immanent necessities of the Aristotelian act-potency analysis. The historical Catholic tradition is thereby dehistoricized and undone, reduced to the ideal a priori implications of the formal logic upon which the act-potency analysis relies. Theological inquiry, traditionally a doctrinally-informed fides quaerens intellectum, is thereby reduced to an impossible quest for the antecedent possibility of the free truth, the Mysterium fidei, in such wise that the theologian finds himself alienated from the historical tradition precisely insofar as he pursues a systematic inquiry seeking a nonhistorical goal.
This situation, however time-honored, is without justification. Although it reached its current radical impasse only in the late twentieth century, its underlying error, the cosmological dehistoricization of the Johannine Logos sarx egeneto, appeared at the beginning of theological speculation.[15] Already in the latter half of the second century, Justin, Theophilus, Athenagoras, Tertullian and, particularly, Ireneus, had recognized that the object of theological inquiry is historical: viz., Jesus the Christ, the second Adam, at once the eternal Son of the Father and the historical Son of Mary, “one and the same,” whose unity was the commonplace of the faith of the primitive Church, expressed inter alia in a hymnody coeval with the liturgy itself and incorporated in it.
The anonymous authors of these hymns, “sung ‘to Christ as to God,[16] were clearly untroubled by the incompatibility of their faith in Jesus’ divinity with the demands of formal logic. Their faith had been mediated to them by and in their participation in the Church’s radically Eucharistic liturgy, whose affirmation of the divinity of the Son of the Virgin Mary was at one with the recognition of his eternal Sonship. This insight is summed up in Irenaeus’ recognition that Jesus the Christ, the Son of Mary, is the Eternal Son of the Father, “one and the same”─this despite his occasional inadvertent subscription to the dehistoricized reading of the “logos sarx egeneto.” Perhaps before him, Tertullian read the “Logos” of Jn. 1:1 and 1:14 as the title of the historical Son, rejecting the dehistoricization of the Christ which has plagued systematic theology ever since, requiring as it does precisely that theological quaerens be intent upon discovering the antecedent immanent possibility of the “logos sarx egeneto.” It was obvious to Tertullian in the Apologeticus, as to Justin Martyr’s preliminary version of Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses, that the Incarnation, grace par excellence, can have no antecedent possibility: the mystery of the faith is a free revelation, a free gift of free truth, not an inference from anything antecedently known or knowable. Secondly, it is evident that one cannot say of an absolute “immanent Logos” that he “became” anything at all: the possibility of such change is foreclosed a priori by his divine immutability.
The Arian denial of the divinity of the Word was then waiting in the wings. Even when that error was disposed of at Nicaea, the correlative heresies of Nestorius and of Eutyches become inevitable, for each rested on the same pagan postulate: the a priori nonhistoricity of the divine Son, the ‘immanent Logos’ who under no conceivable rationale could “become flesh.”
Despite the stress of Tertullian and Irenaeus upon the Personal identity of Jesus with the eternal Son, the Middle Platonic Logos doctrine overshadowed the patristic interpretation of Jn. 1:14 from the middle of the third century.[17] It educed a proto-Nestorian Christology in some monastic followers of Origen, the “Origenists” misled by the cosmological analysis which cannot accept the communication of idioms in Christ that is foundational for Origen’s Christology. Nonetheless, the Origenist mediante anima Christology, by way of Gregory of Nazianzen, influenced Western Christology through Augustine who, under that influence, understood the immateriality of the human soul to provide the prior condition of possibility of the Incarnation―which can have none.[18] With the ‘reception of Aristotle’ in the thirteenth century, the nonhistorical Logos continued to haunt the theological academy by way of St. Thomas’ assignment of the transcendent unity of the absolute One of Neoplatonism to the One God, the Deus Unus who, as Absolute, could relate to nothing. Thus the Logos, insofar as identified with the Trinity-immanent divine Son, homoousios with the Father and the Holy Spirit, as simply divine, could not “become flesh;” i.e., could not become a historical human Son.[19]
Following Maximus Confessor, St. Thomas could not understand the Son as “consubstantialem nobis,” i.e., with of each of us as human, in such wise as to support the inference that Jesus’ is a human Person―although we may suppose he would be hard put to deny that Mary bore a human Son whose divinity he could not challenge.[20] In any event, St. Thomas’ Christology supposes Jesus’ humanity, which he considers to have concrete existence, to have a merely instrumental role in our redemption; for him, the salvific agency belongs to the non-human, nonhistorical, eternal Word, the hypostasis of the Incarnation, which makes it difficult to grasp how the faith of the Church can affirm that “Jesus is Lord”[21]
In Karl Rahner’s Christology, the same quandary found expression in an adoptionism echoing the Sabellian monism condemned by Pope Callistus early in the third century. Fifty years later, two provincial councils of Antioch condemned Paul of Samosata’s unitarian reading of homoousios with its quasi-Sabellian, adoptionist reduction of Jesus to merely human standing.[22]
It is evident that John the Evangelist’s stress upon the unity of Jesus the Christ against the proto-gnostic Docetic heresy of his time must control any reading of “Logos” in his Gospel, and particularly must control the exegesis of the “Logos sarx egeneto.” The Johannine use of “Logos” is comprehensible only as a title of the historical Christ upon whose concrete unity John was so intent. The Syriac tradition, from Ignatius and Polycarp to Irenaeus, followed the Evangelist’s emphasis upon the unity of Christ. Irenaeus passed on his nuclear summary of the Johannine Christology to the Church as the radical answer to the Gnostic movement: Jesus the Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever, is the “one and the same” eternal Son of the eternal Father and historical, human Son of the Virgin Mary.
The false problem of providing antecedently for the unity of Jesus the Christ, which prior to Chalcedon fascinated the Antiochenes and the Alexandrines alike, and which continues to plague contemporary Christology, rests upon an uncritical, abstract, and nonhistorical exegesis of Jn. 1:14, which presupposes a non-historical, pre-human, divine Logos, an Absolute whose “becoming” flesh (sarx) is impossible by definition, and who by definition can be related to nothing. The time-honored dehistoricization of the “Logos sarx egeneto” by the a priori postulate of the absolute immanence of the divine touches also the “sarx” of Jn. 1:14. This term was understood by the Old Testament tradition as well as by John and Paul to denote concrete participation unto death in the process of disintegration that is existential historical fallenness. The Fathers, under the influence of a Platonizing cosmology, generally read the sarx or caro of this text as abstract “humanity.” Thus, they uncritically understood “Logos sarx egeneto” to be an assertion that the nonhistorical Word became nonhistorical man.[23]
The academic Christological tradition has been content with this systematic absurdity, together with its further implication, the dehistoricizing of the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Holy Spirit, which imports a parallel dehistoricization of the Trinity. The current disinterest in systematic theology, thus methodologically removed from history, is entirely justified. So understood, theology is deprived a priori of its sole possible subject matter, the free historical institution, by the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Christ, of the New Covenant, the New Creation, the full gift of the Holy Spirit by the Son in obedience to his Mission from the Father whereby, “made flesh,” he is, as head of the Church and so of the New Creation, the first fruits of the restoration of free unity to our fallen history.
This restoration, the recapitulation of all things in Christ, taught by Paul in Ephesians and then taken up by Irenaeus to be the center of his Christology, is achieved on the Cross and the Altar, indissociably, by the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, the restoration of free unity to a humanity locked into the necessary disunity of sarx by the fall of the first Adam. Our fallen solidarity with the first Adam is our imprisonment in the sin and death of the flesh; our free solidarity with Christ is our free entry into the free unity of the One Flesh, the New Covenant, the good creation made so by Jesus’ obedience unto death, “death on the Cross,” whose triumph over sin and death is the full gift of the Holy Spirit to the historical Church. Our free solidarity with the second Adam’s victory over death, as the single remedy for our unfree solidarity with the first Adam fall into sin and death, is comprehensible on no other basis than the passage, by faith in Christ, from the fatality of the flesh to the free unity of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the nuptial unity of the second Adam and the second Eve, of the Head and the Body. There is no doubt that this solidarity is ex gratia, but that gratuity remains a merely nominal theological assertion until an intelligible account is provided of the free, historical community in Christo of those thus graced. It is patent that there is no free human community save that which, by its covenantal fidelity, images the free circumincession (perichōresis) of the Trinity, and does so as nuptially ordered: no other intelligible account of human freedom in society exists.
We have seen that egress from theological dead-end posed by the dehistoricization of the Johannine Logos sarx egeneto is possible only by returning to the foundation of the doctrinal tradition, viz., the liturgical affirmation that Jesus is the Lord. This liturgically-sustained dogma of the full humanity and full divinity of Jesus is explicitly affirmed eight times in the Chalcedonian Symbol, whose unitary Christology has been systematically ignored for the more than fifteen centuries since its proclamation. Theological imagination, insofar as locked into a monist and cosmological metaphysics, simply could not then and cannot now understand the liturgical faith-affirmation of Jesus’ Lordship to literally true, i.e., as metaphysically and historically intelligible. Karl Rahner has spoken well for that mentality: for him, our historical experience of “person” is not sacramentally, i.e., liturgically, informed by the nuptial symbolism pervading the Church’s historical worship, and so can provide no basis for attributing subjective selfhood to the Trinitarian “Persons” without lapsing into a tritheism.
However, the Chalcedonian symbol required and continues to require a complete discard of and conversion from that monist mentality, that nonhistorical cosmological consciousness, which the Fathers inherited from the Greeks and which has been sedulously handed on to generation after generation of theology students as though indistinguishable from rationality itself. During the past century Catholic scholars have even come to identify this monist rationalization of history with a supposed “historical consciousness” which they deem indispensable to honest scholarly inquiry―to the point, in at least one signal instance, of praising such “historical consciousness” as the vindication of Modernism.[24] This viewpoint was thought to be the precondition of a properly ‘presuppositionless’ exegesis, and of theological scholarship generally. Not much has changed since then insofar as Catholic theology is concerned, although a certain dissatisfaction with the ideological purity of Modernism has arisen here and there.[25] Today it must be stressed yet again that the Catholic tradition, the paradosis that is at bottom Eucharistic and only on that basis is doctrinal and moral, is the indispensable foundation of the fides quaerens intellectum that theology must be if it is to be Catholic: i.e., if it is to be grounded in history. Only in the ecclesial, liturgical, radically Eucharistic tradition of the historical Truth, the Word made flesh, the “one and the same” Son” proclaimed eight times at Chalcedon, who is Eucharistically immanent in the Church as her Head and thereby the Head of the good creation, does history have the freely intelligible unity presupposed by free historical inquiry. Absent a scholarly commitment to this liturgical mediation of the salvific unity of history, historical scholarship can only deny the intelligibility of history, and will search in vain for an ideal Truth. This disinterest is not a Catholic option: it consists in the refusal of the moral responsibility inherent in the appropriation of intellectual freedom whose single alternative is a humanly unbearable nihilism, soon to masked by an idolatry.
It has been evident since Plato that history has no abstract or ideal unity: historicism is always illusion. Only in the concrete liturgical praxis of the Church’s radically Eucharistic worship do the past, the present and the future find their free synthesis, in the transcendent immanence of the Eucharistic Lord of history, whose transcendence, whose Lordship, is the free integration of the past, the present and the future―of the Old Covenant, the New Covenant, and the Kingdom of God―into the history of salvation. History has no other unity than this, its Eucharistic integration, its consequently salvific significance and efficacy. “Historical consciousness” consists in the free appropriation of this significance, this salvation, in ecclesia, in sacramento.
The historical significance of the Eucharistic presence of Christ has been under-appreciated simply because it has been dissociated from Jesus’ Lordship of history, his headship of all creation: he is thus the Lord of history and the head of creation by his Personal Eucharistic immanence in the history and in the creation which by that immanence he has redeemed. The reaction to Berengarius’ perceived denial of the concrete historical immanence of Jesus in the Eucharist issued in a stress upon the objective or “Real Presence,” but not upon the event-character of that Presence which, as historical and free, nevertheless could not but be that of the Event of his Lordship, his institution of the New Covenant. It even became a commonplace that the Mission of the Son terminates in the Incarnation, not in the institution of the Covenant.[26] It is more than likely that failed efforts of theologians such as Johannes Betz and Alexander Gerken to substitute for it a dynamic “Aktualpräsenz” are reactions to a “Real Presence” thus statically conceived.[27] The Thomist theology of a Eucharistic presence of the Christ “per modum substantiae” is a systematic summation of theology of Eucharistic “substantial change” originally excogitated by Guitmond of Aversa, and the development of that insight into a theology of Eucharistic “substantial presence,” by Alger of Liége and his pupil, Gregory of Bergamo, in order to account for the immunity of the consecrated species from the empirical (“accidental”) changes worked by fallen time and space. We have seen that this had been the purpose of Augustine’s famous Eucharistic injunction, “Spiritualiter intelligite!” uttered seven centuries before Guitmond.[28]
In this medieval development of patristic theology, the immunity of the Real Presence from submission to fallen historicity continued to be understood defensively, as countering, e.g., a vulgar “Capharnaitism,” but not yet positively, as that immunity actually is, viz., the lordly and redemptive transcendence of history by Christ, the head. The Eucharistic liturgy had of course recognized and affirmed Jesus’ Lordship of history from the outset, but medieval and contemporary theologians have given it little theological attention, with the result that the Christ’s Lordship was not understood by patristic and medieval theologians to be Eucharistic, and still is not. Consequently Catholic theologians, failing to understand history to be theologically intelligible precisely as Eucharistically ordered, easily fall victim to views of history which are ill at ease with freedom[29]―although patristic scholars, notably de Lubac, have recognized that order, for it is explicit in an ancient catechetical couplet composed to account for the traditional historical senses of Scripture.[30] Yet the sacramental objectivity of historical reality is the immediate implication of the historical realism of the Eucharistic sacrifice. This sacramental objectivity of history is of course known only by revelation: the freedom of personal historical existence cannot otherwise be known.
The radical, most basic appropriation of this revealed truth can only be liturgical, by personal participation in the concrete recognition and affirmation of the Lordship of Jesus through his Eucharistic Presence to us in the Church’s worship, the priestly offering in his Name of the One Sacrifice. This worship, this Eucharist, grounds all that the Church has taught of Jesus the Christ her Lord who, by his Eucharist Lordship of the Church, is inexorably the Lord of history. Precisely as head of the fallen creation, he is the single source of its free and ordered unity, whose objectivity must in consequence be sacramental, for it derives from his Eucharistic historicity. To repeat: there is no intelligible unity history other than that of which Jesus is the Eucharistic Lord and Head, the Archē of its freely ordered salvific unity, the unity of the Church’s sacramental worship. Attempts to construct an intelligible historical unity, whether “scientific” or ideal, have been obsolete since 1931, when Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems. With their publication, the rationalist optimism of the Enlightenment died. The sole remaining alternative to the historicity of Catholic sacramental realism is the reduction of history to nullity that we find in academic Hinduism and Buddhism and, lately, in some adepts of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
However unlikely the assertion of the sacramental objectivity of the historical order of reality may appear, the quest for a unity necessarily intrinsic to history has never succeeded. Pursued currently in the realm of high-energy physics, it goal remains as elusive as it was for the Pythagoreans. The dominant Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics regards the postulate of the intrinsic unity and intelligibility of the empirical universe as unnecessary, and accepts the consequent dehistoricization of the subject matter of physics, a project difficult to square with the experimental method whose perhaps supreme achievement was to have discovered the quantum of energy in the first place. The philosophical or speculative quest for historical unity has fared no better: it finds itself obliged to choose between asserting the necessary rational unity of being, which immediately undercuts the free integrity of the quest itself or, refusing that postulate, the quest can only to turn in upon itself: one may think here of Husserl’s “bracketing” of all metaphysical interest in order to pursue a rigorously scientific scrutiny of consciousness which, without metaphysical standing, could only disintegrate under the rigors of an analysis whose norms, if not arbitrary, could only be those of immanent logical necessity―whose application, in either case, is merely to beg the phenomenological question of the unity of consciousness.
Despite these rational dilemmas, there is a universally lived persuasion that historical rationality is not only possible but actual in man’s world, a visceral conviction that in this fallen universe we nonetheless live out a personal and communal history which, as human, is free and morally significant here and now simply as rational, as reasonable, as inseparable from concrete personal participation in a free consensus upon the public decencies of a free community.
It is this free and thus moral consensus, weakened but still effective, upon which we must rely to support our personal dignity, however little we may otherwise regard its prescriptions and proscriptions. Whatever our view of a final judgment may be, we learn that the assertion of our own personal dignity, our own indefeasible moral stature as morally responsible members of a free community, is in practice impossible to avoid. Efforts to rationalize it have long shown this claim of personal dignity to be at once irrational and inconvenient, but the human mind is not encompassed by its fallen logic; we all freely reject and in practice transcend such rational necessities, and this for reasons that reason cannot know, as has famously been remarked.
This is our salvation: that while we can confect justifications for a despair of our own significance, we need not, for they affront our self-respect, our personal dignity, and we know at a most profound level that we should not, for only a common intuition that we are made for joy can explain our universal propensity to celebrate our life commemorate our dead.
It is not accidental that the celebration underlying all others should be of our nuptiality.[31] It is finally the Catholic faith in Jesus the Christ that grounds this celebration, for his constitutive exercise of Lordship is his institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the only free community, the only free truth and therefore the only source of beauty that our fallen world can boast and which, as Catholic, we celebrates above all else. This nuptial union, the sancta societas, is the free order of the good creation as redeemed, whereby all things have been made new. This free order is perceived, however dimly, across all human history, as John Paul has emphasized in Fides et Ratio: our human quest for understanding, is indefeasibly historical, and our insistent freedom, our refusal to be accept limits upon the freedom of our own rationality, is sustained only by the transcendent reality of the Mysterium fidei upon which it cannot but be focused, for in seeking the Ultimate, at once the Beautiful and the Good, it seeks Jesus the Lord, our the head, the Lord of history, the source of our freedom. It is thus that, as Augustine knew, our hearts are restless until they rest in him.
The Greek text of the definition of Chalcedon, as published in Denzinger-Schönmetzer *301-*302, is established today. As is there noted (at p. 108) the previously disputed reading of “ek duo physeōn” (out of two natures) in verse 17 has been clearly proven to be “en duo physesin” (in two natures), not only from the majority of manuscripts and from early testimonies, especially the Latin version of Rusticus,[32] but likewise from the deliberations of the Council itself. The Definitio is as follows:
Ἑπόμενοι τοίνυν τοῖς ἁγίοις πατράσιν ἕνα καὶ τὸν αὐτὸν ὁμολογεῖν υἱὸν τὸν κύριον ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν συμφώνως ἅπαντες ἐκδιδάσκομεν, τέλειον τὸν αὐτὸν ἐν θεότητι καὶ τέλειον τὸν αὐτὸν ἐν ἀνθρωπότητι, θεὸν ἀληθῶς καὶ ἄνθρωπον ἀληθῶς τὸν αὐτὸν, ἐκ ψυχῆς λογικῆς τῷ πατρὶ κατὰ τὴν θεότητα, καὶ ὁμοούσιον τὸν αὐτὸν ἡμῖν κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα, κατὰ πάντα ὅμοιον ἡμῖν χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας· πρὸ αἰώνων μὲν ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς γεννηθέντα κατὰ τὴν θεότητα, ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτων δὲ τῶν ἡμερῶν τὸν αὐτὸν δἰ ἡμᾶς καὶ διὰ τὴν ἡμετέραν σωτηρίαν ἐκ Μαρίας τῆς παρθένου τῆς θεοτόκου κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα, ἕνα καὶ τὸν αὐτὸν Χριστόν, υἱόν, κύριον, μονογενῆ, ἐκ δύο φύσεων [ἐν δύο φύσεσιν], ἀσυγχύτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀχωρίστως γνωριζόμενον· οὐδαμοῦ τῆς τῶν φύσεων διαφορᾶς ἀνῃρημένης διὰ τὴν ἕνωσιν, σωζομένης δὲ μᾶλλον τῆς ἰδιότητος ἑκατέρας φύσεως καὶ εἰς ἓν πρόσωπον καὶ μίαν ὑπὸστασιν συντρεχούσης, οὐκ εἰς δύο πρόσωπα μεριζόμενον ἢ διαιρούμενον, ἀλλ᾽ ἕνα καὶ τὸν αὐτὸν υἱὸν καὶ μονογενῆ, θεὸν λόγον, Χριστόν· καθάπερ ἄνωθεν οἱ προφῆται περὶ αὐτοῦ καὶ αὐτὸς ἡμᾶς ὁ κύριος Ιησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐξεπαίδευσε καὶ τὸ τῶν πατέρων ἡμῖν καραδέδωκε σύμβολον.
Denzinger-Schönmetzer *301-02, p. 108.
1. Sequentes igitur sanctos Patres [= therefore following the holy Fathers]
2. unum eundemque confiteri Filium [= one and the same Son is to be confessed]
3. Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum [= Our Lord Jesus Christ]
4. consonanter omnes docentes [= we teach with one voice]
5. eundem perfectum in deitate [= the same, perfect in Godhead]
6. eundem perfectum in humanitate [= the same, perfect in manhood]
7. Deum vere et hominem vere [= truly God and truly man]
8. eundem ex anima rationali et corpore [= the same (consisting) of a rational soul and a body]
9. consubstantialem Patri secundum deitatem [= consubstantial with the Father according to his divinity]
10. et consubstantialem nobis eundem secundum humanitatem [= and the same consubstantial with us according to his humanity]
11. per omnia nobis similem absque peccato, [= made in all things like us, without sin]
12. ante saecula quidem de Patre genitum secundum deitatem [= begotten of his Father before the worlds as to his divinity]
13. in novissimis autem diebus [= in these last days]
14. eundem propter nos et propter nostram salutem [= the same, for us men and for our salvation]
15. ex Maria Virgine Dei genitrice secundum humanitatem [= (conceived) of the Virgin Mary the Mother of God as to his humanity]
16. unum eundemque Christum Filium Dominum unigenitum [= This one and the same Jesus Christ the Lord, only-begotten Son]
17. in duabus naturis [= in two natures]
18. inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivise, inseparabiliter agnoscendum, [= must be confessed to be (in two natures) unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably (united)]
19. nusquam sublata differentia naturarum propter unitionem [= and nowhere is the distinction of the natures taken away because of the union]
20. magisque salva proprietate utriusque naturae [= but rather the property of each nature being preserved]
21. et in unum personam atque subsistentiam concurrente [= and being united in one Person and subsistence]
22. non in duas personas partitum sive divisum [= not separated or divided into two persons]
23. sed unum et eundem filium unigenitum [= but one and the same only-begotten Son]
24. Deum verbum dominum Jesum Christum [= God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ]
25. sicut ante prophetae de eo [= as the prophets of old, concerning him]
26. et ipse nos Jesus Christus erudivit [= and as Jesus Christ himself has taught us]
27. et patrum nobis symbolum dedit. [= and as the Creed of the Fathers has delivered to us.]
DS §*301-*302; the English translation is a literal rendition of the Latin; see Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers; Second Series, 14: The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church. Their Canons And Dogmatic Decrees Together With The Canons Of All The Local Synods Which Have Received Ecumenical Acceptance. Edited With Notes Gathered From The Writings Of The Greatest Scholars by Henry Percival, M.A., D.D.
It is clear that the Fathers of Chalcedon would never have composed a special symbol (creed) unless compelled to it by the Emperor Marcian who, at the first session of the Council, expressed through his commissioners his firm desire of a clear expression of the faith of the Church in opposition to the contemporary errors. The Bishops insisted that no new symbol could be made, but that they must stand by the faith of the Fathers. The Symbol of Nicaea, the Symbol of Constantinople, Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius, his letter “Laetentur coeli” [Let the Heavens Rejoice] to John of Antioch with the Formula of Union, and Leo’s Letter to Flavian [variously called The Dogmatic Letter, The Tome of Leo, etc.] were read with shouted acclamation by the Bishops, who proclaimed it “the faith of the Fathers, of Cyril, of Leo, of the Apostles.”
However, three passages in Leo’s letter were objected to by certain bishops who had just come over from the side of Dioscorus, including the “for he acts by both forms” of the later symbol of Chalcedon. Theodoret of Cyrus pointed out parallel passages in Cyril’s letters, and almost all agreed that Leo and Cyril were in accord. The Patriarch Anatolius of Constantinople and the Papal Legates undertook to explain the Leonine doctrine to the doubting Bishops, until they agreed.
Then the Patriarch Anatolius and a commission drew up a symbol which contained none of the important elements of Leo’s letter, and used instead the phrase “out of two natures.” This aroused great opposition and the Roman legates threatened to withdraw.
The Emperor then commanded that a commission be picked to retire into the chapel of St. Euphemia and draw up a symbol to which all could agree; otherwise he would transfer the Council to the West. When the Bishops continued with their protests, the Imperial commissioners placed before them the dilemma: Do you follow Dioscorus (out of two natures [one]) or Leo (unconfused and undivided and inseparable)? The Bishops shouted for Leo, and the commission was chosen to make the definition in accord with his teaching. The result was the Symbol of Chalcedon.
The investigation of the internal structure of the symbol reveals the fact that the Fathers of Chalcedon, though apparently acceding to the Imperial wishes, have in fact stood by their refusal to draw up a new symbol. For the Symbol of Chalcedon is a mosaic, based chiefly on the three letters mentioned above, and the Symbols of Nicaea and I Constantinople, together with a few minor sources.
Verses 2, 3, 5, & 6 repeat almost word for word the beginning of the Formula of Union.
Verse 7 shows an evident dependence on the formula of Leo “He who is true God, the same is true man.”
Verses 8-15 are almost word for word from the Formula of Union, though in a different order.
Verse 16 elaborates slightly the “one Christ, one Son, one Lord” of the Formula of Union.
Verses 17-18 are the two verses from Leo’s letter ---in duabus naturis [= in two natures] inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivise, inseparabiliter agnoscendum, [= must be confessed to be (in two natures) unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably (united)]―whose inclusion in the proposed symbol of Anatolius was insisted on by the Papal Legates and the Imperial commissioners.
Verse 19 is, except for the “nowhere,” directly from Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius.
Verses 20-21 are a slight variation of a clause of Leo’s with the important addition of “and one hypostasis” to the “one prosōpon” of Leo’s letter. This added phrase is a contribution of the Profession of Faith of Flavian, the former Patriarch of Constantinople, which had been read at the Council in connection with the trial of Eutyches.
Verse 22 closely resembles a phrase of a letter of Theodoret of Cyrus, and may be his, since he was present at the Council, though not on the Commission.
Verses 23-24 are a repetition of verses 2-3 with the addition of “only-begotten” which had been omitted in verse 2.
Verses 25-27 are the concluding formula composed by the Fathers of the Council.
Thus the final definition is a happy recapitulation of the Christological formulas of both Oriental (Greek & Syrian) and Western (Latin) Fathers. It is also to be noted that since the majority of the quotations are from Cyril’s letters, the later rejection of the Council by the Monophysites as anti-Cyrilline was unjustified: Theotokos doctrine of Chalcedon was only a repetition of that upon which Cyril had insisted at Ephesus against the Nestorian diophysism. But Dioscorus in particular read this doctrine as a concession to the Antiochene insistence upon the full humanity of Jesus, thus as Cyril’s departure from his consistent emphasis upon the unity of Jesus the Lord, whose Person he had understood to be the divine Logos, whose relation to a human nature was “notional,” i.e., conceptual rather than actual.
The distinctive characteristics of the Symbol of Chalcedon are its simplicity and synthetic vigor. In contradistinction to other Symbols or official credal formulae, it does not present a summary of the entire economy of salvation. Rather, by way of complement to the Symbols of Nicaea and Constantinople, it deals only with a doctrine then controverted: the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, and the duality of his natures. Although the Council of Ephesus had emphasized the identity of the Son of God with the Son of Mary, and the identity of the divine Logos with the man, Jesus, two things still remained obscure: (1) the kind of unity which unites God and man in Christ, and (2) the terminological expression of this unity.
The original contribution of the Symbol of Chalcedon consisted in a synthesis of the definition of Ephesus with the clear post-Ephesus expressions of both East and West (The Formula of Union and Leo’s Tome) concerning the duality of natures, effected by emphasizing the duality of the fullness of humanity and of divinity which remained perfect and unchanged even given their union in one Person, one Prosōpon (Ρρόσωπον) or Hypostasis (Ἡυπóστασις).
The significance of the formula of Chalcedon is to be found in the fact that in short, classical terms a distinction was elaborated which enabled the duality of Jesus the Christ, as well as his Personal unity, that of “one and the same Son,” to appear clearly. By the incorporation of the concept of hypostasis (in close connection with that of prosōpon) and the simultaneous separation of this concept from the Greek term, physis,(φύσις), the “natura” of vv. 17, 19, and 20, it was linguistically possible to reject both the Monophysist blending and the Nestorian separation of the humanity and divinity of Jesus in a clear and unequivocal manner: Jesus the Christ is a single Person, as the Ephesian Formula of Union had already indicated.
The mediator of the Chalcedonian Christological synthesis between (a) Leo’s formula, (b) the Christology of the Antiochenes, and (c) the doctrine of the Council of Ephesus, was the Formula of Union (433), probably composed by Theodoret of Cyr for the Antiochenes in protest against the Apollinarian flavor of the anathemata in Cyril’s Third Letter to Nestorius. The Formula was accepted by Cyril in his Letter to John of Antioch, for it affirmed the one thing necessary, the full humanity and the full divinity of Christ the Lord in according to his mother the title of Theotokos. The incorporation this Formula into the Chalcedonian Symbol manifested the Council’s approval of the terminology of the Antiochene school, which was almost identical with that of Leo and the West.
While the Council of Ephesus had not spoken of the Son as consubstantial with us in our humanity, the reality of his consubstantiality with us was certainly affirmed in the Conciliar approval of the Theotokos title for Mary. This was a crucial doctrinal development: while directly intending to assert the full divinity of the Son, Jesus the Christ, employing the Cyrillian ‘communication of idioms’ to that end; that doctrinal insight entailed also what Chalcedon would define, the Son’s consubstantiality with us, for the communication of idioms which affirms Mary’s motherhood of God is metaphysically grounded by his Personal community in the human substance of Theotokos, which can only be his consubstantiality with her, and so with us, for the homoousios of Jesus with the Father demands a common subsistence in the numerically same substance. This unity of the divine substance is alone consistent with the full divinity of Jesus the Son; the unity of the human substance is alone consistent with his full humanity. It is obvious that the definition of Jesus’ consubstantiality “with us” requires a radical revision of the “anthropological turn” characterizing post-Vatican II Christology.
However, the hostility of the Monophysites to the ‘two natures” Christology of the Formula of Union continued. Upon Cyril’s death in 444, Dioscorus had succeeded to the See of Alexandria. Here, abetted by the monk Eutyches, he had resumed and lead a fierce opposition to the diophysism of the Formula of Union: specifically to the assertion of the full humanity of Jesus the Christ, which he identified with adoptionism.
The post-Ephesian reviviscence of Monophysitism under these quite virulent auspices prompted a misapprehension of the task before them. Some few among the Fathers at Chalcedon were under the impression that their task was to achieve a reconciliation of the Alexandrine and the Antiochene rationalizations of the Incarnation, each of which supposed the pre-human Logos to be the subject of Jn. 1:14, and thus to be the subject of the Incarnation. The heirs of the Antiochene Logos-anthrōpos Christology and of the Alexandrine Logos-sarx Christology alike took for granted that the primary task of Christology is the rationalizing of the historical immanence of the supposedly non-historical Logos.
The logic of this mistake had driven the extremists in each school into heresy. From this dilemma there was in fact no exit. In brief, it supposed that Jn. 1:14 taught that the non-human Logos became man in an abstract sense, not that the historical Jesus of Jn. 1:1, Jn. 1:14, I Jn. 4:2, and Phil. 2:6-7 became flesh, assuming that “form of a slave” which characterizes our fallen humanity. As Bouyer’s survey of biblical scholarship has shown, in the Marcan, Lucan and Johannine Gospels “Logos” is a title of Jesus the Christ: no other interpretation of that word has scriptural support.
In a critical moment in their deliberations, and under pressure for a decision from Emperor Marcian, the Fathers at Chalcedon chose to ignore this false problem, and to proceed to give doctrinal expression to the faith of the Church in Jesus the Christ, the Lord of history, as fully human, fully divine, and one Son, one Lord, one subsistence in two irreducible, unmixed and inseparable substances, by which unique Personal subsistence who is Jesus the Lord is consubstantial with the Father and with us.
This faith that Jesus is the Lord, whose dogmatic foundation had been laid at Nicaea, had been challenged by the Nestorians who were condemned at Ephesus. Eighteen years later, at the “Robber Council” of Ephesus, the faith affirmed at Nicaea and again at Ephesus was challenged by the Monophysite rejection to the Formula of Union. The Monophysites would reject also the Symbol of the Council of Chalcedon as unresponsive to their insistence upon a unity of nature in Jesus rather than the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ. The effective dismissal by the Fathers at Chalcedon of the nonhistorical, cosmological interpretation of the Logos of Jn.1:1 amd 1:14 underlying both of these aberrant Christologies has continued to be incomprehensible to theologians of the West as well as of the East, in such wise as to lead them to question the “reception” of the Symbol, with the implication that its doctrine is in some measure debatable until approved by a theologycal consensus―which after fifteen centuries is still to be sought. This assessment of Chalcedon as a failure is made by theologians still under the fascination of a supposed need to provide for the prior possibility of the ‘hominization’ of the nonhuman Word, the prior possibility then of his becoming historical, his becoming flesh.
It remains true however that the project of reconciling these irreconcilable solutions to a false problem, viz., that of resolving the supposed “aporia” of the Chalcedonian Symbol, which in fact constitutes the basic mystery of the faith in the Lordship of Jesus, did not interest the authors of the Symbol. In acclaiming the stress of Pope Leo’s doctrine upon the historical Jesus the Christ, they dismissed the alternative abstract and nonhistorical academic concern for the historicization of a dehistoricized Logos. Those theologians who still insist upon reading Jn. 1:14 as did the Nestorian and Monophysite heretics, i.e., as a statement about the non-historical Word, the ‘immanent Son,’ labor over a puzzlement unknown to the Apostolic tradition, which knows nothing of a Logos other than Jesus the Christ, the Son of the Father, who for our sakes became flesh.
Taught by the Councils of Nicaea, I Constantinople, and Ephesus, by the Tome of Leo and the Formula of Union, the Fathers at Chalcedon affirmed with the Council of Nicaea the full divinity of the one and the same Son, and his consubstantiality with the Father. They affirmed with the Council of Ephesus and the Formula of Union the Son’s full humanity, and finally, they affirmed that which the confusion underlying the recent Christological debate had made difficult to conceive, the concretely historical personal unity of Jesus the Christ, the One and the same Son of the Father and of Theotokos. This unity could only be Personal, for “Son” is a Personal Name, as Irenaeus had recognized two and a half centuries earlier. Thus, Irenaeus’ formula, “one and the same” became the leitmotif, the dominant theme, of the Symbol of Chalcedon.
The Symbol identifies the “one and the same Son” with Jesus the Christ. Having asserted what it will reaffirm throughout, the unity of Jesus’ Sonship, i.e., of his Person, the Symbol proceeds, in vv. 5-8, to reaffirm the doctrine of Nicaea and Ephesus, i.e., that Jesus is fully divine and fully human. Then, in the balanced clauses comprising vv. 9 & 10, the Symbol contradicts the monist metaphysics of personal “subsistence” by affirming the Son’s consubstantiality at once with his Father and with us (“consubstantialem nobis”―“ὁmooύsioν ἡmῖn”). The consubstantiality of the Son with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and with us, implies his consubsistence with the persons, divine and human, with whom he is consubstantial. This is inescapable, and is given at least implicit recognition in v. 21: “et in unum personam atque subsistentiam concurrente” [= and being united in one Person and subsistence]. The Symbol uses the Nicene term, “homoousios,” of the Son’s divinity and his humanity: this word, thus firmly established well prior to I Constantinople, affirms the numerical unity of the divine substance in which Jesus subsists as one and the same Son; applied to that same subsistence of the Son in humanity, it establishes the numerical unity of the multipersonal human substance.
Academic resistance on the standard cosmological grounds to the consequent free substantial unity of the human community of which Jesus is the Head and Archē has issued in debates over whether the Fathers understood that term as Athanasius had understood it, i.e., as asserting a numerical unity of the divine substance―as though the Fathers at those Councils were afflicted with polytheistic proclivities which cannot be proven to have been overcome in the Conciliar definitions. These academic doubts, still the stuff of scholarly publication, are without theological significance, for neither Nicaea, I Constantinople, Ephesus nor Chalcedon taught theology or intended to solve the cosmological problems of Arius or Apollinarius or Nestorius or Eutyches. The Conciliar concerns were always soteriological, which is to say liturgical and hence doctrinal: to require that they should have provided a via media between competing theologies is to place the magisterial office in an entirely alien academic context.
Because of the clear incompatibility of Jesus’ subsistance at once in divinity and humanity, with the substantial monism of the human person as taught by the classic theological metaphysics, v. 9 of the Symbol has been widely misinterpreted and v. 10 has been given a minimalist application. The homoousion of the Son with the Father has often been read, and still is being read, as by Karl Rahner and his disciples, in a monist sense which: identifies the Father with the divine Substance and entails a modalist theology of the Trinity, while the homoousion of the Son with us in our humanity (consubstantialem nobis) has uniformly been read as though it were simply a nominal repetition of the doctrine of the full humanity of Jesus taught at Ephesus and affirmed by the Fathers at Chalcedon in vv. 5, 6, and 8, instead an assertion of the Son’s Personal consubstantiality “with us,” a doctrinal affirmation requiring the subsistence of a plurality of persons in the one human substance in which Jesus is consubstantial in the only manner possible to him who is its head: that is, precisely as our head, consubstantial with us as the Father, the head of the Trinity, is consubstantial with those of whom he is the head, i.e., the Son and the Holy Spirit. The substantial unity of humanity is quite as fundamental to Jesus’ consubstantiality with us as is the substantial unity of divinity to his consubstantiality with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Clearly, this consubstantiality with us in our humanity requires that community in the unique human substance which consubstantiality with the Father and with the Holy Spirit requires of the unique divine Substance. We are long accustomed to the Nicene assertion, bizarre as it seemed to those theologians steeped in the Platonic and Aristotelian cosmologies, of three divine persons subsisting in the same and therefore single divine substance, but we must remember that the reception of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son by the homoiousian Cappadocians required thirty-eight years (325-363) and even then only in the sense of its assimilation to the homoiousian doctrine of Basil of Ancyra; much as Hilary of Poitiers misunderstood ‘homoousion’ in his De synodis.
Quite as Jesus’ consubstantiality with the Father is not his identification with the divine Substance in which he subsists; neither is his consubstantiality with us his identification with human substance in which also he subsists. He is “consubstantialis cum nobis,” i.e., with the plurality of human persons, precisely as he is consubstantial with the plurality of divine Persons: i.e., with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, for the same word, homoousion, is used to designate both consubstantialities. From this, we must infer that concrete distinctions between the divine Persons and the divine Substance which are real in the Trinity also concretely distinguish human persons from the human substance in which Jesus, like us in all things save sin, also subsists precisely as we do, for he is homoousios hemin (ὁmooύsioν ἡmῖn): i.e., “consubstanial with us.”
Thus, just as his consubstantiality with the Father is also his consubstantiality with the Holy Spirit, so his consubstantiality with the Theotokos, as her Bridegroom, her head, is his consubstantiality with every human person, for he is the head of the human substance as the Father is the head of the divine Substance, the Trinity. In short, headship, as it is attributed by Paul in I Cor. 11:3 to the Father, to Jesus, and to the husband, refers in each case to the Personal source of the free unity of the substance of which the head freely subsists.
This doctrine simply eliminates any theological reliance upon the classic metaphysics of substance wherein the identity of each person, each “intellectual supposit,” with a distinct substance, divine or human, is taken to be a matter of definition. The doctrine of the Son’s subsistence in two “natures” or substances, viz., in divinity and in humanity, eliminates the commonplace monist identification of each human “person” with subsistence in a personally unique human substance. Insofar as the Church’s doctinal tradition is concerned, there is no monadic human substance just as there is no monadic divine substance. Fifteen centuries after its solemn definitionm, contemporary Catholic theologians continue to find the communitarian reality of the human substance incomprehensible.
Nonetheless, just as Jesus subsists in the divine Substance, as does the Father, and as does the Holy Spirit, with each of which Persons the Son is consubstantial, so Jesus subsists in the human substance, as does Theotokos, and as do all of us, with each of whom he is consubstantial. The Symbol of Chalcedon demands an entirely historical Christology, Trinitarian theology, and anthropology, conformed to Jesus’ consubstantiality with each of us, as our Head, as sent by the Father.
This dogmatic fact, ignored by the regnant theological anthropology from its promulgation down to our own day, and currently threatened by modalist Trinitarian speculation, can no longer be ignored, given the recent magisterial assertion of the nuptiality of our imaging of God, which reminds us of what has long been forgotten, that the human substance is not monadic but as created is a free and nuptially-ordered community, and that only as thus substantially constituted by our creation in Christ do we image the free Community, the divine Substance, the Triune God.
The Chalcedonian Symbol requires a theological restatement of human substantiality, a restatement of theological anthropology consistent with the subsistence of the Son in the human substance, and consequently with his consubstantiality “with us”. This restatement must take seriously, for the first time, the dogmatic fact that Jesus the Christ is the Head, in the sense set out in I Cor. 11:3-16, Col. 1:17, Eph. 1:10 and 5:21-33, of the human substance in which he uniquely subsists. This free human substance cannot be other than the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the New Creation instituted by his obedience “unto death” to his Mission from the Father, the accomplishment of which is his plenary gift of the Holy Spirit, on the Altar and the Cross inseparably, to the Bridal Church and, through her, to the New Creation, wherein the fragmentation of our fallenness and that of the world is undone, and all things are made new in Christ, the Head.
It is by and in this subsistence “with us,” his consubstantiality with us as our Head, that he is the Redeemer, for it is only by his subsistence in human substance as its Head that he is the source of the free, substantial unity of that humanity in which he subsists in free community, free consubstantiality, “cum nobis.” The meaning of Headship as revealed in Christ is to be the source of free substantial unity. We must infer, from Paul’s identification in Eph. 1:10 of our redemption by Christ as an anakephalaiosis, that the authority and office of the Head, whether as the Father, as Jesus the second Adam, or of the husband, is to be the source of the free unity of the substance of which he is the head: i.e., of the Trinity, of the free substantial unity of the redeemed humanity which as free, the marital One Flesh: As has many times noted in these volumes, this doctrine is set out by Paul with nuclear density and clarity in I Cor. 11:3.
Paul’s emphasis upon the headship of Christ in I Cor. 11:3-16, Col. 1:15ff. and Eph. 1:10 is at one with his stress upon the nuptial unity of Christ and the Church; his victory over death is the fulfillment of his Headship, for it is precisely as its Head that he restores to humanity the primordial free unity of the Good Creation: this restoration is Jesus’ sacrificial institution of the nuptial unity of the substantial One Flesh, by entry into which we are delivered from our sarkic disintegration: this passage from the fallen fragmentation of our flesh to the gift of free community on the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church is at once is our liberation and our redemption.
Only the exercise of the office of headship by Jesus the Christ makes this salvific solidarity theologically comprehensible, but not apart from a novel theological conversion to and systematization of the free and substantial unity of redeemed humanity, a unity which can have only a sacramental objectivity, for it is only as Eucharistically represented that Jesus, the risen Lord, is the Head: he has no other post-Resurrection historicity than this, whereby he is Lord of history. It must be stressed that historical freedom is mere irrationality in any nonsacramental context: to this, the ongoing exorcism of political freedom by the insistently secular jurisprudence taught by nearly all the major American and English law faculties over the past several decades offers an all too eloquent witness.
Theological anthropology must abandon any notion of human unity derived from sources incompatible with the Symbol of Chalcedon, which requires that Catholic theology come to terms with the free unity of the human substance in which our Lord freely subsists, ‘with us.”. This free unity is precisely nuptial, that of the One Flesh, whose concrete historical objectivity is Eucharistic: the One Sacrifice instituting the One Flesh of the New Covenant in which terminates the Mission of Christ. The insoluble problem of providing for sexual differentiation within the unity of the classic (Aristotelian-Thomist) anthropology must be abandoned as simply alien to Chalcedon and radically incompatible with the doctrinal tradition: its evident incoherence, manifest in the tension between the concrete individual and the abstract “species,” should have long since forced its theological rejection. This permanent tension between monadic man and his community, simply the anthropological expression of the perennial pagan and neopagan dilemma of “the one and the many,” has been eliminated by the revelation of the free, nuptially ordered unity of the good creation that is good, and intelligible, only as created and sustained by the historical immanence of the head, Jesus the Christ, the Archē of humanity. Only in Jesus the Christ, by his Mission from the Father, have we come to be. We are created in him by the Gift of the Holy Spirit, the Spiritus Creator, whom by his One Sacrifice he has poured out upon his bridal Church, whereby she is freely One Flesh with him. The immanence of Jesus the Lord, the Head, in his Good Creation, his New Covenant is historical, his salvific exercise of his Eucharistic Lordship of history.
To enter into this redemptive historicity is to accept, to appropriate personally, its free nuptial order, that unity of which our Lord has said that what God has joined man may not put asunder. This created unity of the One Flesh is the unity of humanity, of the New Creation: it cannot but be substantial, and free, for it is Eucharistically sustained.
The time-honored theological dissociation of creation from the Trinitarian Mission of the one and the same Son is simply without theological justification: it is a radical mistake, regardless of its antecedents. It contradicts the Catholic faith in Jesus the Christ as the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega, whose Lordship is identically his Eucharistic transcendence of our fallenness by his sacrificial exercise of his headship, whereby the free unity of the One Flesh is restored to a world doomed to the “dust” of death by the first Adam’s refusal of that free exercise of the headship, of the nuptially-ordered responsibility, offered him “in the Beginning,” in Christo. [34]
Jesus’ headship is victorious over sin and death; thereby it is also victorious over the dilemmas of fallen rationality, which knows no free unity and cannot but fragment and disintegrate all it touches in its vain quest for a necessary unity, whether in our fallen history or out of it. Within the realm of doctrinally-informed metaphysics, which is to say, of Catholic systematic theology, the “good news” is the revelation of the one free unity upon which all the redeemed universe depends, viz., the substantial One Flesh of Christ and the Church, by whose institution on the Cross and the Altar, inseparably, all things are made new. Thereby alone creation is good and very good.
It is hardly necessary to repeat here what has already been established in detail: that the historical objectivity of substantial unity can only be sacramental: no other free historical unity or objectivity exists. To choose to exist in another and false historical unity nonetheless is to prefer the necessary disunity and dynamic disintegration proper to “the flesh” to the free unity of the One Flesh of the New Creation, the New Covenant, the New Creation, restored by the One Sacrifice of the head. As has long been taught, in the Old Testament as in the New, this is simply a preference for death over life.
The long-delayed theological recognition of the doctrine of Chalcedon requires the development of the radically transformed, historicized anthropology already implicit in Veritatis splendor, which has become increasingly explicit in later papal pronouncements, and which reaches yet fuller clarity in the recent document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World.”[35] This Letter reaffirms what has long been recognized, viz., that the doctrine of the creation of man and woman to the image of God is foundational for theological anthropology, which cannot but pivot on our creation to the image of God. The Letter refers to humanity as “a relational reality,” a term easily misunderstood, for the relation is intrinsic to the reality, intrinsic then to the human substance: the Letter does not affirm a merely nominal reference of our humanity to the Creator as if in abstraction from the Trinitarian Missions.
The rejection by the Fathers at Nicaea of the quasi-Aristotelian, monist distortion by Arius and his allies of the Trinitarian faith of the Church should have forestalled from the outset the theological anthropologies of Augustine and St. Thomas, as Josef Ratzinger wrote over forty years ago,[36]
Augustine failed to understand that the intra-substantial relational reality assigned to the Trinitarian Persons by the Nicene proclamation of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, and later, its application to the Holy Spirit, whose full divinity was taught at I Constantinple, is applicable as well to the human condition, particularly to the human imaging of the Trinity. He assumed the relational meaning of “Person” in the Trinity to be exceptional, i.e., unique to the Trinity rather than normative for human persons as well.
In thus restricting personal inter-relationality within a free intellectual substance to the Trinity, Augustine imposed upon theological anthropology the monopersonal and hence dehistoricized notion of the substantial human imaging of God, with a consequent implicit reduction of Trinitarian theology to the Sabellian dimensions upon which Rahner has been insistent.
The Chalcedon Symbol’s definition of the Son’s human consubstantiality “with us” is a dogmatic dismissal of this classic monist anthropology, but it is only with Pope John Paul II’s development of his “theology of the body” and, specifically, with his doctrine of our nuptial imaging of God, that the implications of the Chalcedonian anthropology entered into common theological parlance. Even now, its radical theological implications are largely ignored if not refused a priori, for they are inassimilable to the still-regnant Thomist metaphysics, short of its radical conversion to historical freedom by its submission to a historical prime analogate capable of grounding the free truth and free reality of sacramental objectivity: that prime analogate can only be the substantial One Flesh of the Eucharistic institution of the New Covenant.
St. Thomas followed Augustine’s monist notion of created substance, with its consequent monadism of the human person. This monism requires that each human person be understood, as by Plato and Aristotle, by St. Augustine, and as later by St. Thomas, to exhaust the substance in which he subsists. Augustine’s subscription to this postulate should have prohibited his recognition of metaphysical permanence of the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church, which he recognizes by ascribing to it the unity of “una persona,” although recognizing the intrinsic unity, the “one flesh,” of the personal correlation between bridegroom and bride. He thus recognized the unity of a created free substance, but did not understand that unity to be substantial; he labeled it “una persona.” The difficulty was resolved at Ephesus and Chalcedon, too late for Augustine; whose failure to refer the relational character of the Trinitarian Persons to the human condition Cardinal Ratzinger appears to have been the first to notice. The monist postulate, integral to the pagan historical pessimism, and disseminated by a mythology whose dualism had been internalized for millennia throughout the classic cultures, explains the patristic incomprehension of the emphasis of Gen. 1:27 upon the nuptial imaging of God.
St. Thomas’ anthropology only echoes the Fathers’ incomprehension of the Genesis creation accounts of a good because nuptially ordered creation, a doctrine in flat contradiction to the classic metaphysics, Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic, which were no more than rationalizations of the dualism characterizing the mythologically-formed consciousness pervading the pagan Mediterranean and Indian cultures. During these first three centuries of the Christian era, the pre-Christian philosophies melded into the Middle and Neo-Platonism integral to the education of most of the more sophisticated of the Fathers down to the close of the patristic age.[37] Their reliance upon this final expression of pagan wisdom was passed on to the Latin West by Boethius and, centuries later, by Peter Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences, which educated Christian theologians through the close of the Middle Ages. By then, the Thomist synthesis had begun to dominate theological metaphysics in the Latin world, and continues to do so: such rival theologies as those of Duns Scotus and Francis Suarez are governed by the same metaphysical monism as St. Thomas.
This predilection for the monism of the human substance as created in the image of God prevented theological recognition of literal truth of the affirmation in Gen. 1 of nuptial order of our imaging of God, with the result that its implication of the free nuptial unity of the human substance could not be understood. Karl Barth was the first to perceive this error and propose as its correction the restoration of the literal sense of the biblical text, two decades before John Paul II began the exposition of his nuptially-ordered “theology of the body,” and just in time to encounter the feminist antipathy to that revelation.[38]
Catholic theological anthropology must now be rethought in terms of its conversion to the substantial character of the nuptial imaging of God, as set out in first and second chapters of Genesis, and to Pauline application of Gen 2:24 to the One Flesh of Christ and the bridal Church, implicitly in I Cor. 11, explicitly in Eph. 5. The nuptiality of our imaging of God was given doctrinal standing by the final statement of John Paul II’s “theology of the body,” his “Apostolic Letter on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.” Theological anthropology must recognize the created image or analogue of the Trinity in the One Flesh which, in Genesis 2, is revealed to be the crown of creation, that by which it is good and very good. Failing this conversion, the “turn to anthropology” so much promoted of late must become what in too many precincts it has already become, the submission of the imaging of God to a political praxis.[39]
Once it is recognized that the free unity of the nuptial covenant of Christ and the Church in One Flesh is the perfection of creation, in which the Holy Spirit is fully and definitively given, it is possible to understand that the primordial fall of man, “in the beginning,” issued in our human solidarity with the refusal of that perfection, of that free unity, and a lapse into “the flesh:” the unfree, necessary disunity and fragmentation of man and his world whose single finality is death, symbolized by the ashes with which we are signed at the beginning of each Lent as a memento mori. With the fall thus understood as entailing our solidarity with the refusal of the first Adam, our redemption cannot be other than the restoration, in sacramento, of that lost free unity, the nuptial One Flesh of the New Covenant instituted on the Altar and the Cross by the obedience of the second Adam to his primordial Mission by the Father which, “in the Beginning,” i.e., in Jesus the eternal Son of the Father, the historical son of Mary, transcends all creation, for creation is in Christ, who is, precisely, “the Beginning.”
It is then evident that the free, covenantal, human substance, the New Covenant, must be understood to be the substantial terminus of the full gift of the Holy Spirit, i.e., the terminus of the Mission of the Son, and thus understood as the image of God, is the nuptially ordered Trinity-imaging, substantial community of the second Adam, the second Eve, and the New Covenant, which their free nuptial unity has constituted. Only this transcendentally free unity can image the supremely free Community of Father, Son and Spirit that is the Triune God. In our fallen history, this nuptial imaging can only be liturgical, i.e. sacramentally achieved, primarily in the Eucharist, secondarily in Matrimony. Further, unless we put this imaging at the beginning of our Trinitarian theology, explicitly acknowledging the nuptial freedom in which each of us images God, we shall not escape the monism which even today haunts Trinitarian theology.[40]
It is further impossible to grasp the free unity of the Trinity and of its human image without invoking the Pauline doctrine of headship, apart from which the analogy between the Trinity and its image is without historical foundation: this is the radical flaw of the classical Trinitarian theology.[41] In I Cor. 11:3ff. Paul ascribes headship to the Father with respect to his Glory, his Son who proceeds from him, Jesus the Christ. The Father is in union with his Son, the Christ, in the Holy Spirit who is their subsistent Love: the Trinity is their perichōresis, their free dynamic substantial unity. Paul ascribes headship secondly to the Christ the Son, whose glory is the Church, the second Eve, who proceeds from him as from her Head, and with whom he is One Flesh/ This is their irrevocable and therefore Personally subsistent Covenant, incapable of being identified with either the Bridegroom or his Bride, and therefore, consubstantial with the Christ and with his bridal Church.
Finally, Paul assigns headship to the husband, whose glory is his wife, who proceeds from him, and with whom he is in union in the marital “one flesh,” which proceeds from him through her, as their subsistent and irrevocable marital bond, consubstantial with both.
In sum, headship is always either Trinitarian or Trinity-imaging; in each instance, headship imports the subsistence of the head in a free substance of whose free unity he is the source, in a free intimacy with those of whom he is their consubstantial source. This free intra-substantial intimacy is always dynamic: a circumincession, a perichōresis, whose prime analogate is Trinitarian, and whose created analogues are revealed, in Christ to be nuptially ordered. The historical objectivity of our consubstantial intimacy with Christ our head is of course liturgical and sacramental; its concrete expression is the Eucharistic worship of the Church, the celebration of the One Sacrifice by which the One and the same Son fulfilled his mission from the Father in his High Priestly offering of himself as the One Sacrifice, whereby his headship is achieved, our fallenness redeemed, and his Kingdom opened to us.
Free substance, thus understood as constituted by an immanent exercise of headship, consists in a free community of the personal subsistence of the head in a free unity, a community either Trinitarian or Trinity-imaging, of whose freedom he is the immanent source. The primary Trinity-imaging created substance is the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church: this is the substantial New Creation in which our Lord, by reason of his headship of his bridal Church, is consubstantial with each of us.
Within our Eucharistically-ordered subsistence in ecclesia, sacramental marriage is in turn the dynamic image of the One Flesh, of the New Covenant. In marriage, the husband is the source of the free unity of his union in one flesh with his wife, while himself subsisting in it: as the Father does not transcend the Trinity, nor does the Christ transcend his One Flesh with the Church, so neither does the husband transcend his own nuptial union with his wife.
The Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord issued in the Nicene decree of his Personal consubstantiality with the Father, a consubstantiality which, as Personal, could not but be human as well as divine: this is the doctrine of the Council of Chalcedon. The revelation in Christ’s life, death and Resurrection of this foundational Reality, his personal subsistence in the Triune God and in our humanity, is the basic mystery of the faith, in which all others are contained and realized. It is the single subject of theology, of the fides quaerens intellectum, the ancient beauty who is forever new. upon whose splendor, by his grace, may we gaze forever.
The head is the source of all free substantial community: viz., the Father, of the Trinity; the Son, of the Eucharistically-ordered New Creation, and the husband, of the marriage whose free, substantial unity images the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, and thereby the Triune God. In each exercise of headship, the head is the source of the freedom, the perichōresis, of the substantial community that proceeds from him through his glory, and does so precisely from the head. Thus, the Father’s union with the Son is the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son; the Christ’s union with the Church is the One Flesh that proceeds from him through her; the husband union with his wife is in the marital one flesh that proceeds from him through his wife, as in Gen 2:21-4 (cf. Jn. 19:34). The Sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church is the institution of the New Covenant by which we are redeemed and freed in Christ. In fallen history, this freedom is objectively exercised in our fidelity to the Covenant established by the One Sacrifice of Christ. This fact has implications for Catholic spirituality, particularly for the meaning of our divinization as a reality inseparable from in our consubstantiality with the risen Christ, which have not been explored: here it must suffice to repeat that these implications are radically incompatible with the latently antisacramental inferences which spiritual writers past and present have drawn from Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs.
In the Captivity Epistles Paul asserts Christ’s headship of the Church who is his bridal Body, and asserts as well the Christ’s headship of all creation, assigning to that headship, in Eph. 1:10, the role of a reunification, Irenaeus’ anakephalaisasthai panton, the restoring of all things in Christ, the head, the source of the Gift of free unity―for there is no unfree unity, neither in God nor in his fallen creation―redeemed and fulfilled through the Gift of the Holy Spirit. Within our fallen history, freedom cannot but be a gift: it is actual, objective, in our history only by the Eucharistic immanence of the risen Lord of history, who transcends history as its Beginning and its End.
Each of Paul’s accounts, in the Acts of the Apostles, of his vision of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, recites our Lord’s identification of himself with the Church. There our Lord informs Paul that in persecuting the Church, he persecutes the risen Christ. This Christ-Church unity, which in Eph. 5:21-33 Paul identifies with the “one flesh” of Gen. 2:24, cannot be understood to be a Personal identification of Christ with the Church. Rather, inasmuch as in I Cor. 11:3 the prime analogate of headship is the Father’s begetting of Jesus, the Son, and his outpouring, through the Son, of the Holy Spirit, its prototype and pattern of requires that the head be the intrinsic source of a free, substantial community. It is thus proper to the head that he subsist in a free substantial community, as the Father’s subsists in the Trinity, as Jesus the Son subsists in the created image of the Trinity, the One Flesh of the New Covenant, or as the husband subsists in the one flesh of the sacramental marriage which images the Trinity through its imaging of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church. As has been pointed out heretofore,[42] it is also proper to the head to name the substance in which he subsists as its head: this is the implication of headship, and so is much more than a linguistic idiosyncrasy.
The head is personally distinct from but in free personal union with the Glory which proceeds from him as head: Jesus the Christ, the Son, is the Glory of the Father; the Church is the Glory of the Christ; the woman is the glory of her husband; Paul even goes so far as to see a woman’s hair, which proceeds from her to be so much her glory as to require its veiling―her failure to veil her glory is for Paul to have denied it, for in the fallen world, all glory is veiled, even that which is Christ, whose veiling is his crucifixion, while the Church, his glory, is veiled by her fallenness, semper reformanda and, with her, the glory of all creation is veiled (Rom. 8:19-25).
Christ, as obedient to his Mission from the Father, “unto death, even to death on the Cross,” as Paul stresses in Phil. 2:5:12, exercises there the fullness of his headship. In his sacrificial death the Church has her origin, for she proceeds from his side as the second Eve, as his glory, the glory which, primordially, was his before the world began but which in fallen history is veiled, having only a sacramental visibility and objectivity: that of the Mater dolorosa, that of the Church of sinners. The unanimity of this universal patristic interpretation of Jn. 19:34 as the allegorical fulfillment of Gen 2:21-14 still awaits theological recognition.
The banalization of Christ’s headship has been a sort of cottage industry among exegetes as well as among dogmatists, who agree in reducing the “anakephalaiosasthai,” or “to recapitulate” of Eph. 1:10 to a metaphorical resumé, a merely nominal summing up, without metaphysical weight. This reading is already latent in the “instaurare omnia” of the received Latin translation.[43] The biblical dictionaries and the current commentaries on Ephesians unanimously ignore the foundation of this term in the doctrine of Christ’s headship taught in I Cor. 10-11 and deployed in Col. 1:15 and Eph. 1:10, preferring a derivative use of term such as that wherein the Old Testament Commandments are resumed or summed up in the NT command to love God beyond all else, and one’s neighbor as oneself.[44]
This exegetical trivialization of the recapitulation worked by Jesus’ One Sacrifice cannot but trivialize also the Trinitarian headship of the Father. Further, it fails to understand the Fall as precisely Adam’s refusal of the office of headship, although only this interpretation of Adam’s original sin can account for the fragmentation which the Old Testament and the New assign to the fallen condition, sarx, or the “flesh”, and to its universality. The linkage between the first and the second or last Adam is precisely the primordial refusal of a proffered headship by the first Adam, for only the remedial, redemptive, crucifying and sacrificial acceptance and exercise of headship by the second Adam can account for the parallel between the world-historical universality of the effect of the first Adam‘s sin and world–historical universality of the efficacy of the offering of the second Adam’s redemptive sacrifice on the Altar and the Cross, inseparably.
No event in the Catholic doctrinal tradition is of more decisive significance than the proclamation at Nicaea of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, for this term asserts at once the unity of God and the full divinity of the Jesus the Christ as the only-begotten Son of the Father. The Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father set the stage for the development of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, concluding respectively at I Constantinople with the proclamation of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, and at Chalcedon with the proclamation of the full divinity, full humanity, and Personal unity of Jesus, one and the same Son of the Father and of the Theotokos. The dogmatic import of this development, at once Trinitarian and Christological, cannot be understood apart from a full appreciation of the meaning of “homoousios” as established at the Council of Nicaea, where Athanasius, then a deacon but already theological advisor of his bishop Alexander, convinced the assembled bishops that meeting the Arian challenge to the Church’s faith in the divinity of Jesus the Christ required a dogmatic recognition of his Personal consubstantiality with the Father: nothing less precise would serve[45]
At the Council of Nicaea, only the divinity of the Son was in issue, for neither Arius nor Athanasius, nor any of the assembled bishops, had any doubt of the unity of God. In fact, such objection as was raised, whether during the Council or in the four decades following it, to the use of homoousios to underwrite the divinity of the Son rose out of a fear that it had a modalist consequence, an identification of the Son with the Father: it occurred to none of the orthodox bishops, nor to their Arian antagonists, that its use implied “two gods.”
However, subsequent historical scholarship has questioned whether the Nicene Fathers understood the Nicene ‘homoousios’ to affirm the absolute numerical unity of the divine substance.[46] This numerical unity had been a Western emphasis, but it was not at peace with what seemed to be the tritheistic implication of the alternative Eastern stress, at once Eastern and Western (by way of Tertullian’s Apologeticus) upon the irreducible distinction between Father, Son and Spirit―which in turn did not at all stand in the way of the affirmation by the Western Fathers as well as of the Eastern, of the unity of the One God. Only Arius and his sympathizers, beset with speculative rather than soteriological concerns, considered the divinity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit to threaten the unity of God. The conviction of the divine unity was of course inseparable from the Church’s liturgical worship of the One God; it did not wait upon a theological vindication, nor did the liturgical distinction between the names of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit taught in the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19.
The Conciliar approval of the homoousion of the Son with the Father would be echoed by Athanasius’ insistence in the Tome to the Antiochenes upon the homoousios as alone adequate to affirm the divinity of the Son while upholding the unity of God. No bishop present at Nicaea is recorded as having upheld a tritheism: in this they had no argument with Arius; they knew as well as he that there cannot be a multiplicity of divinities: the one God is indivisible, unique, beyond all categorization: it is absurd to read into their approval of the homoousios of the Son a relativizing of the unity of God.
The liturgical expression of the Catholic faith in the One God was the indispensable prius, the pre-condition and the cause, of the Conciliar effort to reconcile the divine Unity with the divinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The liturgical mediation of the Church’s faith is simply the Church’s inerrant worship in truth: even its indispensable homiletic dimension is not theological but magisterial for, while the bishops exercise a liturgically grounded oversight of theology, their oversight is doctrinal, not academic; their preaching is inseparable from their primary liturgical responsibility for the Church’s worship in truth. Neither speculative nor provisional, it is dogmatic, even apodictic.
It is then beside the point to look to the Nicene Fathers for a theological account of their understanding of “homoousios”. As bishops, meeting in what would soon be recognized to be the first ecumenical council, understood the doctrine they had proclaimed at Nicaea to be a fulfillment of their responsibility for the Church’s worship in truth, an obviously liturgical responsibility. Therefore, meeting in the Council, they recognized and responded defensively to the heresy inherent in Arius’ effort rationally to disintegrate the Trinitarian faith of the Church, which had from the outset been explicit in the baptismal liturgy, and yet more radically affirmed in their preaching of the Father’s Mission of the Son to give the Holy Spirit. At Nicaea, the bishops reaffirmed the truth of the Church’s liturgical worship of her Lord: thus their affirmation of his divinity met a most basic episcopal responsibility for the truth of the Church‘s faith that Jesus is the Lord. Their reliance upon the inerrant truth of the Church’s worship found expression in a conversion of the metaphysical language of the Greek and Latin cultures, for that pagan metaphysics, exploited by Arius, was unable to accommodate the liturgical expression of the faith of the Church, and gave way before it.
“Homoousios” opened the way for a conversion of classic metaphysics which is as yet incomplete, and, in this fallen world, is likely to remain so. The academy is ever reluctant to accept the radicality of the theological conversion of its subject matter; rather it seeks spontaneously an academic autonomy which alienates it from the free unity of the faith. The supposetion that philosophy and theology are to each other as nature and grace, with a cause-effect priority in nature, is an ancient instance of this tendency, which had already reached an extreme form in fourth-century Arianism.
Those bishops who mistakenly understood their office to be speculative and theological rather than liturgical and doctrinal, who accepted with Arius the criteriological authority of a pagan Greek metaphysics rather than the Church’s liturgical mediation of the truth of Christ, had barred themselves, a priori, from grasping the import of “homoousios:” viz., the dogmatic compatibility of the unity of God with the divinity of the Father and the Son. They carried their confusion with them, and broadcast it so effectively that Jerome remarked, of the denunciation of Athanasius by a dissident council held at Rimini in 359, that “the world groaned and was amazed to find itself Arian.” But two years later, during a respite in the persecution of the Pro-Nicene orthodox following the death of Arian Emperor Constantius in 361, and prior to Julian the Apostates’s succession to the throne, it became evident that the tide had turned. In the provincial Council of Alexandria, called immediately by Athanasius upon his return from exile early in 362, he attempted to win over the “homoi-ousians,” (whom Epiphanius of Salamis had unwarrantably dubbed “semi-Arians,”) to his own firm conviction that only the Nicene doctrine of homoousion of the Son was adequate to and consistent with the orthodox faith in his divinity. While Athanasius’ irenic Tome to the Antiochenes failed of its object, and the homoiousions retained their resistence to the Nicene Creed, its reaffirmation by the First Council of Constantinople put them out of court. While Arianism lingered on for another two centuries in Gothic territories in the West, with the death of Auxentius, the Arian bishop of Milan, and the accession to his See of Ambrose, Arianism soon ceased to be a threat to the unity of the Church .
The resistance of the conservative “homoiousion” bishops to the use of “homoousios” to uphold the divinity of the Son was partly due to its previous modalist exploitation by Paul of Samosata two centuries earlier, and by the Sabellians fifty years before him, but for the most part they had been persuaded by Eusebius of Caesarea that the Nicene definition of the homoousion of Jesus with the Father was inherently Sabellian. When Athanasius demonstrated to them, by his De synodis, that the Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father was the sole means of avoiding the hetero-ousianism of the radical Arians, the homoiousian disciples of Basil of Ancyra had to choose between their Eusebian loyalty to the authority of the emperor over the Church, or the Church’s independence of the empire. The “choice” was entirely abstract, for their loyalty to the emperor was not discussable. The Nicene definition of the homoousios of the Son and his irreducible distinction from the Father was intelligible only in the context of the Church’s faith in the One God, the Trinity, which the Eusebians had immediately dismissed as Sabellian. Consequently, the Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, the two Gregories, of Nyssa and of Nazianzen, and Amphilocius of Iconium, (to whom Basil addressed his De Spiritu Sancto), had to decide whether to accept the Nicene Creeds definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, and its corollary, the substantial unity of the Trinity―which entailed the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit―or to remain in the subordinationist stance of Basil of Ancyra. On this they divided. Basil of Caesarea and his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa, remained loyal to their homoiousian antecedents. Gregory of Nazianzen and Amphilocius upheld the Nicene Creed, and went on to defend it at the First Council of Constantinople, to whose presidency Gregory succeeded upon the death of Meletius of Antioch. Basil died the year before that Council met, but had retained the misunderstanding of the homoousios first set out in his Ninth Letter. In the Council of Antioch, called by the homoiousian Bishop Meletius in 363, he accepted the Nicene homoousios, but only as assimilated to the homoiousios.
Loyal to binitarianism of Basil of Ancyra, Basil of Caesarea never attributed to the Holy Spirit even this confused notion of the homoousion, While it is clear in his De Spiritu Sancto that he was in no doubt about the Holy Spirit’s divinity, he never accepted that divinity as hypostatic, i.e., as Personal. His hesitation to do so has been described as rather diplomatic than doctrinal, but it is far more likely to be due to the continuing influence upon him of the homoiousian refusal to recognize the distinct divine hypostasis of the Holy Spirit, impressed upon him long before by Eustathius of Sebaste. However, well before the Council, Eustathius had become Basil’s bitter enemy by reason of Basil’s upholding the divinity of the Holy Spirit as the obvious implication of his Trinitarian standing. Eustathius went on to lead the Arian Pneumatomachians, who would be condemned at I Constantinople. Despite his death the year before, Basil’s latent homoiousianism afflicted the deliberations of the Council which, despite the urging of Gregory Nazianzen, refused to ascribe the Nicene homoousion of the Son to the Holy Spirit, although, like the Council of Nicaea, it affirmed the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. However, the incorporation by I Constantinople of the Nicene Creed’s inclusion of the Holy Spirit in the objects of the Church’s faith bars any homoiousian reading of its affirmation of the divinity of the Holy Spirit who, as the object of the Church’s worship, which cannot but be Personal. After the Council, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzen, particularly the latter, undertook the explanation of the distinction between the Trinitarian hypostases. Gregory of Nazianzen was the lone Nicene among the Great (i.e., older) Cappadocians, to set out his Trinitarian doctrine and its attendant Christology. This he did in his five Theological Orations, 27-31, while Gregory of Nyssa began to develop a Trinitarian theology in which the Persons might be distinguished by way of their Personal origin; this project was baffled by the Father’s lack of a Personal origin, and by a failure to develop Amphilocius’ suggestion that the Persons were distinguished by their mutual relations.[47] This insight was arrived at by Augustine, whose De trinitate completed its development thirty years later, perhaps informed by Amphilocius' suggestion.
Consequently, “Homoousion” does not appear in the decrees of the second ecumenical council, I Constantinople (381): specifically, it is not said of the Holy Spirit, although that Council defined the full divinity of the Holy Spirit against the Arian “Pneumatomachians” (i.e., Spirit-fighters—the Alexandrine version were also designated “Tropici” by Athanasius. in view of their allegorizing whatever doctrinal statements got in their way) who explicitly denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit on the same grounds upon which they based their denial of the divinity of the Son: viz., that in the final analysis the Holy Spirit must be a creature because He is distinct from the Father who, following Arius, they identified with the monadic Godhead, the divine Substance.
Neither does homoousios appear in the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus (433), wherein Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is proclaimed to be thereby the Theotokos, the Mother of God: this against Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople whose opposition to the use of that term by his clergy drew the attention of Cyril of Alexandria and led to Nestorius’ condemnation by this third ecumenical Council, a condemnation confirmed by Pope Sixtus III. In neither of these Councils was the unity of God in issue: the dogmatic compatibility of the One God with the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and their irreducible distinction, had been resolved at Nicaea, and was not questioned after re-affirmation of the Nicene Creed by the Council of I Constatinople.
It is therefore surprising at first glance that the homoousios should be used twice in fact at Chalcedon to affirm the Personal unity of Jesus, for both the contesting schools of Christology, the Alexandrine monophysites and the Antiochene diophysites, affirmed the full divinity of the Son; his numerical consubstantiality with the Father. The Son’s homoousios with the Father and the Holy Spirit was not in issue, yet the Fathers at Chalcedon found the term equally indispensable to their magisterial affirmation of the full humanity of the Son, in whom humanity is created. While it is evident that the Son must be of one and the same substance as the humanity of which Jesus the Christ is also the head, for it derives solely from him, the Council of Chalcedon relied rather upon Irenaeus’ teaching that Jesus the Christ is “one and the same” which the Symbol eight times affirms of Jesus the Son of the Father and of the Virgin Mary,. Only the “homoousios cum nobis” of Jesus, the one and the same Son, could adequately affirm the fullness of his humanity, as only his homoousios with the Father, his Head, could affirm his full divinity.
In both applications, “homoousios” relies upon the communication of idioms first spelled out by Cyril of Alexandria in his three “Letters to Nestorius.” This ‘communication of idioms’ supposes distinct personal subsistence in identically the same substance by personally distinct subsistences, viz, the Father, San and Spirit in the Trinity, and the second Adam, the second Eve, and their Covenant in the One Flesh, the human Image of the Trinity which, as Imaging the substantial Trinity, must be substantial. Mary is the Theotokos because she is consubstantial with her Lord, for they both subsist in the numerically same human substance, their One Flesh, quite as Jesus is Lord because he subsists in numerically the same substance as his Father, consubstantial with Him.
The Council of Chalcedon had been called to deal with the challenge to Christological and Eucharistic orthodoxy posed by the extreme Eutychean interpretation of the Logox-sarx Christology, whose rationalization, after the death of Cyril,. amounted to a refusal of the full humanity of Christ, and thus a challenge to the faith that Jesus is the Lord quite as direct as the Arian denial of his divinity in the previous century. The Fathers at the Nicene Council had agreed with Athanasius that the definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father was essential to the Church’s faith in the Son’s divinity; now it would be recognized that the Son’s human consubstantiality with ourselves is equally indispensable to the faith that Jesus is Lord.
The personal subsistence of Jesus in the Trinity as One and Same Son may sound rather odd to theologians accustomed to the standard accounts of the Nicene Council, for in those recitals of the Arian controversy the homoousion of the Son with the Father is too often presented nonhistorically, as though the debate touched the Incarnation only tangentially, i.e., only by reason of the assignment by Arius to his diminished logos of the role of the hegemonikon, effectively the intellectual soul of Jesus the Christ. Much of this dehistoricization of the Logos by historians is the consequence of the Arian heresy itself: Arius, with his allies and sympathizers, understood the logos in cosmological terms and thus as immaterial and nonhistorical. This proto-Apollinarian reading of the Logos as the non-human Son was deliberately chosen by the Arian party, whose dehistoricization of Jesus was part and parcel of their denial of his divinity and of course of the Trinity.
However, the Nicene Council affirmed the divinity of Jesus the Christ, the subject of the Synoptic Gospels, the Logos of the Prologue of the Gospel of John whose divinity Arius denied. Only this Logos, the one and the same Son, whose subsistence in divinity and humanity is the object of the Church’s faith, and so of the doctrine of Nicaea. The Fathers at Chalcedon wrote his subsistence in divinity and humanity eight times into their Symbol. Thus it is Jesus the Son of Mary and of the Father, whom Irenaeus was first to recognize as the “one and the same Son,” who subsists in the Trinity by reason of his consubstantiality with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, and who, by the same unique Personal subsistence in our unique humanity, our indivisible human substance, is “consubstantialem nobis” (ὁμοούσιον τὸν αὐτὸν ἡμῖν).
It is important to understand that Jesus is not consubstantial with the divine substance, the Trinity: that is, Jesus is not Personally identified with the Trinity: thus put, the fact is obvious. As subsistent in the Trinity, receiving the Father’s full divinity as the Son, his consubstantiality is Personal, with the Father as his Source. As the Father’s Glory, the One Son is also consubstantial with the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father through the Son and so is the Holy Spirit of their Love, consubstantial with his Source, as the Source is with the Holy Spirit. This circumincession of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is the divine Trinity, the divine Substance in which each Person subsists in the divine Order (τάξις) whose created Image is Jesus’ institution of the New Covenant: thus the Trinitarian circumincession is imaged in the New Covenant, the New Creation, the nuptial human Image of the Triune God.
The most immediate impact of the Chalcedonian Symbol upon Catholic Christology is its flat rejection of the dehistoricization of Jn. 1:14 which has been thought by Catholic theologians to require that one choose between a “high” or “descending” Christology―whose project henceforth must be to explain how the divine Logos, the object of the Church’s faith, could “become” historical and human ―and an “ascending” Christology, a “Christology from below,” whose task henceforth must be to explain how a historical human being, Jesus, the object of the Church’s faith, may be identified with the eternal Son of the Father. Both projects entail an explanation of the prior possibility of the Mysterium Fidei, and neither have a future.
These dehistoricized Christologies, the final implications of the Logos-sarx school on the one hand, and of the Logos-Anthnropos on the other, suppose the Incarnation to involve a reconciliation of the divinity and the humanity of Jesus. Clearly enough, such a reconciliation is possible only by a denial of his divinity or his humanity. This dilemma arises out of the supposition, common to both schools, that the prius of Christological speculation that the eternally-begotten Son of the Father, as eternal, must be nonhistorical, and therefore is the “immanent Logos,” with the consequence that the first task, even the single task of Christology is to account for the truth of the Prologue’s “logos sarx egeneto.” This supposition arises out of a Middle Platonic reading of the Logos sarx egeneto of Jn. 1:14 which . Within that abstract philosophical context, the Incarnation required a union of divine and human natures, which is impossible. That recognition that Christ’s unity might be on another level than that of “nature” had been obscured by a theological controversy in the years between 444, the death of Cyril of Alexandria, between the monophysite rebellion of Dioscorus and his aged ally, the abbot Eutyches, against the Nestorian assertion of the full humanity of Jesus and consequent denial of his divinity. Christological speculation, having exhausted the two approaches to its false problem, came to a dead end in the middle of the fifth century. The falsity of the pre-Chalcedonian Christological problem may be very simply stated: both schools supposed the subject of Christology, the Logos of Jn. 1:1 and Jn. 1:14, to be nonhistorical, whereas the subject of the Church’s faith is the historical Jesus, the Christ, the Eucharistic Lord.
A rigorously systematic development of the “high” Christology can only conclude in a monophysism . A comparably rigorous emphasis upon a “Christology from below” finds itself unable, with Nestorius, to affirm that Jesus is the Lord. These failures are inescapable for as long as the “subject of the Incarnation,” the eternal Son of the eternal Father, is taken to be the “Trinity immanent” or nonhistorical Logos. Both are failures to solve a false problem, that of explaining the prior possibility, which is to say, the intelligibility as measured by autonomous rationality, of the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord. Among the Fathers prior to Chalcedon, Bishop Theophilus of Antioch, the layman Athenagoras of Athens, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Irenaeus and, in the next century, Origen, avoided this dilemma by adhering to the historicity of the apostolic tradition, i.e., to the historical faith of the historical Church.. Like his eminent predecessors, Irenaeus was not interested in the extrapolation of the Incarnation from a Middle Platonic Logos doctrine; his Christology centered upon the historical second Adam, the object of the Church’s apostolic faith, who is therefore at once God and Man, one and the same Son of the Father and of the Virgin Mary. The reliance of Chalcedonian Symbol upon Irenaeus’ understanding of the historical Jesus as “one and the same” is an index of the historicity of its doctrine. The Council of Chalcedon rejected the ancient dilemma of the one versus the many to affirm the full divinity, the full humanity, and Personal unity of the man Jesus, who is the Son of God and of Mary, the Theotokos..
Unfortunately, the dilemmas posed by the dehistoricized Logos still occupy Catholic dogmatic and systematic theologians who; with rare exceptions, have systematically ignored the dogma of Chalcedon, which summarily rejected, by refusing to recognize it, that perennial false puzzlement which, in Antioch and in Alexandria, had continued to challenge the Church’s faith that Jesus is Lord. The Fathers at Chalcedon refused to concern themselves with the nonhistorical, cosmological inquiry of the Antiochene and Alexandrine theologians into the ideal, nonhistorical conditions of possibility of the Incarnation. Instead, they affirmed with Irenaeus the historical faith of the historical Church in Jesus the Lord, who is the sole subject of their Symbol because, as sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit, Jesus the Lord is the sngle subject of the Church’s faith. Thus they ignored the “immanent Son,” of whom the Church knows and has known nothing. Whatever is not revealed in and by Jesus the Christ is not the faith of the Church.. The Fathers at Chalcedon, instead of supposing their task to have been set by the scholasticism of the disputing schools of Alexandria and Antioch, taught with precision the historical consubstantiality of Jesus with the Father and with ourselves. Thus and only thus he is “one and the same Son,” at once of the Father and of the Theotokos, for it is as the one “Son” that he is consubstantial with both in a unity which can only be Personal, because it is in the Person of the one Son, an obviously personal Name.
The Thomist denial that Jesus is a human Person is the most drastic of the cosmologically-inspired mistakes afflicting contemporary Christology. Its implications are set out in Pars Tertia of the Summa Theologiae. Their refusal of the historicity of Jesus the Lord can be transcended only by the conversion of theological quaerens intellectum to the historicity of the faith which alone sustains that quaerens, and which should be its object. The cosmological quandaries accepted by the classic Thomist Christology have been beside the point since the Council of Chalcedon, whose Symbol proclaims that Jesus, as Personally consubstantial with the Father, subsists, as does the Father, in the divine Substance, the Trinity and subsists also in the human substance, as Personally consubstantial “with us.” Jesus is the head of the created and therefore substantial humanity which images the Trinity solely by reason of Jesus‘ subsistence in it, for it is created in him. The Catholic liturgical-doctrinal tradition knows nothing of the subsistence in the Trinity of an “immanent Son,” and nothing of a “composite” Jesus. It is as Personally human that Jesus subsists in the Trinity and as Personally divine that he subsists in humanity. Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity, is the human Son of the Τheotokos and the divine Son of the Father, “one and the same Son.”.
However, the Chalcedonian return to the most concrete datum of the faith, the concretely historical personal unity of Jesus the Lord, has hardly been noticed by systematic theologians, who continue to regard the Symbol’s dismissal of the false problem posed by Nestorianism and Monophysitism, as a failure to meet the challenges to the faith which, supposedly, it was called to resolve, viz., that of arranging beforehand for Jesus’ historicity as the Lord,. Despite theologians’ confusion, ecumenical Councils are not called to resolve theological disputes. The bishops’ competence is doctrinal, not theological. Their authority is liturgical and thereby magisterial; it is not academic. When a theologian such as Arius is condemned by the Magisterium, it is for doctrinal deviation, not for theological incoherence.
The explanation for theological non-reception of the Chalcedon Symbol is simplicity itself: a common refusal to accept the historicity of Catholic theology as such, viz., a failure if not a refusal to recognize that, as its subject is the historical Jesus the Lord, so also must theological quaerens intellectum be historical. The spontaneous turn of theologians to a cosmologically-necessary dehistoricization of “the subject of the Incarnation” is finally indistinguishable from the Protestant denial of the historical mediation of salvation. This systematic refusal of the historicity of the Logos, the denial of his Personal humanity, long instinctive to systematic theology, has since the late nineteenth century succeeded in depriving scriptural exegesis of any doctrinal or moral interest, which is to say, of any religious interest, the inevitable fate of sola scriptura.
There can be no question of Jesus’ human Sonship, for he has a human mother and a human Name, Jesus. His Person, that of the Son, unites his full divinity and his full humanity: his Sonship, therefore, is at once human and divine: he is one and the same Son. The Chalcedonian Symbol, in refusing both the monophysite and the diophysite problematics, which are alike grounded in the rational impossibility of discovering a cosmological (i.e., abstract, nonhistorical) compatibility between essential divinity and essential humanity, defined the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, the One and the same Son of the Father and of the Theotokos, and his consubstantiality with both. He, and not an “immanent Logos,” must be the object of theological inquiry if it is to conform to the Catholic faith.
In sum, Chalcedon’s stress on the Personal union of divinity and humanity in the one and the same Son refuses the presupposition which ground both the Nestorian and the Monophysite heresies as well as their contemporary analogues. The Council’s repeated stress upon the historical reading of the “one and the same Son” is not a rejection of Jn. 1:14, but rather is a refusal to read it as for three centuries it had been read, i.e., as a statement about the nonhistorical “immanent Logos.” The New Testament’s Logos, the object of the Church’s faith and of the Chalcedonian definition, is the historical Jesus, the “one and the same Son” of Irenaeus’ Christology, at once the eternal Son of the Father and the historical Son of Mary, the Mother of God. This proclamation of the ancient faith of the ancient Church demands an intellectual conversion from cosmological necessity to historical freedom as the precondition for undertaking the quaerens intellectum that is Catholic theology; without it, the pseudo-theologian can only wander in the monist maze which trapped the Antiochene and Alexandrine theologians of the fifth century, and continues to entrap their heirs today. The eternal Son of the eternal Father is the subject of the Father’s Mission of the Son into the world, which by that Mission is created in the subject of that mission, Jesus Christ the Lord. Thus Jesus has a Beginning; in fact he is the Beginning and the Beginning is primordial, freely unfallen in the primordial nuptial union in One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve. The primordial Jesus the Lord offered this free nuptial union to the first Adam and first Eve, who refused it in that rejection of free unity which is Original Sin, and which is the Fall from free unity into necessary disunity―for no unfree unity exists.
The nonhistorical reading of the Johannine “Logos sarx egeneto” as the “hominization” of the “immanent Son” must also dehistoricize the kenōsis of Phil. 2:5-12, wherein Paul, adapting an ancient hymn as also did John the Evangelist in composing the Prologue to his Gospel, recites the same primordial Event as does the first verse of the Prologue, viz., the Beginning, in which the primordial Jesus, for our salvation, entered into our fallenness, into our fallen world: “he emptied himself, taking the “form of a servant,” or, in John’s idiom, he ”became flesh”[48]..The Pauline language understands Jesus the Christ to be the fulfillment of the Servant Songs of Deutero-Isaiah: Jesus, the One Son, became the Servant of all, that he might save at least some. It is evident that the Jesus here in view is the primordial second Adam, whose primordiality is that of the Johannine “Alpha,” of the Pauline “Beginning.” It is he who, consubstantial with us as our head in obedience to his Mission to give the Holy Spirit, could not but enter into our fallen servitude, into the imprisonment imposed upon us, as the Epistle to the Hebrews teaches, by the fear of death, the wages of sin. “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Lk. 24:26).
With the fall, the Father’s Mission of the Son, of the head, the source of creation, in whom we are created, is therefore that of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. Thereby his Mission became a Mission also of redemption and liberation, of restoring the freedom of the sons of God which had been foregone by the sinful rejection by the first Adam of the headship offered him, the rejection consequently of that pristine nuptial freedom offered Adam and Eve “in the Beginning.”
“In the Beginning” refers, not to the initial moment of fallen history, but to the immanence in the unfallen creation of the primordial Christ, of the Head in whom “we live and move and have our being.” It is he, in Person, whom Paul identifies with “the Beginning,” as John Paul II has emphasized.[49] It is he, as our Head, who is the source of the free unity, of the nuptially-ordered One Flesh, the free order of the Good Creation whose rejecttion by the first Adam and first Eve was the original sin, the efficacious cause, by which death entered the world of man and the good creation fell into the immanent necessity of the fragmentation which pervades the time and space of the fallen universe. The primordial refusal by Adam and Eve of the free nuptial unity in “one flesh” (Gen. 2:24) was the choice of the necessary disunity, the intrinsic dynamism of the fallen creation toward disintegration and death. This is the existential situation, the “flesh,” into which Jesus entered by the fact of his Headship; by that same mission of Headship, by that same obedience, “unto death, death on the Cross,” he became the redeemer prophesied in the Protoevangelium (Gen. 3:15).
It might be supposed that Jesus, himself sinless, might have taken upon himself, as the Servant, the role of headship rejected by the sin of the first Adam, thereby to become the second Adam, the head of the good creation which, with the first Adam’s refusal of the headship offered him, was without the free unity proper to it. Submitted by that refusal to its inexorable consequence, the fragmentation of the order of creation, the “flesh” which Jesus had became by reason of his free immanence in humanity as its Head, could only proceed to the yet further fragmentation whose finality is his Personal death: the utter dissolution to which he submitted in obedience to his Mission, which could no longer be simply creative, the giving of the Gift of the Spiritus Creator, freely to have been received by the first Adam and Eve, but made redemptive by their refusal, for the Gift could now be given only by conquering the “last enemy,” the death which is the sign of our fallenness. This he did by offering his One Sacrfice on the Altar at the Last Supper, and upon the Cross, inseparably. His redemption of the Good Creation is the “recapitulation” to which Paul refers in Ephesians, and is of course the work of the second Adam, whose restoration of free unity, the One Flesh, to the fallen creation could not but be the work of its Head: free unity has no other source than the Bridegroom of the Bridal Church.
However, this scenario may fail sufficiently to stress what must be stressed: viz., that the first Adam and first Eve were not the source of the nuptial freedom which they refused. Their refusal was in fact the refusal of a Gift, that Gift which Jesus had been sent to give, the Spiritus Creator. He offered it as their Head: only thus could the Gift have been offered; only thus could it have been refused. That free and sinful refusal was of a free Gift, not of an option immanent in their finitude: the first Adam and the first Eve refused the free nuptial unity of their one flesh, the free order of the Good creation, apart from which reality has no unity, no goodness and no truth. The Good Creation continues to exist only by the immanence in creation, from the Beginning, of Jesus the Lord, who is the Beginning and the End of the history that is made salvific by his Event-immanence within it, that of the Eucharistic respresentation of the One Sacrifice of Christ, the institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant. ..
Here it is essential to grasp the meaning of the primordiality or pre-existence of Jesus the Christ; it is a most neglected datum of the faith, undercut by the commonplace assumption that it is as the non-human “Trinity-immanent Son” that Jesus is preexistent, and consequently that his pre-existence is simply that of God: a pre-existence ab aeterno rather than the primordially created pre-existence of Jesus, the subject of the Incarnation, of the Son of Man, of the Bread from Heaven, of the Man from Heaven, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.
This dehistoricization of Jesus’ pre-existence is an immediate implication of the cosmologically dehistoricized reading of the Johannine Logos sarx egeneto which, rejected since Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras of Athens, Tertullian, Hippolitus and Irenaeus in the second century, and by Origen in the third, has tempted Catholic theology ever since. It has been pointed out that it is of the first importance that this dehistoricizing temptation continue to be rejected. Its crippling impact upon Catholic theology is all too evident. Its dehistoricization of the primordial pre-existence of the Redeemer renders unintelligible the indispensable doctrine of original sin and the fall, as more than one contemporary theologian has insisted.[50]
According to both John and Paul, the pre-existence of the Christ “in the Beginning,” immediately rules out the identification of his primordiality with a divine eternity─which by definition cannot begin. While it has been clear since the Council of Nicaea that the begetting of the Son by the Father is from eternity, and so has no “beginning,” his Mission by the Father is “The Beginning” which in Genesis 1 opens the account of the Good Creation, and cannot but refer to that primordial event of a Good Creation which, nonetheless, is from its first moment fallen: there is no unfallen history and no unfallen creation.
Creation as such, as Paul insists in Romans 8:19-22, is in solidarity with that primordial dissolution, “waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” All creation fell with the first Adam, as all of it is redeemed from its consequently immanently necessary destruction by the second Adam’s re-bestowal, as its Head, of the Gift of the Holy Spirit, creating the free unity, the nuptial order of the One Flesh, by which alone creation can be good and very good, by which alone it can image the free unity of the One God, the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The solidarity of creation with its fallen fragmentation, i.e., with the sin of Adam, with the ‘dust of death,’ does not defeat its solidarity with the second Adam, as we learn from the Protoevangelium, Genesis 3;15, from Paul in Phil. 2:7, and from John in the Prologue, Jn. 1:14; the kenōsis of Jesus is the event of his becoming “flesh,” his entry into our fallen world, his mission, now redemptive, to give the Gift of the Holy Spirit, by which Gift all things are made new..
The kenōsis of Jesus, the primordial Son of Man, the Johannine Alpha and Omega, the Pauline Beginning, is implicit in his free Personal immanence in our humanity as its Head, its source. It is by his creative immanence in our humanity─a primordially nuptial immanence, for the freedom of his immanence is that of the head, the Bridegroom, of the second Eve─whose primordiality is her procession from her Head as immaculate, thus as supremely free with the freedom by which she could conceive her Lord as the historical expression of their primordial and indissoluble One Flesh.[51] Their freedom is a nuptially-ordered freedom, for there is no other human freedom conceivable, as there is no other divine freedom conceivable than that which is Trinitarian. This created, nuptially-ordered freedom is offered to all those of whom he is the head: i.e., to all humanity, all those for whom he died, and through the redemption of all humanity, is given to all creation, to the universe which longs for it.
With the refusal by the first Adam and first Eve of the proffered nuptial freedom offered them , they and, with them, the good creation, fell into the fatality of the “flesh.” Our Lord’s obedience to his Mission by the Father is his immanence in our humanity as its Head; with the fall, this immanence became subjected to the ongoing dissolution of the good creation, its fragmenting time and its disintegrating materiality. It is thus that he is “made flesh,” mortal, subject to all the ills that burden us, like to us in all but sin.
The freedom of his obedience to his Mission, viz., the freedom of his Personal immanence in our history, required the free acceptance of that immanence by the primordial second Eve who also, by the fall, entered into our fallen history as One Flesh with him: thus she would freely conceive him and give him birth: there is no other free entry into fallen history than this. Were his mother’s acceptance of her destiny lacking in any element of freedom, were it imperfect by reason of any imperfection of her nuptial freedom by a personal sinfulness, his immanence in the fallen creation would be that of a Zeus, a divinity imposing himself in a fashion evoking all the fallen fragmentation of the flesh. Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, the ground of her sinless and perfect freedom, is indispensable to the Incarnation: in fact, the event of her Immaculate Conception is inherent in her primordial historicity, in: her kenōsis which, as with her Lord’s, leaves her like us in all but sin.
The first Adam and first Eve were then offered, by their Head, the nuptial freedom, that of the one flesh of head and body, bridegroom and bride, which was his alone to offer―for, as free, it could not be imposed. The fate of the universe waited upon their free acceptance of the nuptial freedom by which, as we learn from Genesis 1:27 and 1:31 the creation is good and very good. Their sinful refusal of free responsibility for each other could not annul or defeat the Father’s Mission of the Son to give the Holy Spirit, but the Gift now would require the “recapitulation of all things” that was complete only in the death of the Head, the death of him who is God, the One Sacrifice whereby the One Flesh of the New Covenant is instituted.[52]
Louis Bouyer has summed up the Christological problem posed by its late twentieth century development as that of accounting systematically―i.e., metaphysically―for the integration of the faith with the Christ in such wise as to support the universal efficacy of his redemptive death, which is to say, to support our solidarity with the Jesus the Lord, the second Adam. The problem presented by the universal efficacy of the Christ’s atoning sacrifice is inescapable, but no systematic exposition of its intrinsic intelligibility has been provided whether by the Thomist or the Scotist schools of theology. Karl Rahner’s indictment of his contemporaries for this failure is well known, but his own Christology, with its denial of the identity of Jesus with the Person of the Logos, is rather an abdication of the Christological problem than its solution. This is hardly surprising; Rahner's methodological monism, which he considered to be a necessity of thought as such, can not accept the dogmatic tradition. The same uncritically postulated metaphysical monism has long barred theological appreciation of the Chalcedon; as noted heretofore, it still does. The dogmatic assertion of Jesus’ consubstantiality with our humanity continues to be indigestible by theological tradition; consequently it continues to pose the permanently false problem of establishing the prior possibility of the Personal unity of Jesus Christ, whose systematic resolution is still taken to be the sine qua non of Catholic theology.
During the course of his Jesuit formation, Rahner’s brilliant contemporary, Hans Urs von Balthasar, had undergone the same training in systematic theology as Rahner, but later abandoned its metaphysical analysis in favor of a theological aesthetics whose hallmark is the freedom of truth as beauty, thereby he intended to free his theological aesthetics from the systematic cosmological deformation he had come to regard as inseparable from any application of metaphysics to theology.
Von Balthasar relies upon the Augustinian equation of beauty with the concrete freedom of historical truth.[53] Beauty, he has insisted, needs no apologetic, an assertion hardly contestable. But his theological application of it, i.e., his theological aesthetics, reveals his own notion of theological quaerens to be as inadequate as Rahner’s for, under the auspices of his theological aesthetics, truth as beauty is indeed free but, as free it becomes rationally incoherent (apophatic?) to the point that its synthesis can only be symphonic, i.e., beautiful, possessing then an aesthetic harmony, but incapable of a rational, publicly accessible and critically discussible statement. Beauty as free is unstructured, inarticulate, incommunicable. Von Balthasar holds any systematicization of theological aesthetics, insofar as metaphysical, to be the destruction of its intrinsic freedom. Against this postulate stands Augustine’s “Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi!” (Too late have I loved thee, beauty ancient yet forever new: too late have I loved thee).
Under the auspices of von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, each venture in theology is sui generis. The authenticity of each such project, and of all other putatively theological expressions, is measured by its refusal of metaphysical monism, its preservation of the “ontological difference,” the irreducible distinction between God and what is not God. Apart from this distinction theology becomes monist, capable only of serving a pantheism, not the faith of the Church. However, with the acknowledgement of the “ontological difference,” theology is an expression of the freedom of truth, which the Augustinian tradition understands to be beauty as such.
Von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics is within this tradition, but only if its foundation, the “ontological difference,” is itself free, not merely contingent. That freedom is proper to an historical event: a nonhistorical freedom is a contradiction in terms. If von Balthasar has failed to link his theological aesthetics to the Event “the ancient beauty that is forever new,” nonetheless his aesthetics must presuppose it.
Upon that free foundation theology as aesthetics is possible, but only as indiscernible, submitted to no critique, self-sufficient, needing no apologetic, thus engaged in no public discussion, for were it thus engaged it could not avoid invoking an explanation, an apologia for a truth which can suffer none and yet be free, consequently beautiful, and true. For von Balthasar, the synthesis of irreducibly distinct aesthetic projects in theology exists only in their intrinsic harmony, which is to say, in a more inclusive beauty.
Von Balthasar rejects systematic theology insofar as given a metaphysical expression, for rigorous metaphysical systematizing, as he sees it, is a quest for necessary reasons, i.e., for a truth that is neither free, nor beautiful nor, at bottom, true. In the last analysis, on Balthasar regards all theological rationality as a construction of procrustean beds for the Revelation. These “beds” are pantheist in principle. As he sees it, the quest for rational unity drives to necessary unity, i.e., to the cosmological nullification of all distinction, the finally ineffable immersion of being in the Absolute. Freedom from the quest for immanent necessity native to fallen reason is impossible apart from the grace, universally given, of the trahi a Deo, the interior magister, This, the Augustinian illumination, is equivalently our creation in Christ, the radical gratia Christi. Again, this grace is presupposed by von Balthasar’s aesthetics, for it is the prerequisite condition of the quaerens for free truth, thus for beauty, a quest that is theological only insofar as it remains an aesthetics. His equation, following a Franciscan maxim, of beauty with the freedom of truth is of fundamental significance, but a theology founded upon that equation cannot be inarticulate and remain a theology,
It is thus that von Balthasar finds a given theology to be discordant, extra choro so to speak, only insofar as it fails to maintain what is theologically indispensable, the “ontological difference” between God and what is not God. It may well be that every theological error is in fact reducible to a pantheism, but this cannot be an aesthetic statement, for it requires an ultimately metaphysical explanation, the apologia which a theological aesthetics as conceived by von Balthasar cannot provide and remain itself. Nonetheless, the “ontological difference” upon which he insists is in fact the metaphysical foundation of his theological aesthetics, quite as the Covenantal One Flesh is the foundation of de Lubac’s comparably Augustinian Eucharistic exegesis. In fact, of the two, de Lubac is the less systematically oriented, for he relies upon the apostolic tradition, the Eucharistic representation of the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, as the indispensable bar to all pantheism, whereas von Balthasar’s reliance upon the “ontological difference” is by comparison entirely abstract; it is not only without reference, but is also incapable of reference, to its only possible historical ground, the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the redeemed creation, whose free unity, its nuptial order, is an invitation to free metaphysical inquiry, as these volumes may claim to have shown. However, in von Balthasar’s view, de Lubac’s appeal to the historical tradition to ground free rationality as such is alien to theological aesthetics,
Von Balthasar’s distrust of theological rationality is grounded in his supposition, akin to Rahner’s, that metaphysics must be monist to be intelligible. This supposition can issue, as with Rahner, in a radical subordination of the Catholic tradition to a monist hermeneutic. On the other hand, as with von Balthasar, it can require abdicating the task of systematic theology as an inherently pantheistic reduction of the freedom of the Catholic faith to necessity. Rahner’s dialectical analogy rests upon his rejection of the Catholic doctrinal tradition, while von Balthasar rejects merely theological tradition. Of the two, von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, as a fides quaerens Pulchrum, remains theological, because engaged in a quest at least analogous to that of a fides quaerens intellectum, while Rahner’s metaphysics does not, for the subject of Rahner’s quaerens is not the faith of the Church, whether as truth or as beauty, but the immanent logical necessities of sarkic reason, whose pursuit can conclude only to a nihilism.
At bottom, von Balthasar supposes that systematic theology, as opposed to theological aesthetics, cannot sustain a quaerens intellectum, a free quest for the free truth, for he is convinced that truth is free, and therefore actual in history, only as pulchrum, not as a truth whose understanding is to be sought―quaerens intellectum. The Catholic fides quaerens intellectum is mediated by wonder, drawn by the Mysterium fidei whose free truth cannot but be pulchrum, but is also fascinans, drawing the mind out of its self-enclosure into the freedom for which Christ has made us free, and out of our personal darkness into the Light of the world. In brief, beauty can only be historical, for it is the freedom of truth, as von Balthasar well knew.
On the other hand, the Church worships in truth the historical Truth, Jesus the Christ, the light of the world. Von Balthasar maintains that systematic theology is alien to that worship, that inevitably, simply as rational, it distorts the truth of Christ mediated by the liturgy. Doubtless much of medieval theology, and most of the systematic theology down to our own time, has forgotten that theology is a quaerens intellectum, and regards its conclusions, insofar as formally correct, to be what they cannot be, proxima fidei. At best, theology asks coherent questions of a Mysterium fidei which it can grasp only in worship, and can never transcend or comprehend, never exhaust it subject.
Despite these very different abdications of systematic theology, theology insofar as Catholic continues to be what Anselm intuited it to be, a question arising out of personal participation in the Church’s liturgical expression of her faith, thus a question which intends to be directed to the Church’s liturgical tradition of the Revelation as a question is directed to a Truth which it can never comprehend, much less transcend, but by which the fides quaerens intellectum that is theology is continually sustained and nourished. Von Balthasar’s fides quaerens Pulchrum is similarly nourished, and similarly seeks a Beauty which it cannot transcend and remain itself. Only as liturgically sustained is theology the fides quaerens intellectum or quaerens pulchrum. Whether it be the intellectual or the aesthetic expression of theologian’s personal indigence, that indigence is revealed to him in his liturgical worship of the Truth who is Augustine’s “ancient beauty,” for this beauty is mediated only in ecclesia, by personal participation in the Church’s Eucharistic tradition.
This study could not deal with the Augustinian theological tradition and yet neglect von Balthasar’s contribution to it. However, a further inquiry into the intricacies of his theology is beyond the goal and bounds of this work.[54]
The historicity of the liturgical tradition was first seriously questioned in consequence of a burgeoning fascination with “dialectic,” i.e., with the Aristotelian logic which Plotinus had incongruously melded with the Platonic hylemorphism, and whose consequently binary, ‘either-or’ anti-metaphysical and therefore linguistic analysis Boethius had mediated to the Carolingians. Enthusiasm for the new learning, specifically for the “new logic,” was shared by all the stars of the ninth-century Carolingian renaissance; it marked a departure from the traditional monastic “lectio divina,” which had embodied the unsystematized presupposition of patristic exegesis, common to the East as to the West, of the historical realism of the Catholic tradition. Under what amounted to a naive dehistoricization by way of an unfamiliar linguistic analysis, the monastic confidence in the historicity of the truth, the sacramental realism, of the Church’s worship began to undergo a long eclipse.[55]
The most brilliant Carolingian expositor of the “new logic” was John Scotus Eriugena, whose Periphyseon, or De divisione naturae, the first metaphysical systematization of the Catholic tradition since Origen’s Peri Archon, exhibits the pantheistic tendency that von Balthasar has held to be native to the systematic project as such.[56] As has been remarked, the Carolingians who exploited the “new logic” (which, as binary, was also labeled “the new dialectic,” still under Neoplatonic auspices, were concerned primarily with the hermeneutic issue which arose from the application of the binary “new logic” to the words of Eucharistic institution. The threat to Eucharistic realism of this naive rationalization of language in the untutored speculation of such Carolingians as Ratramnus and Gottschalk was not then recognized. Two centuries later Berengarius would apply the same dehistoricizing analytical hermeneutic to the Words of Institution, this time to the point of heresy. Those who in the eleventh and twelfth centuries defended the realism of the Eucharistic tradition against him also lacked the requisite metaphysical tools, as earlier had Paschasius’ defense of Eucharistic realism against the dimly perceived threat to it by Ratramnus and his allies. The threat posed by the Carolingian revival of the ancient Eleatic binary analysis of reality as absolute unity or absolute disunity was met for the first time in the latter half of the thirteenth century by St. Thomas, whose theological application of the newly available Aristotelian act-potency analysis of being rested upon posing a metaphysical absolute, the agent intellect, which was known to Aristotle as capable of only an ambiguous application, whether to the unity of the human species, or to the unity of the human person. St, Thomas chose the latter option, in order to provide each human person with an agent intellect. The felt need to do so arose in his controversy with Averrhoes, who placed the agent intellect in the species, to the evident detriment of the members of the species, whose intellect could only be a passive subordination to the unity of the species, which Averrhoes regarded as concrete. Thomas found himself forced to reduce the human species to an abstraction, a second substance. This riposte required that: only the individual person could be concretely substantial. The rationality deployed by both Averrhoes and St. Thomas was Aristotelian and therefore cosmological, an induction of necessary causes.
Unfortunately, St. Thomas’ application of the Aristotelian metaphysics to theology amounted to systematizing the twelfth-century theologians’ subordination of the freedom of the Church’s worship to the immanent determinism of “necessary reasons.” This deterministic rationality, which under Neoplatonic auspices forced a pantheism, was by St. Thomas given a rigorously metaphysical foundation resting upon his identification of God as the absolute Ipsum Esse Subsistens., an oddly impersonal notion. St. Thomas’ adaptation to Catholic theology of Aristotle’s monist act-potency metaphysical analysis ran into immediate difficulties. One of them has already been pointed out: Aristotle’s lack of acquaintance with moral freedom is evident in St. Thomas’ corresponding reduction of the freedom of creation ex nihilo to a “contingency,” an abstract possibility within the infinite range of abstract possibilities open to the equally abstract divine omnipotence.
This adaptation, in which the Neoplatonic “One” became the Deus Unus, and Aristotle’s uncritical assignment of substantial objectivity to any intrinsically intelligible material entity was taken for granted, was the work of a man whose acquaintance with the entire philosophical and theological tradition of his time was unrivalled, unexampled, and whose devotion to the Catholic tradition can never be in issue. At the same time, the tension between his analytical rationality and the free truth of the Catholic tradition could not but become more and more evident as St. Thomas understood his theological project to be the application of that analytical rationalization of the historical tradition. This work, occupying barely a quarter-century, is published in over thirty quarto volumes, was most effectively mediated in the three volumes of the Summa Theologiae.
St. Thomas died in 1274 at the age of forty-nine. He left behind him a body of work which has dominated Catholic theology throughout the intervening centuries down to our own day. It is the Church’s great misfortune that three years after his death, St. Thomas’ theology was attacked and condemned by the Archbishop Tempier of Paris. The Order of Preachers immediately took up the defense, and the Dominicans and their allies have remained in that posture ever since, rejecting all criticism of Thomas’ theology. In consequence it has undergone little if any development beyond its original statement, for to question its adequacy was to stand extra choro. As von Balthasar has observed, Catholic theology became a study of St. Thomas. That climate of uncritical school loyalty forced the competing Augustinian tradition to become a study of Duns Scotus, or of Ockham, or of Gabriel Biel, or of Suarez ―but not of the doctrinal and moral tradition of the Church.
Such vagaries go far to vindicate the rejection of “dialectic” by Peter Damian and Bernard of Clairvaux, and the opposition to Aristotelian metaphysics by St. Thomas’ contemporaries, the Franciscan theologians who, with Archbishop Tempier, held it to be incompatible with the Catholic tradition. Their resistance to school Thomism has been repeated by such twentieth century theologians as Teilhard, Lonergan, and von Balthasar. Karl Rahner’s rigorous application of that monism of substance has gone far beyond anything St. Thomas could have anticipated. Under its aegis Rahner has dehistoricized the Catholic tradition, and his “dialectical analogy” cannot rescue its historicity for, having denied a priori the historical mediation of gratia Christi, Rahner has also denied the existence of a historical foundation for the “dialectic” between the divine and the human, between history and eschaton, on which his methodological dehistroricization of the Catholic tradition must rely.
These several theological solipsisms have been in great measure rendered obsolete. The most immediate effect of Archbishop Tempier’s condemnation of the Aristotelianism whose thirteenth century “reception” had dominated philosophical and theogical speculation prior to 1277 was its deconstruction of that “reception.” After Archbishop Tempier’s authoritative rejection of pivotal Aristotelian maxims as incompatible with the faith of the Church, the authority of Aristotle crumbled before the authority of free inquiry. Particularly, Aristotelisnism had held experimental science in abeyance for nearly a millennium by assimilating physics to metaphysics, both dismissive of any need for verification; The deconstruction of the metaphysics permitted free physical inquiry supported by experimentation, and in the next century, John Buridan, another Rector of the University of Paris, better known for the reading of his Nominalism into dialectical dilemmas, also deduced from the free creation of the physical universe its inherent physical dynamism, and so to the local motion of its particles which he affirmed, contra Aristotle, to be rectilinear rather than circular, thus free of the onus of an eternal return. This free rectilinear motion he termed “impetus;” it corresponds to what would be termed “momentum,” and entails the first of the laws of physics, the first law of motion, which postulates that objects in motion move in a right line unless deflected from it. Pierre Duhem first noted the import of Buridan’s insight. See Volume I, 189-91, endnote 48, and Ch. 2, 289, endnote 71, for Fr. Stanley Jaki’s recognition the significance of Pierre Duhem’s discovery of the strategic importance of the Catholic doctrine of creation ex nihilo underlying Buridan’s insight into the first law of physics, upon which the rest depends. Underlying this insight is the more radical postulate of free inquiry, a most subtle rejection of cosmological determinism.
The “theology of the body” taught by John Paul II throughout his long papacy, culminates, as has been seen, in his approval of the “Letter on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World,” issued in 2004 by Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Taken seriously, the ‘theology of the body” has bestowed new life upon an inquiry long moribund. With the publication of the “Letter on Collaboration,” the free, nuptial substantiality of our imaging of the Triune God has entered the doctrinal tradition, challenging the validity of the uncritical theological dependence upon a monist metaphysics. With the papal approval of the assertion of the nuptial order of our imaging of God, which dismisses without comment the traditional monist interpretation of that imaging, it finally becomes possible for theologians to accept the literal truth of the Chalcedonian Symbol that it is Jesus, the One and the Same Son, not some theoretical “immanent Son,” who is “consubstantialem nobis,” for the human substance, created in the image of God, is nuptially unified. This nuptial unity supports a multiplicity of human persons, the human community of male and female persons each of whom is consubstantial with Jesus, their head, who is consubstantial with the Father, his head. It is Jesus, not some pre-human Logos, who subsists freely, as our head, in our human substance, and thereby, as the source of our free unity, is our Redeemer. It must be stressed that the head is the source of the free, multi-personal unity of the free substance, the community, divine or human, in which he subsists, whether the Father as the Archē of the Trinity, or Jesus as the Archē of humanity, or the husband as the Archē of his wife in marriage. This “great mystery” which Paul applies to the Church in Eph. 5, is the concrete subject of the Chalcedonian Symbol.
St. Thomas has described the product of the hypostatic union of humanity and divinity in the Christ as issuing in a “composite person.”[57] This is a palmary instance of the ancient mistake of seeking the necessary causes of that which, as the basic mystery of the faith, can have none. Gratia capitis is the gift of free unity by a single Head, Jesus the Christ, the Archē of all created unity. The notion of a composite source of unity needs no discussion. This error fed and still feeds the continuing effort of even contemporary theologians to divide the redemption worked by Jesus into divine and human components. This division of the grace of Christ radically contradicts the doctrine of Chalcedon, which denies any division in the “one and the same Son,” the single source and agent of our redemption from the immanently necessary fragmentation of creation caused by the sin of Adam, his refusal of the free unity offered him “in the Beginning;” i.e., in Christ, his head.
The explanation of our solidarity with the first Adam and the last rests upon the relation, set out in Rom. 12, between the “one man,” the first Adam, through whom sin and death entered the world, and “that one man,” Jesus Christ, the second Adam, by whom the world is redeemed, freed of the sin and the universal fear of death by which man and, through him, his world, have been imprisoned. Simply put, the universal destruction effected by the sin of Adam is overcome by the superabundant grace of the Second Adam. Summarily:
If, because of the one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. (Rom. 5:17)
The textual stress upon the “one man” responsible for the reign of death, and the “one man” responsible for our salvation from the reign of death, presents its problems, for here Paul simply ignores the role of the first Eve in the fall and of the second Eve, the Church, in redemption. This is not an expression of the misogyny of which Paul is famously and unjustly accused; rather he is dealing with “one man” as the head and the source of the unity of the substance he heads: the Father, the one God, as Archē, the source or head of the Son and the Holy Spirit, is the source of the free substantial Unity that is the Triune God, the divine Trinity of Persons in the Community of their circumincession. In this bestowal of free unity on the Trinity, the Father is the pattern of all headship, i.e., of Christ as the Head every man, of the husband as the head of the woman in marriage (I Cor. 11:3-16; cf. Col. 1:15ff., Eph. 5:23).
Christ is the Redeemer as the restorer of a lost freedom: Rom. 8:19 is eloquent upon the longing of all creation for the redemption of the sons of men, for it is only in that redemption that the material creation is restored to the freedom it also has lost, together with the beauty that is the freedom of truth. There can be no doubt that this restoration is mediated through the “one man,” the One and the Same Son who is Jesus the Christ; this is clear from the passage quoted above from Rom. 5:17. It is equally evident in Rom. 5 that the primordial loss of freedom is mediated through the “one man” who is the fallen Adam, whose fall can only be his refusal of headship. No problem in theology is more recalcitrant than this solidarity with “one man,” whether in sin, or in redemption from sin. Only a recognition of the substantial authority of the head as set out in I Cor. 11:3 permits its resolution.
The classic―which is to say, monist―theological anthropologies offer no basis for such solidarity: efforts of theologians to make a “representative personality” of Jesus the Christ who died on the Cross for our liberation from sin, and of the world through us, provide nominal explanations at best. In short, there is no intrinsic possibility or potentiality in man, qua monist, i.e., as constituting a unique human substance, “indivisum in se et divisum ab omni alio,” for such a “representation” which, we must remember, is the office of the “one man,” whether it be effective in the fall or in redemption from the fall. The popularity of the interpretation of that “one man” as a corporate personality bespeaks a continued commitment of theologians and exegetes to the monist misunderstanding of the free unity of the human substance and, at bottom, to misunderstanding the meaning of the Headship of our Lord.
As applied to the unity of Jesus the Christ with those for whom he died, the “representation” takes on a parliamentary connotation, if not denotation. In that context it constitutes only another statement of the dilemma of “the one and the many,” to which no political solution exists. None should be supposed to have been provided by this absurd misreading of “head.” Within the Trinitarian context of I Cor. 11:3, “head” is a title expressive not of a despotic exercise of divine omnipotence ab extra, but rather of our Lord’s admonition to his Apostles, “let it not be this way among you.”
As we learn from I Cor 11:3, whether it be the Father’s headship of the Trinity, Jesus’s headship of the Church and, through her, of all humanity, or the husband’s headship of his within the “one flesh” of their marriage, it is the office of the head to provide the free unity of the substance of which he is the head, and in which substance he is immanent as its source. The signal expression of headship is the redemption of the fallen world from its slavery by the subsistence of Jesus the Lord in our fallen human substance (Phil. 2:6-7), bestowing upon it, as Head and thus through the Church, the gift of free nuptially-ordered (Covenantal) unity and freedom. By his One Sacrifice, he instituted the One Flesh of Christ the Bridegroom and head of his bridal Church, at once the New Covenant and the New Creation in the image of God. His restoration of the free nuptial unity lost by the refusal of the first Adam of the headship offered him, i.e., his nuptial unity with his bride, is the restoration of the nuptially-ordered imaging of the free unity of the Trinity by the free unity of the One Flesh, primarily in the Eucharistic institution of the New Covenant, secondarily in the sacramentally-free praxis of marriage. By his restoration of the salvific significance of history through his Eucharistic immanence in it as its head, its Beginning and its End, we who must live our lives in this fallen world, nonetheless, even as per speculum in aenigmate, may yet know and exercise historical freedom, and develop the free, nuptially ordered institutions inherent in and integral to that exercise. By so doing, we enter into that “recapitulation of all things” (Eph. 1:10) by which our head, Jesus the Lord, makes all things new.
The head, precisely as head, is the source of the free, substantial unity, the community, in which he subsists as its consubstantial head: this is verified in the Father, who subsists in the uncreated Trinity as its unbegotten source of the Son and the Holy Spirit, who by their subsistence in the Trinity possess with the Father the fullness of divinity; it is verified in the Son, the head of humanity, of the Church, of the good creation which is created in him and in which he subsists as its head, its source; it is verified in the husband, who subsists as head in the nuptial community, the source of the free unity of the marriage in which he subsists, consubstantial with his wife and with their subsistent covenant, their irrevocable bond. In the Trinity, headship is actual in the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son; in the economy, it is actual in the Procession revealed by the Mission of the Son to give the Holy Spirit, which Gift is eo ipso the sacrificial institution, by Christ the head, of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the restoration, the “recapitulation” of the free substantial unity lost in the fall, our creation in the nuptial image of God
A theological solution to this enigma, the unity or better, solidarity, of Christ with those for whom he died, must rely upon the historical tradition, which is to say, upon the worship of the Church, a worship and a reliance that is radically Eucharistic. A variety of “representative personalities”―Adam, Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the patriarchs, Joseph, Moses, the judges, kings, priests, and prophets, the Suffering Servant, the Son of Man―appear in the Old Covenant. In the New Testament the Church understands their significance so to focus upon Jesus the Christ that it is in his life, death and resurrection that their salvific significance is unveiled ―and only in Jesus, the Christ, the Lord.
He is the second Adam, One Flesh with the second Eve. Abraham’s obedience to the divine command to sacrifice Isaac foreshadows the Father’s Mission of his own Son to his death, as also Jesus’ own obedient offering of himself as the Victim of the One Sacrifice. He is the Angel with whom Jacob wrestled; he is the Messiah, the High Priest and the New Moses. He suffered as the Servant and as the Son of Man who had nowhere to lay his head. All this he did in imaging his Father’s headship. His supreme act of obedience to his Mission is his restoration of all things in himself, the recapitulation which Paul ascribes to him in Eph. 1:10: his sacrificial institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh by which the Good Creation is restored to the free unity it had in him, in the Beginning.
This “recapitulation” is simply his exercise of his supposedly “representtative” office, which is in fact his headship: at once of the second Eve, the Church who is his Body, of every man, and of the restored creation whose restoration is its free unity under the effective sign of the One Flesh, the Eucharistic worship of the Church. Our solidarity with him is our consubstantiality with him: by our creation in him we subsist with him, in the redeemed free unity of the New Covenant.
A generation ago it was commonplace in liberal theological circles to deprecate the kingly dimension of the Christ. “Kingship” was understood by the academic theologians in the rationalized, coercive, finally abstract and monist terms of which our Lord had expressly said, “Let it not be thus among you.” Christ is indeed the King, the King of kings, but he is so as the Messiah, the head of humanity whose office is not oppressive but redemptive and creative because liberating: the giving of the Spiritus Creator by which we are made free to recognize in Jesus the Son sent by the Father to offer each of us eternal life in the Kingdom of his Father, whose will it is that none of us should be lost.
Headship is indeed kingly: we are thereby as Peter has said, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (I Pet. 2:9). But we were not made so in order to oppress each other by our personal authority, for the historical exercise of personal authority, insofar as authentic, is nuptial and sacramental, and has as its pattern the utterly free unity of the Triune God. As the authority of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is in each case divine, but mutually supportive and implicative, so also the authority of the husband, of the wife, and of their irrevocable covenant is in each case fully human, but these three authorities are not competitive; rather they are complementary and personally indispensable each to each, for authority as sacramentally validated knows no coercion, but only love. We obtain here some glimpse of the truth of the ancient biblical idiom which recognizes the nuptial relation to be one of knowledge, not mere physical possession, for knowledge and coercion are mutually exclusive, while knowledge and love coincide in the free unity of truth that is beauty.
With this, the vindication of the free unity, the nuptial order, of historical substance and so of historical objectivity, is complete. It is beyond controversy that the doctrinal tradition of the first four Ecumenical Councils permits no alternative to the free reality, the free intelligibility, that is given in Christo, in ecclesia. If Catholic theology is to remain dependent upon that tradition, as an inquiry arising out of and sustained by the Church’s liturgical mediation of her faith in Jesus the Christ, if it is to continue to be a search for a continually deeper understanding of the Revelation given in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, theological method must affirm a priori the graced freedom of its inquiry, and permit no methodological transgresssion of that freedom, for its source is personal participation in the faith of the Church in her Lord, a faith whose concrete historical proclamation in the Symbol of Chalcedon no Catholic theology may transcend without ceasing to be Catholic, and so ceasing to be theology.
The reception of the doctrine of the Council of Chalcedon is at bottom a reception of the Nicene proclamation of homoousion of the Lord Jesus, the Son, with the Father. . The first stage of this reception was accomplished in principle at the Council of Ephesus by the recognition of Mary as the Mother of God, and the consequent doctrine of Jesus’ consubstantiality “with us.” This doctrinal application of the communication of idioms to Jesus the Lord was understood to underwrite the divinity of Jesus, her Son. Not until the Council of Chalcedon was it understood that, as her Son, Jesus could not but be consubstantial with her humanity; he would otherwise himself fail to be fully human. The Chalcedonian Symbol, or Creed, is the full promulgation of the homoousion of the one and the same Son, at once human and divine, with the Father, and with all those human persons whose humanity is their subsistence in his humanity, in the numerically single human substance of whose free unity he is the source, the Head, the Bridegroom.
The quaerens intellectum driving this doctrinal development is integral to conversion to the faith that Jesus is the Lord: its earliest expressions are those of the second century Apologists with whom Catholic theology begins. However, before tracing their fides quaerenxs intellectum, it may be well to examine the meaning of the “reception” of the Council of Chalcedon, for a notable confusion has accompanied the term.
The current theological consensus, Catholic as well as Protestant, puts in issue the ‘reception’ of the Symbol of Chalcedon. We have seen Louis Bouyer’s summary remarks to this effect; Aloys Grillmeier’s detailed examination of the fate of the Chalcedonian Symbol between the end of the Council and the beginning of Justinian’s reign in the sixth century repeats the common charge of the failure of the doctrine of Chalcedon to be accepted, particularly by the Greek, Syriac and Coptic Christians of the East.[58] While ‘reception’ in this academic context is not without ambiguity, its core meaning, insofar as theological, bears upon the apostolic tradition, upon the Church’s historical worship, her public liturgical mediation, radically Eucharistic and therefore at once moral and doctrinal, of the Truth of Christ, the historical object of her historical worship in truth of Truth.[59] At bottom, the historical reception of this radically Eucharistic tradition can only be liturgical, for it has no other objective historicity. Further, its reception can only be personal, consisting in free participation, at once personal and communal, in the free community of the Church’s Eucharistic worship in truth of the Truth, whose radical doctrinal affirmation is that Jesus is Lord, and whose Magisterium is the continual liturgical expression of the ecclesial consensus in that Apostolic affirmation by those ordained to responsibility for it.
This liturgical worship entails eo ipso the historical development of the Church’s doctrine, as inseparable from her Eucharistic liturgy, her worship in truth. It has found infallible expression in the ecumenical councils wherein the bishops of the Church, the successors to the Apostles, exercise their foundational and indelegable responsibility for the apostolic tradition, Church’s Eucharistic liturgy, her worship in truth of him who is Truth incarnate, the basic mystery of the faith. It is the radical truth, the inexhaustible mystery, upon which all doctrinal development rests, and upon which all theological inquiry bears.
The foundation of all theological speculation is therefore liturgical, which is to say, it is Eucharistic. There can be no theological ‘reception’ of doctrine which would rest upon a consensus other than that which is that of the Church herself in nuptial union with her Lord. The unanimity of the ecclesial consensus is apostolic: it is therefore hierarchical, but not as the canonists are tempted to understand the Catholic hierarchy.
Gelasius I, at the end of the fifth century, found it necessary to explain to a usurping Emperor that the latter’s political governance of “the world” took place subject to the moral authority of the Church, which has no political, i.e., coercive, authority whatever. The bishops’:authority is liturgical; it cannot be coercive. Because the truth the Church affirms is inherently free, faith in it cannot be imposed. The subordination of ecclesial authority to canonical rationality risks the caricature by which contemporary canonists liken the papal authority to that of the imperial dominus, which error speaks rather to their politicization of the faith than to the reality of the papacy.[60]
Because the authority of the Church’s Magisterium is liturgical, it cannot be politicized, cannot be exercised or understood as coercive. Doctrinal authority is radically liturgical, exercised by those whose episcopal orders render them, as teachers, responsible for the Church’s worship in truth. Thus their authority presupposes and rests upon the freedom of the faith. Their exercise of their liturgical authority neither limits the freedom of the faithful, nor awaits their assent. Canonical penalties may be imposed by that authority, as in cases of heresy, but such sanctions presuppose the freedom of membership in the Church and of participation in her tradition. They have no bearing on those who choose to stand outside the Catholic Church, other than that of formally recognizing the departure of former Catholics from her tradition, a recognition that is simply defensive; it coerces no one.
Catholic theology cannot be an abstract and disinterested inquiry, as ‘religious studies’‘ curricula generally suppose. Theological quaerens arises out of theologian’s personal commitment to the truth of the faith, to the historicity of its truth, a historicity which can only be sacramental. The truth of Christ is neither empirically available nor abstractly comprehensible for, as free, it is neither reducible to mere information nor deducible from what is already known: i.e., it has no prior conditions of possibility. As historical, it cannot be reduced to a set of philosophical propositions. In brief, the faith of the Church is in a Truth which is free because it is mysterious, an inexhaustible font of theological understanding simply because the objective historicity of its subject, the risen Christ the Lord, is sacramentally mediated. Jesus’ immanence in history, his Lordship, his historical objecttivity, is not subject to the criteria of abstract logical coherence, criteria which in fact do not exist, because abstract rational coherence does not exist, as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have shown.
Theology can proceed only from the point d’appui of theologian’s free personal participation in the Church’s liturgy. Theological dissent consists in a personal rejection of the normative truth of the Church’s historical worship, her historical mediation of the Revelation. When a theologian dissents from that ecclesial mediation, his theology ceases to be Catholic. Cut off from its historical foundation, it has no historical function and can only resume the unavailing sarkic quest for the ideal infima species.
Jesus’ Lordship of history is the sole source of the intrinsically free unity of history, the only intrinsic coherence and intelligibility history can possess. The Church’s liturgical and doctrinal affirmation of his Lordship has the free historical unity of her worship: this coherence, as doctrinal, is in sum the analogia fidei, the intrinsic free intelligibility of her doctrinal tradition, a rationality whose coherence, as free, is irreducible to any necessity whatever.
It follows that the freedom of personal conversion to the faith that Jesus is the Lord has a doctrinal dimension and therefore is also an intellectual conversion: a conversion of the mind of the believer to the free, sacramentally ordered truth of history, the history of which Jesus is the Lord. His Lordship is Eucharistic: it is thus, i.e., by his Eucharistic immanence in history, that the risen Christ transcends history, that he is its Lord, by whose sacramental immanence in fallen time our temporality possesses the free unity of salvation history. Fallen temporality thereby is freed of that fleshly futility which profits nothing, to become the history of salvation, whose freedom in truth is liturgically appropriated and personally lived within the community of faith. Fidelity to that truth is a personal noetic entry into the Mysterium fidei, hidden “in the Beginning”, revealed fully in Jesus the Christ, the one Son.
Fidelity to this revelation is covenantal: it does not issue in a servility of the mind, but rather in its liberation from the monadic enclosure in immanence, the final incommunicability that marks the consciousness of the sarkic self whose willed self-imprisonment nonetheless cannot defeat the Lordship of Christ. Despite all dissent to the liturgical-doctrinal-moral tradition of the Church, the fallen mind is still illumined by the light of Christ, the trahi a Deo, the intuition of the personal freedom to choose to be free, to live in the covenantal fidelity that is historical existence in Christo. Beauty, the freedom of truth, cannot be ignored. As “the ancient beauty that is forever new,” called Augustine out of his blindness into the light, so the Glory of the Father that is Jesus the Lord offers all of us the free entry into the world which he, the Light of the World illumines, the Good Creation, the redeemed universe, the Kingdom of God.
The conversion from sarkic immanence to covenantal fidelity may be viewed primarily as a conversion from sarx to pneuma, i.e., from fleshly to spiritual existence, from fleshly corruption to spiritual rebirth, sustained by the personal participation in Church’s Eucharistic worship. Conversion can also be understood as a conversion from imprisonment within a cultural establishment of the criteria of fleshly existence as normative―which is paganism whether old or new―to the liberty of the Kingdom of God, sacramentally mediated to the world by the Eucharistic worship of the Church.
Equally, the conversion may be experienced as a conversion from the despair of history, from the pessimism endemic to all the utopian flights from the anguish of historical existence, to an indefeasible historical optimism inseparable from the faith-assertion that Jesus is the Lord, sustained by his Eucharistic Bread of Life and Cup of Everlasting Salvation. Or, we may experience the conversion as from an unavailing quest for self-indulgence, a search for whatever may distract us from the suffering of the sarkic self, to a recognition with Augustine that “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” Finally, we may regard conversion to faith in Christ the Lord as personal entry into the Kingdom of God by baptismal entry into his death, into the Church which his One Sacrifice instituted, the Church who is the sign of his Kingdom, to which he is the Gate.
Integral to these viewpoints, which may be indefinitely multiplied, is a personal appropriation of personal freedom and of personal moral responsibility. The conversion to faith in the Lordship of Jesus the Christ entails conversion from intellectual irresponsibility, whether that of the sarkic subscription to the self-sufficiency of immanent rationality, or that of the sarkic dissociation of freedom from moral responsibility, as manifest in the pagan and neopagan soteriologies whereby which the sarkic self is submerged in a political idolatry, a utopia of irresponsibility. These irresponsibilities coincide in the person of the prospective convert, leaving him without resource. His conversion is always by grace alone, a gift ex nihilo proceeding from no prior possibility in the convert. His conversion is from radical irresponsibility to intellectual and moral responsibility. Irresponsibility in either the intellectual or moral dimension of personal existence is alien to the faith that Jesus is the Lord, for that faith is a free fidelity. The conversion to faith in the Lord Jesus is total; it terminates only in that vision of the risen Christ of which Augustine somewhere has written, “as we see him, so we have him.”
Resistance to this intellectual conversion is inherent in our fallenness, in our sarkic solidarity with the fallen Adam, by which we are continually tempted to rationalize, to establish as again normative the irrationality of sarkic existence, existence “in the flesh.” The universal human propensity to affirm these rationalizations as true prompted Calvin’s famous description of the fallen human mind as a “perpetual manufactory of idols.”[61] It should be added the idolatries thus proposed are also servitudes. All idols are demonic absolutes, whose worship reduces the exercise of personal responsibility, of personal dignity, to the insolence of “lese majesté,” of hubris, the usurpation of a personal autonomy reserved to the demonic surrogate for God: the world, the flesh, the devil.
Idolatry is the radical alternative to our nuptial imaging of God: it is commitment to the abolition of that nuptial image, which is the abolition of man. Apart from its effectively marginalized Jewish component, the Hellenistic world of the first century was disintegrating under the impact of that nihilism. The “good news,” the Gospel’s revelation of a free alternative to a universal despair, invoked a cultural revolution. Its inexhaustible historical dynamism was and remains the public reception, the ecclesial mediation, of that astonishing revelation, that world-shattering news that Jesus is the Lord, the unsurpassable fulfillment of the Old Testament commitment to salvation history by the historical immanence of the Son of the Father, sent to give the Holy Spirit, obedient to that Mission “unto death, death upon the Cross,” now raised to the right hand of the Father as the Beginning and the End.
We trace here some salient events in the history of that reception that Jesus is the Lord, witnesses of conversion to a new covenantal fidelity, no longer awaiting the Messiah, but celebrating the Event of his redemptive life, his sacrificial death, and resurrection as the “life-giving Spirit” whose Lordship of history is the pledge of eternal life to those who have faith in him as the Son of Man and the Son of God, One and the same Son.[62]
. The earliest recorded advertence to the full humanity and divinity, the double homoousion, of Jesus the Christ, and the recognition of the communication of idioms in him, is Paul’s recital of his encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, mentioned in the Letter to the Galatians, 1:11-24 and more fully set out in Acts 9:1-12; 12:6-17; and 12-18. A comparably primitive assertion of the personal unity of humanity and divinity in Jesus the Lord appears in the Letter to the Philippians 2: 5-11, Paul’s adaptation of the earliest known example of those hymns “sung to Christ as to God,” which Pliny as Proconsul of Bithynia reported to Emperor Trajan in the early second century.
They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food--but ordinary and innocent food. Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden political associations. Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition.
Pliny, Letters 10. 96-97 to Trajan.
Paul’s encounter with the risen Lord grounds his claim to be an apostle, ranking with the Twelve. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus of the risen Jesus who identifies himself with the historical Church whom Paul had persecuted so remorselessly, inspired his development of the nuptial symbolism that appears in I Corinthians, Romans, and Colossians, and whose final statement appears in Ephesians 5. Jesus, the second Adam, is the bridegroom of the Church; their “One Flesh” fulfills the prophecy of Genesis. The corresponding understanding of headship as analogous, the Father’s headship of the Trinity, Jesus’ headship of humanity, and the husband’s headship of the wife, first appears in I Cor. 11:3; its application to Jesus as Head of the Church, and as the Head of all creation, is further developed in Colossians and Ephesians.
Paul’s vision of Jesus as the second or last Adam governs his soteriology. It is as the last Adam, the Head, the one Bridegroom of the Church, that Jesus, by obedience to his Mission from the Father, restored by his one Sacrifice the “One Flesh” the free unity, lost by the sin of the first Adam. The first Adam’s refusal of nuptial union with the first Eve was his refusal of the office of nuptial headship. He was offered the office of the bridegroom by whose acceptance he would have bestowed the free unity of the One Flesh upon his bride by which celebration creation is good and very good. Thereby he would have bestowed that free unity upon all of creation. By his refusal of that gift of headship, the good creation lost its free unity, to fall into the necessary disunity, the fragmentation, of “flesh.”
Thus it is that “one man” is responsible for the fall from freedom into the blind necessity of fragmentation that is “flesh:” thus it is that “one man,” the Lord Jesus, restores the free unity all creation by his sacrificial institution, on the Altar and the Cross, of the sacramental One Flesh of the New and Eternal Covenant, the rejected primordial unity, the “one flesh” of the Jahwist creation account of the primordial good creation, which all creation, now imprisoned by sin and the fear of death, awaits with eager longing.
Paul’s recognition, first in I Corinthians and Romans, then in the Captivity Epistles, particularly the Letter to the Philippians and the Letter to the Ephesians, of the crucial significance of the nuptial headship offered to and refused by the first Adam, and resumed by the second Adam, as the indispensable source of the free unity of the good creation, as primordially unfallen and as historically redeemed, is the central insight of his Gospel. It is in the Letter to the Corinthians that Paul begins to unfold the nuptial symbolism which thereafter permeates his doctrine; in that same Epistle, he establishes its Trinitarian ground, setting out the analogy which links the Father’s Headship of the Persons of the Trinity to Jesus’ headship of the Church and of every human being, and secondarily to the husband’s headship of his wife in the sacramentally free society, marriage, which is our sacramental imaging of the perichōresis of the Triune God, the nuptially-ordered covenantal fidelity proper to the New Testamant.
Jesus reveals the meaning of headship on the Cross, where in the offering of his One Sacrifice he restores what had been lost by sin, the free unity of humanity, by his sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, from which we may know that to be a head is to be the source of the free unity of the free and therefore communal substance in which the head subsists, consubstantial with those of whom he is the source. . Only in Paul’s Gospel are these themes developed, thereafter generally to be ignored by theologians.
In the Letter to the Romans, Paul set out the parallel between the “one man” by whom sin and death entered the world, and the “one man” by whom the sin and fall of man in his world is redeemed, together with the correlative parallel between the fragmented “flesh” of the fallen world, which as fallen has no unity, and the restoration of that world’s free unity in sacramento by the institution of the One Flesh of Jesus, the second Adam, and his bridal Church, the second Eve. The last seven verses of Phil. 2, evidently adapted from the primitive Christian hymnody, clearly affirm the divinity, the primordial humanity, and the kenōsis of Jesus, “obedient unto death, death on the Cross.” The only subject of the Pauline Gospel is Jesus, the Son, the Head, the Bridegroom, “born of a woman,” “made sin” for us, dying on the Cross and risen from the dead,
These themes are fully developed in the Letter to the Ephesians, where the “re-heading” of all things in Christ is taught, and the nuptial relation of the risen Christ to his Church, with explicit reference to the Yahwist creation account in the second Chapter of Genesis. We have stressed the patristic interpretation of Jn. 19:34 as recognizing in the blood and water flowing from the side of the dead Jesus the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Jahwist creation account in the second chapter of Genesis, a tacit recognition of the primordiality of that creation account: it is the second Eve who is taken from the side of the ‘sleeping’ second Adam.
It is often supposed that such expressions of the Pauline theme of headship which pervade his Letters, and most particularly those deploying nuptial symbolism, are metaphors in the sense of literary devices of no particular metaphysical weight, thus at best of paraenetic rather than doctrinal import. The same mentality attends the usual interpretation of the anakephalaiosis (recapitulation) of Ephesians 1:10 (ἀνακεφαλώσασθαι τὰ πάντα). Such nominalist exegesis eviscerates the Gospel of Paul, for it is entirely incompatible with the sacramental realism evident in all his Letters. Further, the anti-metaphysical animus of this starveling exegesis is also a refusal of salvation history. Finally, its implicit subjectivism renders impossible any serious exegesis: we are left with ‘narratives’ of debatable significance.
The Gospel of John repeats the Pauline Christology: Jesus is the primordial Word, present in the Beginning, with God and as God. In him all creation has its origin. He is the Light of the World, enlightening all who come into the world. He was made flesh for our sake, entering into our solidarity with the fallen Adam, like us in all things save sin, yet transcendent to all history, its Alpha and its Omega. John’s Gospel and Letters stress that which a current proto-Gnostic docetism challenged, Jesus’ full humanity and full, i.e., Personal unity.
The Apostolic tradition of the revelation who is Jesus the Christ, a tradition radically liturgical because Eucharistic, began with the first Pentecost and for the next four or five decades was the one source and norm of the Church’s faith. Some fifty years later the Synoptic Gospels had appeared, to be followed a decade later by the Gospel of John, his three Letters, the letters of Peter and of Jude, and, finally, the Book of the Apocalypse. Paul’s letters had by then been collected; Peter recognized their authority in his first Letter. Closely associated with this collection is the Letter to the Hebrews, whose authorship is contested, but whose reliance upon Paul is sufficiently evident for it to be attributed to him by the Eastern Church, and by the West for several centuries, despite the doubts voiced by Origen among others. Contemporary scholarship has placed its Pauline authorship in doubt, but no other author has been seriously proposed. In any case, the Letter to the Hebrews belongs to the Canon of the New Testament, and cannot be dissociated from the Pauline Gospel; particularly, it is an eloquent witness to the High Priesthood of the Lord Jesus: thus to his unity, humanity and divinity.
The Apostolic Fathers include the earliest post-apostolic witnesses to the Church’s faith; pre-eminent among them are Clement of Rome, the third to govern the See of Rome after Peter, and Ignatius Martyr, the Bishop of Syrian Antioch. Clement died in Rome a year or two before the end of the first century: Ignatius was martyred in that city about a decade later. Because our interest here is Christological the consideration given the Apostolic Fathers is largely limited to their testimony to the humanity, divinity, and unity of Jesus the Lord.
Little is known of Clement apart from that which is conveyed by his famous Letter to the Corinthians (ca. 96.)[63],in which city an insurgent group had expelled the local clergy and evidently usurped their offices. Clement’s admonition, written, as Quasten observes, for a wider distribution than a single diocese, confirmed the authority of the apostolic succession to Orders, referring to the expelled clergy as charged with the offering of sacrifice, and rejecting the legitimacy of any exercise of the priestly office independent of that succession. [64]
Clement’s Christological statements are sparse: Jesus is preexistent;[65] he is the “beloved child of God,” the “High Priest and Guardian of our souls.”[66] It is likely that Clement holds a Spirit Christology,[67] since this was standard with the Apostolic Fathers and provided the common interpretation of the Lk. 1:35 for the next two centuries, but it is not developed in Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians. However, his stress upon the sacrificial character of Jesus death on the Cross, and upon its Eucharistic representation as the offering of sacrifice, are foundational for all Christology, for this insistence invokes the Johannine understanding of the One Sacrifice, i.e., as the fulfillment of the prophecy of the union in One Flesh of the primordial Adam and Eve.[68] The primordial personal humanity of the spouses inherent in this nuptial imagery implies the communication of idioms, reflects the synoptic titling of Jesus as the Bridegroom, and relies upon Paul’s development of that imagery from I Corinthians 6 through Ephesians 5.
Ignatius was the second bishop of Antioch, succeeding Evodius, the immediate successor of St. Peter.[69] James Kleist observes that Ignatius was “brought up under the eyes of three illustrious Apostles, Saints Peter, Barnabas, and Paul.”[70] He was condemned to be martyred in the Roman Coliseum during the reign of Trajan, at a date generally stated as 107 AD, although it may have been as much as ten years later. In his seven Letters to the Churches, and in his Letter to Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, he provided the clearest and most comprehensive witness of all the Apostolic Fathers to the full Personal unity of humanity and divinity in Jesus the Lord.[71] His anti-docetic emphasis is constant, both as to the reality of the Incarnation and as to reality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, “the medicine of immortality, the remedy that we should not die”, the standing offer of personal union with the risen Christ. Ignatius relied entirely upon the apostolic tradition and particularly upon the Pauline Epistles. Over and again he stresses that personal union with the risen Lord is mediated solely by the hierarchically-ordered worship of the Church: salvation is by union with Christ, in the Eucharist, in the Church: departure from this ecclesial and liturgical unity is departure from Christ and so from salvation.[72]
Like all the early witnesses to the Lordship of Jesus the Christ, Ignatius took for granted what would later be named “the communication of idioms,” the recognition of the full divinity, the full humanity, and the full unity of Jesus the Lord. This witness to the union of God and man in Jesus the Christ is so clearly the content of the apostolic tradition, of the earliest faith-assertion of the primitive Church that “Jesus is Lord,” as to have been obvious even to the rudes whom, in the second decade of the second century, Pliny the Younger heard in Bithynia, singing hymns “to Christ as though to God.”
Both Paul and John levied on this primitive hymnody, and not least for their assertion of Jesus’ primordial pre-existence, in “the Beginning,:” the pre-existence of the primordial Jesus the Word, the Son, the Christ, the Lord, the Personal unity of God and man We find this witness to the primordiality of the Christ especially in the Johannine and Pauline tradition (Jn. 1:1, I Jn. 1:1; Rev. 1:8, 17; 21:6; 22:13; Col. 1:15-17, Eph. 1:4; 2:10, II Tim. 1:9, Heb. 12:2, 9:26, I Cor. 10:4, 11:47-49), but it is present in the Synoptics as well; of this their insistent ascription of the “Son of Man” title to the Christ offers ample testimony to the Synoptic’s recognition that Jesus is the Beginning and the End.
The same doctrinal postulate of Jesus’ primordiality is inherent in the flesh,” “spirit,” “First Adam, second Adam” polarity of the Pauline Letters, in which “spirit” names that which is in solidarity with the victory of Jesus, the second Adam, over death, whereby he becames “living Spirit;” while “flesh” names that which in each of us is in solidarity with the fallen first Adam, our innate alienation from Christ our head, and the consequent mortality that is the price of original sin. Our solidarity with the risen Christ as Spirit is a solidarity with our Head who, in obedience to his Mission from the Father “became flesh,” entering into our fallen condition, our “flesh,” in order to redeem the whole of the creation which is “in him,” in that Beginning that is the Mission of Jesus the Lord, which terminates in the full gift of the Holy Spirit, the good creation, fallen in the first Adam, redeemed in the second Adam, Jesus the Lord.
This Beginning, the primordial Jesus, is unfallen, integral, immortal, for sin and death enter the world only by the original sin of the first Adam and Eve: a refusal of free nuptial unity in the moment of their creation, in which they spoke for its free imaging of God by refusing that imaging, refusing the free unity underlying the whole creation, by which alone it is good. Thus lacking the free unity which only the head can provide, the creation became “flesh,” locked into the single alternative to free unity, an immanently necessary fragmentation without limit toward the total disintegration that is death. In Romans 8:9ff, Paul describes the fallen universe as longing for the freedom of humanity by which alone creation may recover the freedom proper to it, the intrinsic significance that is its free truth, its beauty.
Jesus’ Mission from the Father was not, as we have seen, propter peccatum sensu negante, i.e., it was not simply on account of sin and thus merely to redeem the fallen world, for the universe is created in him, and has no other source for its free unity than him, its primordial Head. It is a basic Pauline insight that Jesus is the primordial Head of all creation. Thus, it is as the primordial and human head of the primordially unfallen creation, immanent in that creation, that Jesus the Lord enters into its historical fallenness to become flesh. As we learn from his admonition to his discouraged disciples in Lk. 24:26, “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer all these things, and thus enter into his glory?”
It is a time-honored and unreflective supposition that the subject of the Mission of the Son is the “Trinity-immanent,“ nonhistorical, not yet human Son who, sent by the Father, must then “become flesh” in the sense of becoming human, becoming historical. This mistake is the fruit of an abstract, nonhistorical theology of the Trinity as simply ab aeterno, as though intelligible in the abstract, apart from its revelation in Christ. However, the Catholic doctrinal tradition knows nothing of a non-historical, pre-economic “immanent Trinity,” nor of a non-historical, pre-human Son, or of a Mission of the Son other than of Jesus, the one and the same Son. The theologoumenon of an “immanent Trinity” is the confection of cosmological rationality, the product of a latent historical pessimism which supposes that theology must rationally transcend the concrete historicity of the Revelation in order to arrive at clarity of understanding unsullied by the historical mediation of truth.
The doctrinal tradition knows no divine Son other than Jesus the Lord: He is the subject of the primordial Mission of the Son as the Head of all creation, a creation which by reason of his headship of it is good and very good. It is by his Personal immanence in creation “in the Beginning” that creation exists: it is thus that he is the precondition even of the fall, for his offer of free unity to the human substance in which he subsists, as its creator, its Head, the source of its free unity, is the pre-condition of the refusal of that offer by the first Adam and first Eve, and so of Original Sin and the Fall. Jesus the Son is sent to give the Holy Spirit, the Spiritus Creator who proceeds eternally from the Father through the Son. It is by the Son’s obedience to his Mission, by his outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that creation comes to be. It is integral to that creation that it freely be free, that it appropriate the Gift of the Holy Spirit, which cannot be imposed. This appropriation can only be nuptial, for the freedom offered is that of the One Flesh of the primordial second Adam and second Eve in which the Mission of the Son terminates.
The Son’s primordial gift of the Holy Spirit to the second Eve issues in the good creation of Gen. 1 & 2, a creation whose goodness is its free nuptial unity: the primordial One Flesh of the second Adam and the Second Eve. The unity of the primordial good creation is a gift of the Head who is the second Adam: the primordially free appropriation of that goodness is the office of the primordial second Eve, who proceeds immaculate from her Head, the Bridegroom, receiving from him the Holy Spirit he was sent to give and thereby freely in nuptial union with him. Thus the good creation is primordially constituted in the free unity in One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve, in which the Mission of the Son terminates. However, this free unity cannot be imposed. The primordial Gift of the Holy Spirit was its outpouring upon the second Eve in her sinless procession from her sinless Head, by the immaculate freedom given her in that outpouring she freely and spontaneously affirmed him as her Lord, One Flesh with him; This union is personal: it could only be offered personally to the humanity created in this institution of the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve.
The proffer of this free unity “in the beginning” is single, an offer of the supreme responsibility of headship over creation to its prospective head, the first Adam. This offer was of nuptial freedom, and therefore was open to a nuptial refusal: its refusal by the first Adam and first Eve deprived the universe of the free nuptial unity by which alone it is good. The world yet awaits the full restoration of that unity, as dependent upon the full liberation of humanity, by the second Adam, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega, whose immanence in creation was not annulled by its fall.
The fall deprived creation of free nuptial unity―for there is no other free unity in creation than this, which images the supreme freedom of the Trinity. Fallen man, as fallen, is intrinsically divided between two concrete solidarities: as in solidarity with the first Adam, every fallen human being is “flesh,” sarx. As in solidarity with the second Adam, he is “spirit,” pneuma. These polarities are irreconciliable, in a tension which pervades all history, public and private. We live in the overlap of two kingdoms―“two cities” in Augustine’s terms: the City of God and the City of man, and each of us must choose between them. The freedom so to choose is mediated by the Holy Spirit poured out upon the Church: only by reason of her Eucharistic worship is moral freedom possible to fallen humanity.
As free, the choice to dwell in the City of God, in ecclesia, in Christo, cannot but be open to refusal: the refusal by which the first Adam refused a proffered headship, a refusal effective for all creation. The second Adam, immanent in his now fallen creation, is immanent as its Head, as the primordial source of its free unity. His mission remained as it was in the Beginning: to bestow the Holy Spirit. In obedience to his Mission, he could not but exercise that headship which the first Adam had refused: Thus he “became flesh” in the moment of the “Fiat” of the second Eve, whose primordial union with him in One Flesh was given its expression in fallen history by her conception of her Lord, the prolepsis of the One Flesh of the New Covenant which he instituted on the Altar and on the Cross by his One Sacrifice. By his triumph over the “last enemy,” death, Christ redeemed the fallen world.
It is then as having become flesh, descending from the heaven that is the primordial good creation, that the primordial Jesus underwent the kenōsis of his primordial dignity by his obedient entry into our slavery to death, and by dying redeemed the fallen world; his resurrection from the dead is his radical victory over death as such, a victory communicated by baptism into the worshiping Church, the “mother of all the living.”
In her is fulfilled the title given the fallen first Eve, the mother of all the living, but while the children of the first Eve are imprisoned through all their lives by the fear of death, those of the second Eve enter into life eternal, through the apostolic ministry of the bishops, their priests and their deacons who are at one with her in the unity of the Church’s sacramental mediation, essentially Eucharistic, of the risen Lord.
For it is as Eucharistically represented that Jesus is the Lord of history, and that his victory transcends all historical fragmentation: by that Eucharistic representation, the risen Jesus is immanent in our fallen history as its risen Head, as the “life-giving Spirit.” He bestows upon it that free significance by which is it salvific per se: not simply as post-Pentecostal, but from the Beginning to the End, from the Alpha who is also the Omega. All who choose to live and have lived in salvific history live and have lived in him. The sacramental mediation of eternal life restores to those imprisoned “from the beginning” by the fear of death the freedom to choose to live in him, in the “life-giving Spirit,” in the City of God.
Ignatius’ Christology deploys the Pauline Spirit-Flesh dichotomy to express the identity of Jesus, the historical Son of God, with the preexistent “Son of Man,” the “bread from heaven,” who, by his kenōsis, exchanged his primordial integrity, his glory, his manifest divinity, for the “form of a slave,” his submission to the fallenness, the mortality, the temptations, of our fallen historicity, as inseparable from his free acceptance of his Mission from the Father.
In reading Ignatius, it is therefore of the first importance to reject the anachronistic identification of “Spirit” with Jesus’ divinity, and “flesh” with his humanity.[73] Following Paul in Phil. 2, Ignatius knew the subject of the Incarnation to be the preexistent Christ who, antecedently immortal and thus ‘Spirit,’ “became “flesh,” through his conception by the Virgin Mary who, by conceiving him, became the mother, not of his humanity, but of her Son, Jesus himself, so named by the Father’s messenger, the angel of the Annunciation.[74] Here Ignatius follows not only the account of the Incarnation in Phil. 2:5-11, but also that of Jn. 1:1-14 and I Jn. 4:2, in which the preexistent Logos is Jesus. Here Ignatius is following the “logos sarx egeneto” of Jn. 1:14, which is not to be read as his “becoming man,” in the all-too-usual sense that would dehistoricize Jesus’ pre-existence by supposeing it to be that of the “immanent Son,” and thus to be eternal rather than primordial.[75] This is clearly ruled out by Jn. 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word.” When the Word is understood as the divine Son who exists ab aeterno, thus as simply non-human, it is evident that he can have no “beginning,” and no “becoming.” The Word as divine sensu negante, as “immanent,” as absent from history, can have no relation to anything created. When understood as the immanent and therefore nonhistorical Son, thus as absolute, incapable of relation to the created order, the Word cannot be the subject of the Prologue’s “Logos sarx egeneto.”
In the Old Testament and the New, and consequently for Paul, for John, and thus also for Ignatius, “flesh” denotes fallen historicity and therefore the mortality proper to it, the fear of which imprisons all men “who through fear of death were delivered to lifelong bondage.” (Heb. 2:14) [RSV]. It is thus that “all flesh is grass,” as Isaiah has it, and thus that as our Lord has said, “the flesh profits nothing,”[76] It is thus that Ignatius’ Spirit-Christology understands the Incarnation: i.e., as Jesus’ kenōsis in the sense given the term by Paul in Phil. 2, the assumption of the “form of a slave” by the primordial Jesus, unfallen, deathless and therefore “spirit,” who “although in the form of God, did not account equality with God a thing to be grasped.” (RSV) For Jesus, the second Adam, to have assumed the form of a slave is for him to have “become sin,” to have “become flesh,” without detriment to his eternal divinity, to his eternal procession from the Father as his Word, or to his full humanity, or his full Personal unity.
Jesus’ Personal unity is the fundamental mystery of the faith: It can only be preached and heard in faith: it is not open to metaphysical analysis, and Ignatius offers none. His Christology is a celebration of the historical, redeeming Christ; he manifests no interest whatever in the antecedent possibility of the union of humanity and divinity in the Person of the one Son, the Word of God who is Jesus the Christ. Like Paul, like John, Ignatius knows no disincarnate Son. He is the Church’s most eloquent witness to the full Apostolic tradition, to the faith of the primitive Church whose only subject is Jesus, fully divine, fully human, and fully the one Lord, who preexists as “Spirit,” and who “became flesh.”
This is the “Spirit Christology” of the primitive Church: its subject is the Lord Jesus of Rom. 10:9 and Phil. 2:5-11, in whom divinity and humanity are united in the fundamental mystery of the faith. It must be stressed that in this apostolic Christology, “Spirit” refers to the historical transcendence and thus the “pre-existence” of the risen Lord Jesus, as “flesh” refers to his kenōsis, his obedient entry into fallenness, his acceptance of “the form of a slave,” his free submission to of our fallen mortality, our fear of death, for the sacrificial achievement of our redemption. Ignatius knows “the life-giving Spirit” to be Eucharistically mediated: thereby we are given the “medicine of immortality,” “the remedy that we should not die.”
The language of “Spirit Christology” is Pauline: it describes the historical event of the Incarnation of the primordial Jesus, not of an “immanent Son.” Thus it is not at all interested in an analysis of his Personal unity: it speaks rather to the mystery, to the tension between the primordial pre-existence and the kenōsis of the Lord Jesus, in whom divinity and humanity are at one in the mystery of his Person. Ignatius is eloquent on this tension or dialectic, but it is not between Jesus’ divinity and his humanity: it is between his fallen servitude to death and his risen victory over death: between his historical humanity and its transfiguration, between the degradation of his crucifixion and the elevation of his Cross as the triumphant symbol of our salvation.
Later theology will tend to Platonize, cosmologize and thus dehistoricize this mystery, but Ignatius never does. He is in clear possession of the “communication of idioms” which, concrete in the affirmation Jesus’ Lordship, implies the homoousion of the Son with the Father and his human homoousion with us. The Catholic faith that “Jesus is Lord” can have only a Personal reference: it imports the recognition, some three and a half centuries before Chalcedon, of the Personal unity of humanity and divinity in Jesus, and thus inexorably entails the double homoousion of Jesus with his Father and with us, as defined at Chalcedon.[77] In sum, the Symbol of Chalcedon does no more than witness to the Church’s most primitive assertion of her faith that “Jesus Christ is Lord.”
This is the “Christology” of the preaching and teaching Church, explicit in the first four Councils. No Christian theology can go beyond apostolic affirmation of the Church’s faith that Jesus is Lord, still less put it in issue. Foundational for the faith, it cannot but be foundational for theology as such. To debate its adequacy, to submit its truth to an implicitly higher criterion―always cosmological―as though posing a problem to be solved rather than establishing the foundation of historical truth as such, is to cease to do theology, for that false problem thereupon becomes the pseudo-concern of Christology, whose sole interest, not withstanding, is the revelation given in the Lord Jesus and mediated by his bridal Church.
II Clement is the oldest surviving Christian sermon, dating to about 150 AD. Its author is unknown. Jurgens considers its preservation in the Corinthian archives together with I Clement to be evidence of a Corinthan origin. The author’s Christology upholds the divinity and the humanity of the Christ in the unity of his Name: Jesus is Spirit made flesh. He is also familiar with the nuptial imagery of “the beginning,” i. e., of the primordially unfallen order of creation:
[1, 1] Brethren, we must think of Jesus Christ as God and as the Judge of the living and the dead
II Clement 1,1; tr. Jurgens, The Early Fathers, I, § 01, at 43.
[1] Let none of you say that this flesh is not judged and does not rise again. [2] Just think: in what state were you saved, and in what state did you recover your sight, if not in the flesh? [3] We must, therefore, guard the flesh as a temple of God [4] In like manner, as you were called in the flesh, so you shall come in the flesh. [5] If Christ, the Lord who saved us, though He was originally spirit, became flesh and in this state called us, so also shall we receive our reward in the flesh. [6] Let us therefore love one another, so that we may come into the kingdom of God.
Ibid., 9, 1-6; §104, at 43.
[2] I presume that you are not ignorant of the fact that the living Church is the body of Christ (2). The Scripture says, “God made man male and female (3)” The male is Christ, and the female is the Church. Moreover, the Books (4) and the Apostles declare that the Church belongs not to the present, but has existed from the beginning. She was spiritual, just as was Jesus; but He was manifested in the last days so that He might save us. [3] And the Church, being spiritual, was manifested in the flesh of Christ.[78]
2: Eph. 1: 22-23.
3: Gen. 1:27.
4: The Books, of course, are the Old Testament Scriptures, while the Apostles are the New Testament. The Syriac translation supplies to the Books the qualification of the prophets.
Ibid., 14, 1-2, 105, at 43. A more extended excerpt of this passage is provided by Quasten, Patrology I, at 55-56.
The creation of man as male and female “in the beginning,” as revealed in Gen. 1:27 and Gen. 2:21-24, is the obvious ground for the identification of the male as the Christ; the female as the Church. I it is clear that the author read these verses as prophetic, in line with the common patristic interprettation of Jn. 19:34, and also with Paul’s first Adam–second Adam parallel in I Cor. 15:45, Romans 5, and with his citation of Gen. 2:24 in Eph. 5:31. Thus II Clement understands the pre-existence of the feminine Church, like that of Jesus, to be spiritual. The living Church is the body of Christ, his spouse. The Books and the Apostles declare that the Church belongs not to the present but has existed, “from the beginning” and then, as historical, was manifested “in flesh of Christ.” This last sentence [14,3] at first glance appears to identify the flesh of the Church’s manifestation with the flesh in which the spiritual Jesus is manifest, but the creation narratives are here too close to the surface to permit their common “flesh” to be other than the “one flesh” of Gen. 2:24. The allusion which Jurgens has noted to the head-body union of Christ and the Church in Eph. 1:23 confirms that inference. The entirety of the long sentence in Ephesians in which that allusion appears is pertinent here:
I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Eph. 1:16-23 (RSV); underlineation added.
Within this context, in which Jesus the Christ’s headship of “the Church which is his body” is clear, it is not too much to read II Clement’s “And the Church, being spiritual, was manifested in the flesh of Christ” as a reference to the manifestation of the primordial (“in the beginning”) nuptial union of Christ and the Church in fallen history: proleptically in the Incarnation, redemptively in Jesus’ sacrificial institution of the New Covenant. This prolepsis intimates Mary’s standing as the second Eve.
While the identity of the Church with the second Eve is implicit in Eph. 5:32-33, the application of that title to Mary waits upon Irenaeus in the last decades of the second century. II Clement makes no explicit mention of the second Eve in its presentation of the Church as the spouse of Christ and, while Justin develops the Eve-Mary parallel, neither does he call Mary the second Eve. Nonetheless, the strict association of Mary with the sinless Church’s unfallen integrity is prerequisite to her utterly free conception of her Lord, which in turn is the indispensable preliminary to his sacrificial institution of the New Covenant. Only the ancient exegesis of Lk. 1:35 permits Mary to be the mother of her Lord, and the consequent communication of idioms between them apart from which Jesus would not be the Lord.
The Shepherd of Hermas is an apocryphal apocalypse, which Jurgens would date ca. 140-50, in agreement with the Muratorian Canon, while Quasten thinks it to have been written in two parts, the first dated about 96 AD, the second somewhere between 140 and 150, in which case the work would have been composed over a period of perhaps fifty years: this Jurgens thinks unlikely.[79]
The author’s central concern is penitential: Kirsopp Lake offers this summary:
The main problem, which constantly recurs, is that of sin after baptism. In the circle to which Hermas belonged the belief obtained that Christians after baptism were capable of leading sinless lives, and that if they fell they could not again obtain forgiveness. Experience, however, had shown that in this case few indeed would be saved, and the message of Hermas was that for sin after baptism there was still the possibility of forgiveness for those who repented, though this repentance would not avail more than once. A great part of the book is taken up in developing the details of this doctrine of repentance, which is entrusted to an angel called the Shepherd, who gives his name to the book, and it is obvious that we have here the beginning of the Catholic doctrine of penance.[80]
The Shepherd of Hermas, tr. Kirsopp Lake, The Apostolic Fathers II, . Col. The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19701913), p. 2.
Quasten says much the same, if more concisely:
The angel of penance appears in the guise of a shepherd who will sponsor and direct the whole penitential mission, who is to revitalize Christianity, and who now proclaims his commands and his parables. [81]
Quasten, Patrology I, at 94
Hermas’ Christology is consequently indirect; his exposition of it is in function of his ecclesiology and his moral doctrine. In the five Visions constituting the first part of his work, the Church is presented first as an ancient woman, preexistent, the first of all creatures in a world itself created for her sake. Later, she appears in a more youthful guise, that of a mature woman, and lastly as a youthful and beautiful bride, the symbol of God’s elect people: The Church is also presented as a tower in the process of construction, whose stones are the elect, and which is founded in water symbolizing baptism, and on the rock who is the Son of God. It is noteworthy that Hermas makes no reference to the Logos nor does he name Son of God Jesus Christ.
In the third part of his book, Hermas learns from the Shepherd that he has been sent to him by that Son-Savior who is preexistent “Spirit” (who is “Son and Savior, also as preexistent) and who, as preexistent Spirit, assumes flesh.
The Shepherd opens the dialogue:
35. Say on,” he saith, “if thou desirest anything.” “Wherefore, Sir, say I, “is the Son of God represented in the parable in the guise of a servant?”
36 “Listen,” said he; “the Son of God is not represented in the guise of a servant, but is represented in great power and lordship.” “How, Sir?” say I; “I comprehend not.”
37 “Because,” saith he, “God planted the vineyard, that is, He created the people, and delivered them over to His Son. And the Son placed the angels in charge of them, to watch over them; and the Son Himself cleansed their sins, by laboring much and enduring many toils; for no one can dig without toil or labor.
38 Having Himself then cleansed the sins of His people, He showed them the paths of life, giving them the law which He received from His Father. Thou seest,” saith he, “that He is Himself Lord of the people, having received all power from His Father.
39 But how that the Lord took his son and the glorious angels as advisers concerning the inheritance of the servant, listen.
40 The Holy Preexistent Spirit. Which created the whole creation, God made to dwell in flesh that He desired. This flesh, therefore, in which the Holy Spirit dwelt, was subject unto the Holy Spirit, walking honorably in holiness and purity, without in any way defiling the Spirit.
41 When then it had lived honorably in chastity, and had labored with the Holy Spirit, and had cooperated with it in everything, behaving itself boldly and bravely, He chose it as a partner with the Holy Spirit; for the career of this flesh pleased [the Lord], seeing that, as possessing the Holy Spirit, it was not defiled upon the earth.
42 He therefore took the son as adviser and the glorious angels also, that this flesh too, having served the Spirit unblameably, might have some place of sojourn, and might not seem to hare lost the reward for its service; for all flesh, which is found undefiled and unspotted, wherein the Holy Spirit dwelt, shall receive a reward.
43 “Now thou hast the interpretation of this parable also.”
44 “I was right glad, Sir,” say I, “to hear this interpretation.” “Listen now,” saith he, “Keep this thy flesh pure and undefiled, that the Spirit which dwelleth in it may bear witness to it, and thy flesh may be justified.
45 See that it never enter into thine heart that this flesh of thine is perishable, and so thou abuse it in some defilement. [For] if thou defile thy flesh, thou shalt defile the Holy Spirit also; but if thou defile the flesh, thou shalt not live.”
46 “But if, Sir,” say I, “there has been any ignorance in times past, before these words were heard, how shall a man who has defiled his flesh be saved?” “For the former deeds of ignorance,” saith he, “God alone hath power to give healing; for all authority is His.
47 “But now keep thyself, and the Lord Almighty, Who is full of compassion, will give healing for thy former deeds of ignorance, if henceforth thou defile not thy flesh, neither the Spirit; for both share in common, and the one cannot be defiled without the other. Therefore keep both pure, and thou shalt live unto God.”
The Shepherd of Hermas, Parable/Similitude V, 5:5 – 6: 4. Apostolic Fathers – Second edition . Translated by J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer. Edited and revised by Michael W. Holmes (Grand Rapids, MI:Baker Book House, 1989) [hereafter, Apostolic Fathers /2), at 245-46.
The text of Lightfoot’s original translation, downloaded from the Early Christian Writings Website (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/) is followed here, with reference to its revision in the corresponding pages of Apostolic Fathers.
Hermas’ Christology is the Spirit Christology of Ignatius and of II Clement, an affirmation of the Pauline and Johannine tradition of the primordial preexistence of Jesus the Lord, the Logos who, as preexistent, the Shepherd names Holy Spirit, whose ensarkosis is the enfleshment of the primordial Son, the Savior.[82] Contra Quasten and Harnack, there is no adoptionism here.[83] Hermas hypostasized the “flesh” of the Son only because no vocabulary existed by which this could be avoided, nor would it exist until the latter half of the fourth century. Hermas did not express the unity of Spirit and flesh―i.e., of the Son’s primordial pre-existence and his historical existence―in the terms of existential paradox which Ignatius Martyr had used, but neither is Hermas’ “indwelling” metaphor latently diophysite, for Hermas did not think in terms of accounting for the prior possibility of the Incarnation. Cosmological analysis was alien to his interest: he knew no Logos-sarx quandary. To read adoptionism into his exposition of the Spirit’s Incarnation, his “becoming flesh,” is simply to have missed the point. Hermas’ Christology is Pauline; whereas adoptionism responds to a cosmological curiosity which presupposes the antecedent possibility of the Incarnation and wishes to account for it, inevitably putting in question the unity of Christ the Lord. The Personal unity of the Son, the “Holy Spirit” whom he names the Son and the Savior, was not an issue for Hermas. His identification of the Son as the Savior is sufficient evidence of Hermas full acceptance of the communication of idioms in the Son, and so of his faith-appropriation of the basic mystery of the faith: that Jesus is Lord. His Personal unity is corroborated by the Shepherd’s injunction that any defilement of the flesh is a defilement of the Holy Spirit:
See that it never enter into thine heart that this flesh of thine is perishable, and so thou abuse it in some defilement. [For] if thou defile thy flesh, thou shalt defile the Holy Spirit also; but if thou defile the flesh, thou shalt not live.”
Parable/Similitude V, 45; Apostolic Fathers, at 246.
The solidarity of the ‘Holy Spirit’ with the ‘flesh’ of the Christian echoes the headship theme of I Cor. 11:3 and, more particularly, echoes the Pauline doctrine of Jesus’ headship of the body, the Church, in Col. 1:18; finally it anticipates the Chalcedonian definition of Jesus’ consubstantiality with every human being.
Hermas knows an “Angel Christology” as well: it rests upon the application. by early Jewish converts to Christianity, of the Old Testament accounts of the epiphanies of “Angel of Jahweh” to Jesus.[84] Jean Daniélou provides a concise account of the Angel Christology of the first two centuries:
How is this theology in terms of angels to be interpreted? It seems fairly certain that the use of such terms in no way- implies that Christ is by nature an angel. The Semitic categories which underlie this expression are not Hellenistic concepts. In fact the word angel has an essentially concrete force: it connotes a supernatural being manifesting itself. The nature of this supernatural being is not determined by the expression but by the context. The word represents the Semitic form of the designation of the Word and the Spirit as spiritual “substances, as ‘persons’, though the latter terminology was not to be introduced into theology until a good deal later. “Angel” is its old-fashioned equivalent.
Daniélou, Jewish Christianity, at 118.
Daniélou finds this ‘angel Christology” set out with clarity in The Shepherd:
A characteristic feature of theology of Hermas is to call the Word ‘glorious’ (ἔνδοξος) or most venerable (σεμνότατος) angel’. He distinguishes very clearly the angel who visits him, whom he calls variously ‘shepherd’ and ‘angel of repentance’ from the supreme being, whom he also calls an angel, but who is quite different from the other since it is he who sends that other. His attributes also are quite different.
Ibid.
Daniélou then proceeds to a comprehensive demonstration of the Shepherd’s identification of the Word with the “glorious angel,” the “most venerable angel,” “the holy angel” “the angel of the Lord,” “the angel of the Lord, glorious and very tall.” This identification progresses in the following texts:
And he (the Shepherd) immediately sat down by my side, and he saith unto me, “I was sent by the most holy (most venerable) angel, that I might dwell with thee the remaining days of thy life.”
Fifth Vision 5, 2; Apostolic Fathers /2, at 214. (Daniélou here rmarks that ‘holy angel’ is equivalent to ‘venerable angel’).
For I will be with them and will preserve them; for they all were justified by the most holy angel.
Fifth Mandate, V, 1:7; Apostolic Fathers /2, 230.
But thou who hast been strengthened by the holy angel, and hast received from him such (powers of intercession and art not idle, wherefore dost thou not ask understanding of the Lord, and obtain it from Him).”
Fifth Similitude, V 4:4; Jurgens, Apostolic Fathers /2, at 244.
Here Daniélou observes: “The holy angel and the Kyrios are placed on the same footing. The Shepherd on the other hand belongs to another sphere as is shown by what follows:”
“”It is necessary for thee,” saith he, “to be afflicted; for so,” saith he, “the glorious angel ordered as concerning thee, for he wisheth thee to be proved.”
Seventh Similitude 2:2; Apostolic Fathers /2, at 251.
Sir, if they perpetrated such deeds that the glorious angel is embittered, what have I done?”
Seventh Similitude 3, 1; Apostolic Fathers /2, ibid.
Daniélou now points out:
Then the denoument: “glorious angel” is called “the angel of the Lord”:
Thou must be afflicted as the angel of the Lord commanded, even he that delivered thee unto me; and for this give thanks to the Lord, in that He deemed thee worthy that I should reveal unto thee beforehand the affliction, that foreknowing it thou might endure it with fortitude.”
Seventh Similitude, 5:3; Apostolic Fathers /2 at 252.
Daniélou continues:
In the Eighth Similitude, “the glorious angel,” “the angel of the Lord,” appears as the judge those who seek admission to his Church:
He (the Shepherd) showed me a [great] willow, overshadowing plains and mountains, and under the shadow of the willow all have come who are called by the name of the Lord.
And by the willow there stood an angel of the Lord, glorious and very tall, having a great sickle, and he was lopping branches from the willow, and giving them to the people that sheltered beneath the willow; and he gave them little rods about a cubit long.
And after all had taken the rods, the angel laid aside the sickle, and the tree was sound, just as I had seen it.
Then I marvelled within myself, saying, “How is the tree sound after so many branches have been lopped off?” The shepherd saith to me, “Marvel not that the tree remained sound, after so many branches were lopped off but wait until thou seest all things, and it shall be shown to thee what it is.”
The angel who gave the rods to the people demanded them back from them again, and according as they had received them, so also they were summoned to him, and each of them returned the several rods. But the angel of the Lord took them, and examined them.
Eighth Similitude, I, 1-5; Apostolic Fathers /2, at 252-53.
And the angel of the Lord commanded crowns to be brought. And crowns were brought, made as it were of palm branches; and he crowned the men that had given up the rods which had the shoots and some fruit, and sent them away into the tower.
And the others also he sent into the tower, even those who had given up the rods green and with shoots, but the shoots were without fruit; and he set a seal upon them.
And all they that went into the tower had the same raiment, white as snow.
Eighth Similitude, II. 1:3; Apostolic Fathers /2, at 254.
Daniélou’s commentary upon the “glorious angel” of the Eighth Similitude brings out the divine quality of the office exercised by the angel, as evident in his distribution of the branches, his distinguishing between the just and the sinners, his conferring of the seal (baptism), and his introduction of the just into the Tower that is the Church:
These are divine functions: the judgment of souls, the rewarding of the just, the bestowal of grace, the incorporation into the Church of the Saints. For Jewish Christians, they form part of the peculiar mission of the Son of God to whom judgment has been committed.
Daniélou, Jewish Christianity, 121-22.
Finally, Daniélou shows that the Shepherd’s identification of the “glorious Angel” with Archangel Michael is in fact the latter’s identity with the Word, the “glorious angel” who is the chief of all the angels.
but the great and glorious angel is Michael, who hath the power over this people and is their captain. For this is he that putteth the law into the hearts of the believers; therefore he himself inspecteth them to whom he gave it, to see whether they have observed it.
Eighth Similitude, III, 3: Apostolic Fathers /2, at 255.
And, behold, after a little while I see an array of many men coming, and in the midst a man of such lofty stature that he overtopped the tower.
And the six men who superintended the building walked with him on the right hand on the left, and all they that worked at the building were with him, and many other glorious attendants around him.
Ninth Similitude, VI, 1-2, Apostolic Fathers /2, at 266.
“The glorious man,” saith he-, “is the Son of God, and those six are the glorious angels who guard Him on the right hand on the left. Of these glorious angels not one,” saith he, “shall enter in unto God without Him; whosoever shall not receive His name, shall not enter into the kingdom of God.”
Ninth Similitude, XII, 8; Apostolic Fathers /2, at 272.
Daniélou points out also that the description of the “glorious angel” as “very tall”, as “of such lofty stature that he overtopped the tower,”
.is specifically characteristic of Jewish Christian teaching, being a peculiarity of their representation of angels. It serves precisely to establish the transcenddence of the “glorious angel” by showing that he surpasses the angels infinitely. . . .Above all it appears in Hermas with reference to the Son of God: ‘I see. . . a man of such lofty stature that he overtopped the tower (Sim. IX, 6:1).
Daniélou, Jewish Christianity, at 121.
In short, this is a transformation of the account in Tobias 12:15 wherein Raphael identifies himself as one of the seven angels who stand before God: the angels are now six, with the seventh the new Michael, the Son and Savior, who replaces the Old Testament’s Archangel Michael as the head of the six subordinate archangels, and does so as the Son of God, infinitely transcending the six archangels: for Hermas, there are never more than six archangels; we see this in the account in the Third Vision (V, 6) of the old woman who is the preexistent or spiritual Church:
It is to be noted that the “glorious angel” is an epiphany of the preexistent Son of God, as was the Angel who spoke to Moses in Ex. 3:14; such divine manifestations, obscure in the Old Testament, attain clarity only in the New Testament, where the identification of the “angel of Jahweh” (mal’ak Yahweh) with the Christ becomes clear: it is He who, par excellence, has been sent by the Father: the Son of God, the Savior, is the Angel of Jahweh.
Hermas’ “angel Christology’ is entirely historical: it concerns the “great and glorious man” who is the Savior, who also is the “Spirit” who is the Son of God:
After I had written down the commandments and parables of the shepherd, the angel of repentance, he came to me and saith to me; “I wish to show thee all things that the Holy Spirit, which spake with thee in the form of the Church, showed unto thee. For that Spirit is the Son of God.
For when thou wast weaker in the flesh, it was not declared unto thee through an angel; but when thou wast enabled through the Spirit, and didst grow mighty in thy strength so that thou couldest even see an angel, then at length was manifested unto thee, through the Church, the building of the tower. In fair and seemly manner hast thou seen all things, (instructed) as it were by a virgin; but now thou seest (being instructed) by an angel, though by the same Spirit;
Ninth Simlitude, I, 1-2; Apostolic Fathers /2, 262.
In Hermas’ thought, the “Spirit Christology” and the “angel Christology” are at one: the Spirit and the Angel each name the one Son of God. Their pre-existence is in each case primordial: each is “manifest” as at once human and transcendent to creation. Hermas’ Christology, like that of all the Apostolic Fathers, takes for granted the apostolic tradition of the Spirit Christology, with its powerful stress on the primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Lord; that which Origen will call the communication of Names in Jesus Christ the Lord.
Polycarp was the Bishop of Smyrna, Irenaeus described himself as Polycarp’s student, and said of Polycarp that he was a disciple of the Apostle John, and that he had been appointed Bishop of Smyrna by the Apostles.
Our information about Polycarp is largely dependent upon his Letter to the Philippians, sent to the Christians of Philippi. It is now generally recognized to be a joinder of two letters (Quasten, Patrology I, 76-82, at 79; Jurgens, Early Fathers I, at 28; see also endnote 70, supra. The first Letter was sent shortly after Ignatius arrived in Rome, between 110 and 118, probably closer to 110 since. as Jurgens notes, Polycarp's Letter forwarded copies of the Letters of Ignatius to the Philippians, who had requested this of him. Polycarp’s Second Letter, which included most of the text of his Letter to the Phlippians, was sent them some twenty years later. Quasten also records an account of Polycarp’s discussion of the date of Easter with Pope Anicetus in 155 or 156; they could not agree, Polycarp supporting the Quartodecian practice derived from John and the Apostles, the Pope relying upon the Roman custom. They agreed to disagree with the consequence that their disagreement involved no personal breach. Finally, we have also the record of Polycarp’s martyrdom, contained in a letter sent by an otherwise unknown Marcion to the Church in Philomenium, in Greater Phrygia, now central Turkey. His martyrdom occurred shortly after Polycarp’s return from Rome after visiting Anicetus,. He died nobly at the age of eighty-six, as we learn from this account of an eye-witness.
When he had at last finished his prayer, in which he remembered all that had met him at any time—both small and great, both known and unknown to fame, and the whole world-wide Church—the moment of departure arrived, and, seating him on an ass, they led him into the city. It was a great Sabbath. He was met by Herod, the chief of Police, and his father Nicetas. They had him transferred to their carriage and, seated at his side tried to win him over.
“Really,” they said, “what harm is ther in saying “Lord Caesar,’and offering incense” –and what goes with it—“and thus being saved?
At first he did not answer them, but when they persisted, he said: “I am not going to do what you counsel me.
So they failed to win him over, and with dire threats made him get down so hurriedly that in leaving the carriage he bruised his shin. But without turning around, as though he had suffered no injury, he walked briskly as he was led to the arena. The uroar in the arena was so tremendous that no one could even be heard.
As Polycarp entered the arena, a voice was heard from heaven: Be strong, Polycarp, and act manfully. Nobody saw he speaker, but those of our people who were present heard the voice. When he was finally led up to the tribunal, there was a terrific uproar among the people on hearing that Polycarp had been arrested.
So when he had been led up, the proconsul questioned him whether he was Polycarp, and, when he admitted the fact, tried to persuad him to deny the faith.
He said to him, “Respect your age,” and all the rest they were accustomed to say; “swear by the Fortune of Caesar, change your mind; say ‘Away with the atheists!’”
But Polycarp looked with a stern mien at the whole rabble of lawless heathen in the arena; he than groaned and, looking up to heaven, said, with a wave of his hand at them ”Away with the atheists!’ ”
When the proconsul insisted and said: “Take the oath and I will set yhou free; revile Christ,” Polycarp replied ‘For six and eighty years I have been serving Him and He has done no wrong to me; how then, dare I blashpeme my King who has saved me!
But again he insisted and said “Swear by the Fortune of Caesar.”
He answered “If you flatter yourself that I shall swear by the Fortune of Caesar, as you suggest, and if you pretend not to know me, let me frankly tell you: I am a Christian! If you wish to learn the teaching of Christianity, fix a day and let me explain.
Talk to the crowd, the proconsul next said.
“You,” replied Polycarp, “I indeed consider entitled to an explanation; for we have been trained to render honor, insofar as it does not harm us, to magistrates and authorities appointed by God; but as to that crowd, I do not think it proper to make an appeal to them.
“Well,” said the proconsul, “I have wild beasts, and you shall be thrown before them if you do not change your mind.”
“Call for them,” he replied; “to us a change from better to worse is impossible, but it is noble to change from what is evil to what is good.”
Again he said to him: “If you make little of the beasts, I shall have you consumed by fire unless you change your mind.”
“The fire which you threaten,” replied Polycarp, “is one that burns for a little while, and after a shor time goes out. You evidently do now know the fire of judgement to come and of the eternal punishment, which awaits the wicked. But why do you delay? Go ahead; do what you want.
As he said this, and more besides, he was animated with courage and joy, and his countenance was suffused with beauty. As a result, he did not collapse with fright at what was being said to him; the proconsul, on the other hand,was astounded, and sent his herald to announce three times in the centre of the arena: “Polycarp has confessed to being a Christian.” Upon this announcement of the herald, the whole multitude of heathens and Jews living at Smyrna shouted with uncontrolled anger and at the top of their voices: “This is the teacher of Asta, the father of the Christians, the destroyer of our gods! He teaches many not to sacrifice and not to worship! Amidst this noisy demonstration, they called upon Philip, the minister of public worship in Asia, to let loose a lion upon Polycarp. But he replied that he had no authority to do so, since he had already closed the hunting sports. Then they decided with one accord to demand that he should burn Polycarp alive, Of course, the vision that had appeared to him in connection with the pillow—when he saw it on fire during his prayer and then turned to his trusted friends with the prophetic remark: “I must be burned alive”—had to be fulfilled.
Then the thing was done more quickly than can be told, the crowds being in so great a hurry to gather logs and firewood from the shops and baths! And the Jews, too, as is their custom, were particularly zealous in lending a hand. When the pyre was prepared, he laid aside all his clothes, unfastened the loin cloth, and prepared to take off his shoes. He had not been in the habit of doing this, because the faithful always vied with each other to see which of them would be the first to touch his body. Even before his martyrdom, he had always been honored for holiness of life. Without delay the material prepared for the pyre was piled around him; but when they intended to nail him as well, he said, “Leave me as I am. He who enables me to endure the fire will also enable me to remain on the pyre unbudging, without the security provided by your nails. So they did not nail him, but just fastened him. And there he was, with his hands put behind him, and fastened, like a ram towering over a large flock, ready for sacrifice, a holocaust prepared and acceptable to God! And he looked up to heaven and said:
O Lord God, O Almighty, Father of thy beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, through whom we hav received the knowledge of you—God of andgels and hosts and all creation—and of the whole race of saints who live under your eyes! I bless thee, because thou hast seen fit to bestow on me this day and this hour, that I may share, among the martyrs, the cup of Thy Anointed and rise to eternal life both in soul and in body, in view of the immortality of the Holy Spirit. May I be accepted among them in Thy sight today as a rich and pleasing sacrifice, such as Thou, the true God that cannot utter a falsehood, hast prearranged, revealed in advance, and now consummated. And therefore I praise Thee for everything; I bless Thee; I glorify Thee through the eternal and heavenly High Priest Jesus Christ, Thy beloved Son, through whom be glory to Thee together with Him and the Holy Spirit, both now and for ages to come. Amen.
When he had wafted up the Amen and finished the prayer, the men attending to the fire lit it; and when a mighty flame shot up, we, who were privileged to see it, saw a wonderful thing; and we have een spared to tell the tale to the rest. The fire produced the likeness of a vaulted chamber, like a ship’s sail bellying to the breeze, and surrounded the martyr’s body as with a wall, and he was in the centre of it, not as burning flesh, but as bread that is baking, or as gold and silver refined in a furnace! In fact, we even caught an aroma such as the sent of incense or of some other precious spice.
At length, seing his body could not be consumed by fire, those impious people ordered an executioner to approach him and run a dagger into him. This done, there issued [a dove and] a great quantity of blood, with the result that the fire was quenched and the whole crowd was struck by the difference between unbelievers and the elect. And of the elect the most wonderful Polycarp was certainly one—an apostle and prophetic teacher in our times and a bishop of the Catholic Church in Smyrna. In fact, every word his lips have uttered has been, or will yet be, fulfilled.
Polycarp’s Christology is in the tradition of John, whose disciple he had been, which became the tradition of Asia Minor. It continued the crucial anti-docetist stress of John the Evangelist, who had encountered this proto-gnosticism prior to his writing of his Gospel. Thus Polycarp upheld the full humanity of Jesus the Christ, his full divinity and full unity. Polycarp affirmed as well his historical resurrection from the dead, and the final judgment, themes which flatly contradict the docetic and later fully gnostic dehistoricizing of the Christ. Both Quasten and Jurgens report Irenaeus’ account of Polycarp’s encounter with the arch-heretic Marcion, in which Marcion asked whether Polycarp recognized him, and received a short reply: “Of course: I recognize the first-born of Satan.” This forthright rejection of heresy coupled with a dauntless fidelity to the apostolic tradition typified his episcopacy, winning him the love of his flock, and the hatred of those who despised Christianity. Both are manifest in his martyrdom
Both Quasten and Jurgens consider The Letter of Barnabas to be a letter in the sense of personal correspondence only in that it uses the epistolary style common to Christian religious literature in the second century: they consider it to lack the personal tone and content appropriate to a letter: in sum, it is rather an exposition of doctrine than a letter. [85].
Granted that the Letter is certainly an exposition of doctrine, it is difficult to read it in Kleist’s translation without being struck by the intensely personal tone of the entire document. It is addressed to a Christian community with whose resistance to a perceived Judaizing threat to their faith “Barnabas” is profoundly concerned. His Letter, like Paul’s to the Philippians, is rather an extended homily to a beloved congregation than an formal exposition of doctrine.
Little is known of its author except that the Letter’s anti-Jewish animus is generally thought to bar it from having been written by Paul’s companion of that name. It is usually dated either in the middle or latter seventies of the first century when a resurgent and militant Judaism may have prompted its riposte, or perhaps some fifty to sixty years later, between 117 and 138, in reaction to the Bar Kokhba revolt. Quasten would allow a date as late as 138, at the end of Hadrian’s reign: either dating is problematic.
Barnabas’ doctrinal significance is what one may expect of a witness to the Apostolic preaching:: simply,: he upheld the pre-existence of Jesus, who came in the flesh, willing to suffer for us, that we might be saved. This language testifies to the communication of idioms implicit in his faith in Jesus’s Lordship: “Barnabas” understands Jesus to have preexisted in a manner other than that of the “flesh,” but it is Jesus who preexists: the pre-existence assigned him is therefore not eternal but primordial. “Barnabas” also taught the unity of Jesus, and our redemption through his death on the Cross.
Barnabas is an exponent of the “Spirit Christology”[86] which we have seen in Ignatius’ Letters to the Churches, in The Shepherd, and in II Clement. Those who, like Harnack, The Shepherd of Hermas or the Letter of Barnabas a naive adoptionism or adoptionist tendency do so on the anachronistic basis of supposing the view of Hermas and “Barnabas” on Incarnation to the some version of their own Christology, which holds that it is the eternally immanent Word who becomes not flesh, but man. J. N. D. Kelly has shown that the Apostolic Fathers were too close to the Spirit Christology of the apostles and the apostolic preaching thus to dehistoricize the Incarnation. For them, it is the preexistent or ‘spiritual’ Jesus who becomes flesh. He is primordially human as well as divine, and his becoming flesh, his conception by our Lady, the Theotokos, is his obedience to his Mission from the Father to give the Holy Spirit, now to a fallen world. The Apostolic Fathers did not concern themselves with explaining that doctrine: taught by Paul and John, they affirmed it as a matter of faith, as the subject of belief, not of analysis.
Christian theology, in the sense of Anselm’s classic definition, faith seeking understanding, developed and yet develops as a function of the infallible ecclesial-liturgical mediation of the truth of Christ, wherein the Church’s historical worship in and of that historical, incarnate Truth immediately confronts the historical pessimism which here, following J.N.D. Kelly, is dubbed “cosmological.”[87] This pessimism is inherent in the pagan consciousness, formed by a soteriological flight from the experienced futility of historical existence to a nonhistorical pantheistic fulfillment in which all fallen multiplicity is concluded and all distinctions abolished. Catholic theology is therefore Christologically focused by necessity: it has nowhere else to turn. When it forgets or neglects its concrete historical foundation in the revelation of Jesus the Christ, it ceases to be theological.
The Church’s faith is that of Abraham: faith in the Lord’s promise to him of a transcendent future, even at the cost of sacrificing his son in whom that future was embodied. The Church has understood as prophetic Abraham’s re-assurance of his son Isaac: “God will himself provide the lamb”. Abraham’s unconditioned faith in God’s promise is the ground of Judaism as it is of the Christian faith that Jesus is the Lord. He is the Christ, the promised Messiah, not simply as the divinely anointed King to whose coming the Jewish people looked, for the Jesus the Christ is also the High Priest whose one sacrifice completes those of the Old Law, fulfilling them beyond any expectation by his death upon the Cross, and by his institution of that One Sacrifice offered at the Last Supper and on the Cross as the heart of the Church’s worship and life, the central Event of history.
The foundation of Catholic theology, as of all things Catholic, is therefore the Eucharistic celebration, the sacrament instituted by Jesus the Christ by which as risen, he transcends history as its Lord, as the head and redeemer of the fallen creation which was created in him and can be redeemed, restored, only by him. This redemption is the restoration of a lost free unity: as a free gift, it must be freely appropriated, for it cannot be imposed by a divine fiat: it can only be offered. This offer is the Church’s liturgical worship, in which the sacramental reception of the Body and the Blood of the Lord Jesus is communion with his victory over death, which is entry into eternal life. The history of which Jesus is the Lord is thus salvific by the worshiper’ free personal entry into, and freely appropriation, of its Eucharistic mediation of our redemption. By participating in the celebration of that One Sacrifice, we become as Paul has said, a New Creation, for Christ the Lord has made all things new. History has no other meaning than the mediation of this sacrificial restoration of free unity to the universe of man―for the restoration of the physical universe to its free unity, its free truth, its primordial beauty, is at one with the redemption of man: they are a single creation, with a single Head, a single source of free unity, Jesus the Lord.
The consequence of this faith is that the baptized Catholic, comes to recognize in himself in ecclesia, then in his society, in his world and in its history, an existential bi-polarity, “simul justus et peccator,” a double citizenship, an intrinsic conflict whose foundation is not a cosmological fatality but a free moral fault. The dialectic of this conflict is described by Paul as a tension between the two solidarities which constitute our fallen consciousness; viz., a free solidarity in the «lifegiving Spirit, the pneuma that is the risen Christ, in lived tension with a fallen solidarity with the first Adam, the fallen author of the disintegration of creation which knows no end other than the radical dissolution of death. This, our solidarity with the flesh of mortality, sarx, has its source in a free sinful choice that is not our own but that of the fallen Adam who, as its prospective head, freely refused, for himself and for all creation, the offer to him by the primordial Jesus the Christ─the second Adam─of the normative free nuptial unity with the second Eve, that is indispensable to the beauty and the joy of the good creation. This is the Original Sin, the universally efficacious refusal of free nuptially ordered unity offered to the first Adam and first Eve by the primordial Jesus the Lord, whose consequence is the dynamic disunity, the disintegration, of the fallen universe. The Good Creation has no other unity than that which is free. Christ our Lord, obedient to his primordial Mission, died in order that the lost freedom of the Good Creatiopn be restored to us through his Gift of the Spiritus Creator, by which Gift all things are made new.
It is in consequence of this refusal of nuptial responsibility by the first Adam that the Christian knows himself to be an alien, dwelling in a crumbling universe, himself crumbling within it. As corporeal, as a physical entity, every human person is subject to the fragmentation of fallen time and space, subject to the fallenness of the universe, subject to its innate drive to further disintegration, to the yet further dispersion that is death, the single alternative to the continual renewal inherent in the recovery, through the One Sacrifice of its Head, of its lost free unity.
The inexorable physical dissolution of fallenness is fulfilled in the death of each of us. The universal recognition of this fatality characterizes and dominates human consciousness as an angst, a pervasive anxiety, nameless but omnipresent, radically unacceptable. Our death is the question to which we have no answer, thus death is the enemy of all joy. We are imprisoned for all our lives by the fear of death, as we read in Hebrews 2:15.. Only faith in the Resurrection of Jesus the Lord, faith in his victory over death, is able to restore joy to the world.
To regard death otherwise, e.g., as “natural,” as less than malign, as having its own rationale, its own intelligibility, is to abstract from its reality, to dissociate oneself from existence as human.[88]: By reason of the fall, we stand under a divine judgment and, apart from Jesus the Christ, we do so without recourse. At once justified, redeemed in and by him, throughout our fallen history we remain bifurcated, at once just and sinful, between life and death, ever on the brink of a decision which in this life is wavering, inconclusive.
On the other hand, to know this is already to have transcended death: the knowledge is itself an intimation of immortality, for it entails a similarly pervasive intuitive awareness of an indestructible personal dignity and thus entails also a refusal, even an inability, to accept death as personal extincttion. This intuition is universal; it may be refused, but not annulled. Throughout recorded history men have build permanent structures by a kind of instinct: they found families, communities and institutions which themselves connote a kind of immortality. Societies celebrate their founding as of permanent significance, despite the vulnerability which they experience continually. Time may devour all things, but the human response to this awareness is to build yet more. Kingdoms and cultures fall and become lost even to memory, but only to be succeeded by others. There is in the human condition an indomitability which has no physical basis, a fidelity to a future hope that embracing the past as significant of a better future, a confidence that the future will continue to transcend the past.
In this theological context, ‘cosmology’ refers to the universal pagan misunderstanding of reality as the constituting elements of the necessarily existing habitable world, the “cosmos.” Cosmologies are implicitly pantheistic: by reducing intelligibility to necessary structures, the divine becomes a necessary emanation: bonum diffusivum sui, and the cosmos, produced by an immanently necessary emanation from the divine is thus linked to its cause as to constitute “great chain of being” whose intelligibility is rigorously necessary and deterministic. Cosmological rationality must deny intelligibility to free events in favor of assigning necessary causes to whatever is real, with the at least latent dismissal of freedom as mere indeterminacy and therefore as irrational.
Commitment to such determinism denies a priori the freedom of God’s covenantal presence or immanence in the world of men, and must submit divine revelation to the logic of necessary reasons. The cosmological salvation scheme is always a flight from the irrationality of history for, within the stance of cosmological rationality, the historical order has no significance or unity, and the unceasing quest for meaning must seek it elsewhere, i.e., outside of history. This historical pessimism requires the dehistoricization of an unintelligible temporality; it can know nothing of salvation history.
The Christian soteriology, on the other hand, relies entirely upon the free gift of the free truth that is the revelation of God’s free, covenantal presence in the world and his free redemption of humanity from the radical and primordial misuse of freedom that is Original Sin.
Taken seriously, which is to say, as principles of theological method, these two viewpoints obviously exclude each other. Arianism provides a salient instance of a methodological application of cosmological rationality─of dehistoricization─to the Christian revelation that Jesus is Lord. This necessity characterizes every heresy. We are continually tempted to subordinate the free historical revelation of Christ to the immanent necessities of fallen human rationality as criteriological for what may be revealed―or, at least, to have it both ways, which is impossible.
The history of theology begins with the effort of the second-century Apologists who, upholding the faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord, undertook to understand the free truth, the Mysterium Fidei, that is the Christian revelation Their orthodox insistence upon soteriology as criteriological of truth as such finally expunged the influence of the cosmological mentality at the Council of Nicaea. This victory over the relicts of the pagan fatalism laid the essential foundation for the development of Catholic doctrine by opening it to the historical optimism that is explicit in that development.
It must be stressed that the soteriology here in view is precisely specified by the radically mysterious unity of Jesus the Lord, concretely affirmed in the liturgical attribution to him of divinity and humanity and whose unity the Apostles experienced precisely as Personal, to be Named. The Pauline statement of the faith of the primitive Church, “Jesus is Lord,” is normative for Christian soteriology, which in consequence can dispense with neither Jesus’ Personal unity, nor his full divinity, nor his full humanity. This unity, the “Mysterium fidei,” has from the outset been communicated liturgically, in the Church’s Eucharistic worship of her Lord and in the Apostolic preaching integral to that worship of Truth in truth. This radically vocal tradition developed an authentic Scriptural expression by the end of the first century, by which time liturgical formulas for the celebration of the Eucharist and for baptism had been in place since the Last Supper, and a hymnody was also quite evidently in use.
This liturgical development of doctrine has its further expression in local and finally in ecumenical councils, which depend not upon theological speculation but upon the apostolic tradition, which is to say, upon the liturgical mediation of the truth of the Faith by those charged with the oversight of the Church’s radically Eucharistic worship. These, the bishops, are charged with personal, indelegable responsibility for this worship simply as successors of the Apostles. When serious challenges to its truth are seen to endanger the faith of their Christian people, the bishops meet in council whether locally, as at Carthage under Bishop Cyprian, or ecumenically, as at Nicaea under Pope Sylvester, to confront and resolve the challenge. Their exercise of their liturgically-grounded magisterial authority can only be liturgical and therefore sacramental. Their authority is not academic: the Councils do not enter into theological controversies. While the doctrine promulgated by the Councils may resolve them, as occurred at each of the first four councils: Nicaea, I Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon, it does so only by a re-affirmation of the untroubled faith that Jesus is the Lord, sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit.
Consequently, there can be no question of a Christian “reception” of Conciliar doctrinal development distinct from participation in its liturgical proclamation. Such a reception would be tautologous, for it would be identical with participation in the liturgy. Any interpretation of “reception” which would presuppose a dissociation of the academic interest of theology from the unity of worship of the Church and so from the faith of the Church is entirely alien to the res Catholica. In the following examination of theology of salient representatives of the patristic tradition, the liturgical fidelity of the Fathers, their full loyalty to the Church’s faith in the Lord Jesus, is taken for granted. This applies to the alleged antipope, Hippolytus, and his disciple, Novatian, an actual antipope, and to Tertullian, whose rigorism drove him into Montanism. His dispute with the Church was over discipline and a then poorly understood papal authority; he did not contest the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord.
With the half dozen second-century authors known as the Apologists there begins that encounter of faith in Jesus the Lord with the cosmological rationality upon whose a priori rejection of that faith this study has been intent. With the exception of Justin, the Apologists’ theological speculation was framed faute de mieux in the conceptuality of that eclectic joinder of Greek philosophical traditions, pre-eminently Platonism, with admixtures of Stoicism, Aristotelianism, Pythagoreanism and, occasionally, Epicureanism, which informed the learned world of the second and third centuries. The monist emanationism common to the Platonic and Stoic solutions of the perennial problem of the one and the many was very clearly incompatible with the Trinitarian faith: From the late first century to the middle of the fifth, its widespread cultural influence had a subordinationist impact upon Trinitarian speculation, wherein the Father was unreflectively identified with the supposedly emanating divine substance, i.e., with substantial divinity as such, thus requiring that the Son and Spirit, insofar as distinct from the Father and from each other, be emanations from the Father and, further, that thereby they possess a lesser and in some sense participated degree of divinity: inevitably, this was to impose an implicit dualism, a divisibility, upon the one God as such. It is astonishing that we find the Apologists effectively untouched by this influence, for it confused Christian theology (as opposed to the doctrinal tradition) for centuries thereafter.
The age of the Apologists begins with Justin Martyr, and ends with Irenaeus at the close of the second century; he extended Justin’s lost work, Adversus haereses, into a five-volume polemic of the same title against the Gnostic dualism then threatening to submerge Christianity in a revived cosmological dualism, comparable to the docetism with had threatened the faith at the end of the first century. Irenaeus also recognized the comparably dehistoricizing thrust of Platonism, for he found the subject of his Christology in the historical “recapitulation of all things” by the “one and the same Son,” the second Adam, Jesus the Christ, preexistent from “the Beginning,” whose Incarnation was mysterious simply, a historical fact transcending all reality, whose revelation he, like those before him, accepted as a free gift of the free Truth who is the Christ, wholly irreducible by cosmological analysis.
From mid-second century, the Apologists had witnessed to the same apostolic faith as Irenaeus, to the point of martyrdom, as with St. Justin, who died in bloody persecution during the reign of Marcus Aurelius by which the pillars of the pagan world hoped to see Christianity destroyed. The Apologists testified to their faith eloquently as intellectuals of a high order, witnessing to their faith by the exposition of theological reasons for its transcenddence of the imperial paganism. They recognized that this perilous proclamation of the Christian faith, directed to the imperial throne, was imposed upon them by their conversion to the truth of Christ, their deliverance from the cosmological and radically nonhistorical mentality of the ambient pagan learning by conversion to the historical truth of Christ which could not accommodate the paganism of the Greek intellectual tradition, for at best it is a radical pessimism and at worst a blasphemy.
The Greek philosophical tradition understood the divine transcendence of all that is historical to be the divine absence from and immunity to history. The patristic development of doctrine began with conversion from this, the historical pessimism proper to the pagan 'Gentiles' to whom the Gospel was preached, to the historical consciousness which, having accepted the historical truth that is the mystery of Christ, the Mysterium fidei, discovers its free truth to be incompatible with the determinist postulate of the monadic unity of truth and of being which the Hellenistic culture took for granted and to which the converts themselves had unreflectively subscribed.
While inevitably remaining to some extent under this influence. for in this fallen world conversion from it is never complete, the Apologists as Christians affirmed the apostolic tradition that “Jesus is Lord,” that he is sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit. Thereupon they undertook the reconciliation of their faith with their fallen rationality, a process which under grace could issue only in their conversion from the historical despair of the “flesh” to the historical optimism of the “spirit.” The truth of the faith that Jesus is the Lord could be affirmed only as a free gift of the free truth of the historical revelation in Christ, a revelation which, once affirmed and liturgically appropriated in baptism, freed their minds from the doom and despair inherent in pagan philosophy, for by faith they knew God to be actual in history as its Lord, consequently knew that history is significant of salvation, not in fact devoid of intrinsic meaning and hope.
This conversion to historical rationality, to historical optimism, is intrinsic to Catholic spirituality. In Augustine’s famous idiom, we must understand our faith spiritualiter, not as an ideally necessary truth, not as a truth open to verification by its reduction to necessary causes whether intrinsic or extrinsic, nor as a subjective conviction of no public validity, but rather as the public truth publicly available by historical communion in the historical Church with the historical Truth himself, the Lord whose Lordship is his transcendence of all creation, of all history, by reason of his immanence within it, an immanence which, given irrevocably in the constitutive Event of his Lordship of history, his One Sacrifice, can only be Eucharistic: Christ is the Bridegroom, the Head of the Church.
The major obstacle to the patristic quaerens intellectum was the mass of cosmological presuppositions which had for millennia formed the culture of the Hellenistic world, a sampling of which Paul had encountered in addressing the Athenian sophisticates on the Areopagus. Men trained to prosper in that environment could not but regard with scorn the attempts of those who wished to bring to them truths so absurd as those preached by Paul, chiefest among them being the Resurrection, but also the stringent moral code inseparable from conversion to faith in Jesus the Lord. The Apologists were men of this culture, but discovered in hearing the apostolic preaching, and recognizing that it took for granted a personal freedom which the pagan culture had condemned as irrational, found themselves confronted by a free responsibility for the free truth, and were converted thereby to a radically novel consciousness, that which Augustine, following Paul, would identify with being at once just and sinful, simul justus et peccator, confronted always by the need for a further and continuing decision to follow Christ the Lord.
This novel consciousness of conversion to the faith of the Church had immediate liturgical, i.e. baptismal, expression in concretely Trinitarian terms, but the felt tension between the faith-affirmation of the indivisibility of the One God, and of the divinity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, as proclaimed in the liturgy and taught by the apostolic preaching, began to achieve theological clarity only in the last decades of the second century, with Athenagoras' recognition of an unchanging order (τάξις) in the liturgical Naming of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and in Theophilus' recognition that this order was that of a τρíας or τρíαδος, a Trinity. These men were near contemporaries of Tertullian and Hippolytus, who first spelled out the irreducible Personal distinctions of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. A comparable tension, slower to be developed theologically, concerned the pre-existence of the Lord Jesus affirmed voluminously in the New Testament and by the Apostolic Fathers from the latter half of the first century through the first half of the second: i.e., a decade or two before the Apologists. Origen, in his Peri Archon (ca. 231), pivoted on the primordiality of Jesus the Lord, to affirm his full divinity and full humanity in a theological synthesis which has been little understood but has never been surpassed. By the end of the third century his reputation was in tatters, and by the time of the Council of Nicaea the authenticity of his theology was recognized only in Alexandria.
After the authority of the Council of Nicaea had been rejected by the allies and disciples of Eusebius of Caesarea, the pre-existence of Christ began to be conceived cosmologically, i.e., non-historically, whether in Middle Platonic or Stoic terms, leading to the supposition that the subject of the Incarnation and kenōsis was not Jesus, as John the Evangelist taught in the Prologue and as Paul had taught in Philippians, but the pre-human Middle Platonic–Stoic Logos, understood as the ‘Trinity-immanent” or simply eternal. pre-incarnate Son. This confusion received dogmatic resolution only in the middle of the fifth century, with the clear affirmation at Chalcedon of the subsistence of Jesus, not the Middle Platonic Logos, in divinity and in humanity. Its sources are probably innocent enough: a failure to recognize that the eternal Son is eternal sensu aiente: i.e., he is also the historical Jesus the Lord, “one and the same Son,” as Irenaeus would insist and the Symbol of Chalcedon would confirm However this failure induced theological dehistoricization of the Son into a Trinity-immanent divinity, a Son whose immunity to historical realization would trouble theologians thereafter.
The Christian drive to clarify and resolve the tension between the pagan cosmology native to fallen reason and the liturgical mediation of faith in the Lord Jesus’ revelation of the Father and of the Spirit, is simply the development of doctrine, a development at one with the history of salvation, which is the history of the Church. The objectivity of this history is identically the objectivity of the Church’s faith in Jesus, the Lord, and of her Eucharistic celebration of his One Sacrifice. Before examining the contribution of the Apologists, it is appropriate to have before us a caveat by J. N. D. Kelly:
There are two points in the Apologists’ teaching which, because of their far-reaching importance, must be heavily underlined, viz., (a) that for all of them the description ‘God the Father’ connoted, not the first Person of the Holy Trinity, but the one Godhead considered as author of whatever existsl ad (b) that they all, Athenagoras included, dated the generation of the Logos, and so his eligibility for the title ‘Son,’ not from His origination within the being of the Godhead, but from his emission or putting forth for the purposes of creation, revelation, and redemption. Unless these points are firmly grasped, and their significance appreciated, a completely distorted view of the Apologists’ theology is liable to result. Two stock criticisms of it, for example, are that they failed to distinguish the Logos from the Father until he was required for the work of creation, and that, as a corollary, they were guilty of subordinating the Son to the Father. These objections have a superficial validity in the light of post-Nicene orthodoxy, with its doctrine of the Son’s eternal generation and its fully worked-out conception of hypostases or Persons, but they make no sense in the thought-atmosphere in which the Apolotists moved. It is true that they lacked a technical vocabulary adequate for describing eternal distinctions within the Deity; but that they apprehended such distinctions there is no doubt…..their object was not so much to subordinate him as to safeguard the monotheism which they considered indispensable.
Kelly, Doctrines, 100-101..
Sed contra, Athenagoras discerned a permanent order: “taxis” (τάξις) in the doxological naming of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Theophilus referred to the one God as τρíας, τρíαδος (trias, triados). In sum, the theology of the Apologists was rooted in and nourished by the liturgy, which never identified the Father with the one God. The alternative to this reliance upon the authority of the Eucharistic liturgy is that dehistoricization of monotheism into the abstract monas upon which Kelly here relies.
Justin Martyr was born about 100 AD in the city of Flavia Neapolis, now Nablus, in Samaria, and was martyred in Rome about sixty-seven years later. He evidently came of a prosperous pagan family: he was well educated, and became particularly interested in what was then understood to be philosophy, i.e., a learned quest for the meaning of life. This led him to study at schools in Athens and Ephesus, where he obtained a basic familiarity with the Greek philosophical traditions―Pythagorean, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic. While studying at Ephesus, he witnessed the martyrdoms of several Christians, and was more impressed by their faith-inspired courage than by his own philosophical wisdom.
More is known of Justin Martyr than of any other early Christian writer.[89] Much of this knowledge is derived from his own writings, of which survive only the two Apologies, and the Dialogue with Trypho. In the First Apology he introduces himself as “Justin, the son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, natives of Flavia Neapolis, a city in Samaria.” In his Dialogue with Trypho he again refers to himself as a native of Samaria.[90] The first Church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, who admired him greatly, provided further information in his Ecclesiastical History,[91] and finally there is preserved a reliable account of his martyrdom; he was executed for his faith in Rome ca. 167 A.D.[92]
Justin is the first Christian writer to introduce philosophy into his exposition of the Christian faith. His philosophical training was eclectic: in essence it amounted to an assimilation of the current Middle Platonism, an admixture of Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelianism, with traces of other traditions, notably the Epicurian and the Pythagorean.[93] He believed that Plato, whom he considered the greatest of the Greeks, had learned what he knew of God from Moses, but that what he knew was insufficient. He tells us that he learned this at Ephesus, while on a solitary walk by the sea, wearing by right the distinctive garb of a philosopher. There he was greeted by and conversed with an elderly, venerable man who convinced him of the far greater wisdom of Christianity. Thus persuaded, he became a convert, and established a Christian school in that city.
During the reign of Antoninus Pius, about 140, he moved from Ephesus to Rome, and established a Christian school there as well, teaching that the Greek philosophical traditions were not so much wrong as incomplete; he held them to be of use only as a propaedeutic, to lead us to Christ, the historical Personification of Wisdom, the Logos, whose transcendent truth pervades and renders the universe intelligible from within. Justin’s account of his conversion from the study of pagan philosophy to Christianity forms a minor apologia pro vita sua, prefacing his lengthy Dialogue with Trypho.
Of the philosophical traditions he had studied, Justin was impressed most of all by Platonism, until he became convinced that even Platonism cannot provide access to God. Nonetheless he continued to use philosophical imagery, particularly in the Apologies, but also in the Dialogue with Trypho. He took for granted an allegorical exegesis of the Old Testament. Such an exegesis of course has a Christian warrant: in the famous passage from Galatians (4:22-31),[94] Paul interprets the Genesis account of the two wives of Abraham, slave and free, as allegories of the relation of the Old Covenant to the New. Justin owes his familiarity with and free use of allegory to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, not to Philo Judaeus’ use of allegory to develop a dehistoricizing exegesis of the Jewish Scriptures in the first century, but to the much earlier rabbinical exegesis of the Old Testament.[95]
Allegory is inherent in the historical worship of God, in Judaism as in Christianity. The divine Lordship of history, whether taught in Deuteronomy or the Apocalypse, constitutes a mystery which must be meditated upon by those who affirm its truth, but which cannot be rationalized, for the Mysterium fidei is identically the historical revelation, Jesus the Lord, the Personal Mysterium fidei. A “literal,” i.e., analytical reading of the scriptural mediation of that revelation can only deny it its historicity, its objective truth. The inability of the human mind, of fallen analytical rationality, to accept the immanence of the divine in history is perhaps most clearly displayed by the late monist reductions by Hindu and Buddhist monastic traditions of the quest for the divine to logically necessary flights from history. However, the liturgical rituals of popular Hinduism and Buddhism cannot but intimate a degree of divine immanence in history.
Plato’s intellectalist distaste for the allegorism inherent in the poetic mediation of the Greek mythology is of the same order. It reflects his conviction of the irrationality of all assertion of the immanence of the divine in history. For paganism generally, whether expressed in myth or in philosophy, the divine transcendence of the historical order can only be by absence from it [96]
However, Plato’s criticism of the allegorism of the poetry of Homer and Hesiod as irrational, as resting on neither learning nor reason, as productive of mere opinion as opposed to clear understanding, must be balanced with his own reliance upon a mythical anamnesis, as in The Republic: it is only with Plotinus that Plato’s insight into the universal fallenness of the historical order is rationalized, reduced to the immanent bi-polar structure of reality. Under Plotinus’ rigorous logic Plato’s subscription to an irrational cosmic fatality becomes a rational necessity immanent in finitude as such. The pagan myths were theogonic and cosmogonic, concerned with the ultimate questions raised by the human encounter with a baffling world: they are very clearly expressions of a quaerens intellectum, resting on an apparently ineradicable conviction, lived rather than reasoned, that at its most profound level, reality is benevolent.[97]
The Greek philosophical tradition was of course pagan, but it was also religious, and in that sense historical, even theological, concerned with a human knowledge of the divine, as Werner Jaeger has emphasized.[98] The rationalized and dehistoricized concept of the divine as a timeless and unlimited Absolute Mind or Self, a Monas incapable of relation to the finite, and therefore incapable of finite mediation, and therefore a Deus otiosus, a “lazy God,” was common to the learned Greek religious tradition as it had been to the Vedic culture which produced the Upanishads, whose ambiguity over the divine immanence is manifest.
The Greek tradition also knew a more familiar divinity, the remote yet omnipresent Greek god of the sky, Dios or Zeus, whose transcendence was mitigated by being the Zeus-pater, Ju-piter, the senior divinity of the all-too-human Greek and Roman pantheon. The Greek philosophical tradition sought to purify the divinity, as mediated by Homer and Hesiod, of the scandalous accretions of the poetic tradition by their reduction to allegories of divinity. Thus, under philosophical scrutiny, the divine Monas recovered his transcendence, his dignity, even his remoteness, but so as to remain capable of finite mediation: this is particularly worked out in Stoicism and the later schools of Platonism, wherein the Logos, the Word, is either an utterance of or an emanation from the Monas into the world as at once the world-soul by which the universe is made intelligible, and the principle by which the world is related to the Monas.
Christianized to the extent possible, the Logos of Greek philosophy became the immanent Word of the One God, the Father. Under this abstract aegis the Logos entered Jewish theology by way of the Philo Judaeus, who used the allegorical method already familiar to the Greek interpretation of the poets to apply this Logos-mediation of Jahweh to an exegesis of the Jewish biblical tradition which radically dehistoricized it. Philo profoundly influenced the later Alexandrine theology and thus Greek theology throughout most of the fourth century. By Justin’s time some familiarity with Philo’s use of the Logos as the mediator of the One God of Judaism had become familiar to Jews and Christians alike. For Justin, both the Greek and the Jewish uses of “Logos” were of value only as put to Christian use. While the Logos concept played no important part in Justin’s apologetics, his adaption of it was of permanent significance, for after him the Apologists adapted it to their exposition of the Trinity.
Summarily, influenced by the rabbinical meditation on the divine dabar, the historical manifestation of the transcendent truth of the Lord, Justin simply identifies the Logos with Jesus the Lord: he understands the term historically, as the Gospel of John does in the Prologue, as a title of Jesus. In a few places however, he refers to the pre-existence of the Logos as the immanent impersonal Reason of the Father, as not yet “begotten,” a Logos whose pre-existence is therefore ab aeterno, thus not that of the primordial Jesus, but of what later theology will regard as the “immanent Son” or “immanent Logos” whose eternal and non-human pre-existence requires that his “Incarnation” be his “becoming human.”
This “immanent Logos” plays no role in Justin’s Christology: he speaks of the Incarnation of the Logos simply as Mary’s conception of Jesus, the Logos, and this in the context set by Lk. 1:35.[99] In this he affirms the most ancient Christian tradition, the communication of divine and human idioms in the one Jesus, the Son of Mary, the Lord.
For Justin, it is the begetting of the Logos that makes him to be the Son, numerically distinct from the Father the Son, and establishes the relation of the Son to the Father as the Father’s mediator. As begotten, the Logos, the Son, is the Father’s Spirit, Mind, and Power, as effective in creation. That he understands the Father as the plenary divine Substance, the one God, reflects the influence of the monist concept of the divine unity upon his theology, which, taken at the letter, would place the Son in a subordinationist posture, quite inconsistent with Justin’s faith in the Lordship of Jesus. Thus in his work this tension remains latent: it does not impede his full acceptance of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ.
Nonetheless, Justin introduced the term, Logos. into Christian theology; the influence of Philo’s development of this term upon Justin’s thought is negligible, but by the mid-second century the term had become a philosophical and even cultural commonplace; in Jewish and Judaeo-Christian circles, and is so in Justin’s theology as well. His use of it reflected the Jewish speculation on the historical immanence of the Old Testament’s dabar, the Word of the Lord, and grounds his emphasis upon the historical pre-existence of the Son as, e.g., the “Angel of Jahweh.”
Justin wrote more than a century and a half before the doctrine of the Trinity was taught at Nicaea: until then, apart from the Apologists, the unity of God was generally imagined to be that of a single Self, the Father. The Christian liturgical formula for Baptism in Mt. 28:19, with the doxological recitation of the three Names, was integral with a credal affirmation of personal faith in the One God, but the resolution of the evident tension between the monist view of the divine monarchy and the apostolic faith in the full divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit waited upon Nicaea and I Constantinople for its resolution─a resolution which, because the product of a General Council of bishops, was liturgical and magisterial rather than theological. It is addressed to the Church, not the academy. Justin and the other Apologists wrote in the same apostolic context. Their understanding of the Christ was ‘subordinationist’ only in that it involved a struggle of their Trinitarian faith with subordinationist presuppositions of the cosmological imagination which were condemned only at Nicaea, and then by a doctrinal affirmation upholding the Catholic faith in the divinity of Jesus, the historical Logos, the historical Son of the Father, and, at the same time, affirming the substantial unity of God. The Council of Nicaea did not argue with Arius’ cosmology: it simply condemned his inferences from it, thereby denying its doctrinal standing. .
Justin remarks in the First Apology that he had already written a work, long lost, on the refutation of all heresies.[100] Irenaeus was evidently familiar with this work since he borrowed from it.[101] Thus Justin’s lost work against the heretics is the earliest theological undertaking in the Roman tradition.
The importance of Justin Martyr for the present work is Christological rather than Trinitarian: viz., we are initially concerned with refuting a not uncommon supposition that he was the first to use the Logos-sarx Christological analysis of Jn. 1:14. This analysis dominated Christological speculation in the Orient for more than half of the fourth century, from a decade before the Council of Nicaea to the First Council of Constantinople, when the Antiochene insistence upon the full, personal humanity of Jesus found an inadequate systematic expression in the Logos-anthrōpos paradigm over against the equally inadequate Alexandrine Logos-sarx analysis. We have shown that neither paradigm can avoid distorting the tradition by reason of the investment of both in the dehistoricization of the Johannine Logos, with a consequent systematic rejection of the communication of idioms. The question is therefore whether Justin accepted the full personal unity of Jesus the Lord. Beyond doubt he did; for Justin, the divine Logos is identically Jesus the Lord, whose immanence in creation is the sole source of its intelligibility.
Justin was innocent of any dehistoricizing rationalization of the Christ: he treated “Logos” as a title of the Lord Jesus.[102] He entered upon no speculative quest for the prior possibility of the Incarnation, nor he does he appear to have found this inquiry to be of theological interest. His understanding of the pre-existence of the Son, the Lord Jesus, is historical. He identified the “Angel of Jahweh” of the Old Testament epiphanies with Jesus, not with the eternal Logos. Justin is concerned with the historical man, Jesus, whom he knows to be God, the eternal Son of the Eternal Father.[103] His transcendent vision of the Logos rests upon his conviction of the pervasive pre-existence of Jesus throughout the history of the pagans as well as that of the “Old Testament,” a term first used by Irenaeus.
In short, Justin’s habitual identification of Jesus with the Logos is simply that of the liturgy. Louis Bouyer has found it to be unanimous in the New Testament, where “Logos,” for John as well as for the Synoptics and for Acts, is always a title of Jesus the Lord.[104] Justin understood Jesus the Logos to be the single source of the world’s rationality, of its intelligible unity, sought inchoatively by the philosophers whose works he had studied, expressed inadequately the Jewish Scriptures but finally and definitively in the Son’s revelation of the Father. A question arises over the interpretation of a pregnant sentence in the Second Apology,[105] which some have read as Justin’s making the crucial error of supposing the imamterial Stoic Logos, not Jesus, to be the subject of the Incarnation. It would then follow that for Justin, as later for Apollinarius of Laodicea, the Logos took the place of the human soul in Jesus. If so, he would have been a pioneer of that Word-Flesh Christology, in which the Logos is the ruling principle, the hegemonikon, of Jesus. The sentence relied upon provides no basis for reading the Logos-sarx analysis into Justin’s Christology, but the allegation has been made.[106] We have seen Robert Grant offer a representative statement of this view of Justin, which Hurtado has echoed.
Justin’s theology also deserves attention, for in regard to Christ he has taken the Logos doctrine developed in Hellenistic Judaism by Philo and combined it with a picture of prophecy fulfilled as set forth in his testimony book(s). What holds the two together is insistence upon the incarnation of the Logos, even though he never cites John 1:14.[107]
The first sentence of this brief excerpt has Justin melding Philo’s dehistoricization of the Hellenistic Judaism with a prophetic theological interest that can only be historical. This view of Justin is mistaken: see endnote 102 supra.
Insofar as Justin adapted the Stoic-Middle Platonic notion of the Logos to the Christ, it is possible only in the most general sense to regard him as the precursor of the Logos-sarx Christology, for Justin uses “Logos” historically as a title of Jesus the Christ, which the Logos-sarx Christology has steadfastly refused to do. In sum, Justin’s “insistence upon the incarnation of the Logos” is not that of the Logos-sarx Christology, which understands the subject of the Incarnation to be the abstract Stoic-Platonic Logos, not the historical Jesus Christ. For Justin, the Logos is Christ the Lord.
Robert Grant on the other hand understands Justin’s Logos to be that “Logos” developed by a near-contemporary Judaism which, under the influence of Philo, anticipated the determinist Neoplatonic rationalization of the Old Testament tradition. However, there is no trace of this mentality in Justin. He does describe the Logos as the Father’s reason, inseparable from Him, at one with him. This is the common doctrine of the Apologists, the basis of their explanation of the Son’s divinity. It is in this sense only that Justin can be understood to have introduced a pre-human Logos into theology, by his identification of the Logos with the mind or reason of the Father. This understanding of the Logos as impersonally immanent in the Father ab aeterno was rejected by the Trinitarian doctrine of the later Greek Apologists, Theophilus of Antioch and Athenagoras of Athens. In fact, the cosmological need to arrange for the prior possibility of the Incarnation of the pre-human Logos did not trouble Theophilus or Athenagoras, while Justin, warned by Isaiah, never attempted to explain the Son’s “begetting,” which he so identified with the Son’s Incarnation as to ignore entirely the question of the antecedent possibility of the Incarnation of a pre-human Logos. His mention of the Logos as existing impersonally as the Father’s reason prior to his “begetting,” prior to his Incarnation as the Son, thus as eternally but not Personally preexisting, was a departure from the apostolic tradition, but Justin ignored that subordinationist implication. He well knew that the suffering of the Lord Jesus was incongruous, but only as Tertullian saw it in the De Carne Christi, i.e., as the impossible actuality of the Cross, the Kenōsis, taught by in Phil. 2:6-7 and by John in Jn. 1:14 and I Jn. 4:2.
Justin supposed the Father to have uttered forth, i.e., Named, the Jesus the Son as distinct from Himself in view of creation, over which he granted the Jesus a transcendent dominion. The “uttering forth” of the Son at creation would be described by Theophilus in terms of the Stoic distinction between the immanent Logos endiathetos, the uttered Logos prophorikos, and the consequent “Logos spermatikos” intelligibility of the world, but Theophilus’ identification of the One God as a τρíας, τρíαδος, a Trinity, was a precise rejection of the Stoic emanationism, which Athenagoras’ τάξις doctrine also rejected. In any case, there is no reason to seek the ground of Justin’s use of “Logos” beyond the Old Testament use of “dabar,” the “Word” of the Lord, whom Judaism understood to be Lord’s truth concretely effective in history and in the Law[108]. It is this understanding of Logos as, inter alia, the prophetic Word inspiring the prophets, that caused a degree of confusion between the work of the Son and of the Holy Spirit among the Apologists, as it had earlier with Hermas, although the Church’s liturgical tradition had made their distinction and their unchangeable order (taxis) explicit in her sacramental worship, as Athenagoras taught.
Justin did not die for a disembodied Logos-principle: he died professing the faith of the Church that Jesus the Logos is Lord, and this in the face of all that the Roman Empire’s well-practiced executioners could threaten. He was immediately recognized to be par excellence a witness to the truth of the faith that Jesus is the Lord: it is thus that he was surnamed “Martyr.”
The chief historical importance of Justin Martyr is his provision, particularly in the Apologies, of a unique view of the mid-second-century Church; he is the first to combine an exhortation to believe with a philosophically-oriented explanation (apologia) of the Church’s faith in the Lordship, the divinity, of Jesus. In so doing, he was also the first to undertake the ecumenical task of replying to pagans who had been misled by their culture and their philosophies to the point of slandering and persecuting Christians as such. In the Dialogue with Trypho, he addressed his apology also to the Jews whose denial of Jesus’ Lordship rests upon its incompatibility with their understanding of monotheism. The Dialogue with Trypho rests its case upon the historicity of the Jewish monotheism whose biblical witness he shows to be reconciliable only with the free revelation in Christ of the unity of the Trinity. Justin regarded any other concept of monotheism as entirely inconistent with the biblical witness.
Here there is little recourse to philosophy: Justin argues from the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, and from the ‘memorabilia’ of the Apostles. He never quotes the Pauline Epistles, although their doctrine underlies much of his reasoning. Robert Grant has suggested that Marcion’s contemporaneous misuse of the Pauline Epistles may account for Justin’s avoidance of them.
Justin addressed his First Apology nominally to the Roman emperor, Antoninus Pius, and the Second Apology, equally nominally, to the Roman senate, but effectively both were addressed to the circumambient pagan world. His exhortation manifests a curiously contemporary mentality: Justin’s vision of the efficacious historical transcendence of the Logos, of the truth of Christ, is not far from that of John Paul II in Fides et Ratio. The patristic tradition will encapsulate his subordination of pagan philosophy to the truth of Christ by likening it to the “plundering of the Egyptians” recited in Exodus.
It is clear that Justin held to the faith of the primitive Church in the communication of idioms, i.e., in the unity of divinity and humanity in the Lord Jesus: thus Justin’s continuous identification of Jesus as the Logos can only be Personal. For Justin, as for the Gospels and the New Testament generally, “Logos” is a Christological title.
Theological speculation had its beginning in middle of the second century with Justin’s attempt to understand the cosmological Father of the cosmos as the Archē of the Son: i.e., as the Father of the Son rather than of the cosmos, an attempt which would be echoed by Tertullian and Hippolytus. This inquiry is inherent in the apostolic tradition, in the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, but it finds no development in the Apostolic Fathers whose proclamation of the faith did not rise to the level of an apologia, an explanation directed to the conversion of a pagan audience. Apologetics began with Justin, whose apologia is inseparable from the fides quaerens intellectum that is theology. This Christian quaerens drives not only Justin’s polemic in the Dialogue with Trypho, but also his First and Second Apology, as well as the lost Adversus Haereses which Irenaeus would adapt and develop.
This is true of Athenagoras,[109] a mid-second century convert to Christianity, probably an Athenian, an author of apologetic works of which all that remain are an Apology (Πρεσβεία) or Legatio, or Embassy, or Plea (Presbeia), i.e., an Apology for the Christians, written ca.177-78, and a Treatise on the Resurrection written a few years later. The Plea was addressed to Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son, Commodus, some twenty years after Justin Martyr, at about 155 a.d., had directed his First Apology to Antoninus Pius and his adopted sons, one of whom was Marcus Aurelius.[110]
Athenagoras’ Plea anticipates Tertullian’s Apologeticus by twenty years. His Treatise on the Resurrection, the first reasoned exposition and defense of the doctrine of the Resurrection as at once an appropriate work of God and as befitting the human body, may be regarded as an extension of the defense of Christian doctrine and morals presented in the Plea. His attempt in the latter document to explain the faith of the Church to Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, his son, was Trinitarian rather than Christological. He relied upon the liturgical preaching of the apostolic tradition by the bishops and therefore, for apologetic reasons, i.e., in consideration of what a pagan intellectual could accept as rational, he made a single passing reference to the Incarnation (21.4), and then dropped the subject.
The inspiration, the fides quaerens intellectum driving the Plea, could only have been liturgical. The liturgy had fed Justin's theology, faute de mieux, for he also had no other reliance; in fact, no other mediation of the apostolic faith existed in the first half of the second century. Justin was so intent upon the central task of accounting for the plenary authority over all creation of Jesus the Son of God and Lord of creation as never to have mentioned the Holy Spirit in his Apologies, although he does so often in the Dialogue with Trypho, where he takes for granted the economic role of the Holy Spirit without any concern for its theological explanation in what would have been another Apology.. This makes it difficult to attribute to him not so much a Trinitarian faith as a Trinitarian theology, for he was certainly familiar with the Trinitarian formula recited in Mt. 28:19-20, which informed the credal responses to questions put to candidates for baptism from an early period.
Justin's theological concentration upon the relation of Jesus the Lord to the Father recurred in the latter half of the fourth century in response to the semi-Arian, i.e., homoiousian, denial of the Holy Spirit's divinity. Athanasius defended the consubstantial divinity of the Holy Spirit in his First Letter to Serapion, the bishop of Thmuis, a small diocese in the Egyptian Delta. The divinity of the Holy Spirit was first taught by Lucifer of Cagliari (see endnote 423, infra.). Thmuis was troubled by Miletian schismatics who on homoiousian, i.e., subordinationist grounds rejected the divinity of the Holy Spirit. The homoiousians upheld the Son's divinity as similar in substance (homoios kat' ousian--(ὅμοιος κατ’οὐσίαν) to the Father, whom they identified with the divine substance. They understood this substantial similarity of the Son to the Father, which they held to warrant the Son’s divinity, to be unique to the Son,. When, in 358, Basil of Ancyra developed the homoiousian riposte to the Arian “Blasphemy of Sirmium,” Oriental theology was focused upon the Arian challenge to the divinity of Jesus, the Son; little attention was given to the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and to the Son. There was ample liturgical warrant of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, for the sacrament of Baptism invoked his Name, and the insertion of Holy Spirit’s Name into the Nicene Creed in 325 put the matter beyond question apart from the anti-Nicene homoiousian subordinationism which held the homoios kat' ousian to be unique to the Son in such wise that it could have no application to the Holy Spirit. The homoiousian ruling out of any similarity in the Holy Spirit to the divine substance reduced the Holy Spirit to a creaturely standing, quite as had Arianism. Further, the homoiousian subordination of the Son to the Father implicitly denied the Son’s divinity as well. This reduced homoiousianism to heteroousianism, as Athanasius would point out in the De synodis. His logic was impeccable, but the homoiousians condemned Arianism despite the lack of any homoiousian foundation for that condemnation. The Macedonians or "Spirit-fighers” among the homoiousian party would eventually exploit this weakness to deny the divinity of the Holy Spirit on grounds indistinguishable from Arianism.
Justin's provision for the divinity of the Son had invoked a primitive version of the Son's mission from the Father whereby the Son, Jesus the Lord, held unconditioned authority over and responsibility for a creation which the absolute Father, as immovable, could not recognize, although he had willed it into existence by 'Naming' the Son. Justin simply ignored the incongruities of this account. For him, it sufficed to explain the one thing necessary, that Jesus be revealed as the Lord of all creation.
Athenagoras also intended an apologia for the Christian faith, but one centered on the Trinity. Since he never uses τρíας or τρíαδος,, it is likely that he wrote before Theophilus, who was the first to use those terms, but Theophilus’ works are difficult to date. Athenagoras' Plea, on the other hand, has been dated with precision to a brief period of peace between 177 and 178 while Marcus Aureleus and Commodus shared the imperial throne. As had Justin, Athanagoras addressed his defense of Christianity, the Plea for Christians to the royal throne. Unlike Justin, who seems to have made no mention of the Holy Spirit, Athenagoras' foundational theological insight was Trinitarian. His complete reliance upon the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed when, defending himself against the charge of atheism commonly directed by the pagan Roman society against Christians, he had to explain to the imperial addressees of his Plea, Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus, the belief of Christians in a Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, Having done this, he asks:
Who, then, would not be astonished to hear men who speak of God the Father, and of God the Son, and of the Holy Spirit and who declare both their power in union and their distinction in order, are called atheists. (δεικύντας αὐτῶν καὶ τὴν ἐν τῇ ἑνώσει δὺναμιν καὶ τὴν ἐν τῇ τάχει διαίρεσιν, ἀκούσας ἀθέους καλομένους?).
Athenagoras. Legatio and De Resurrectione. Edited and translated by William R. Schoedel (Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1972), Plea 10, 5; emphasis added.
Athenagoras' defense of Christianity leaves unremarked the New Testament’s numerous ascriptions of primordiality to Jesus the Son; they did not fall under his purview, that of offering to the joint emperors a measured philosophical explanation and defense of the rationality of Christianity. He could rely upon their recognition, albeit Stoic, of the authority of rationality, but he could not expect them to endorse Christianity on that or any other basis: Trajan's rescript to Pliny the Younger clearly forbade it. Nonetheless Athenagoras did in fact seek their endorsement, if only indirectly. The concluding chapter of the Plea makes this evident:
37. Let our teaching concerning the resurrection be set aside for the present; but do you, who by name and nature are in every way good, moderate, human, and worthy of your royal office, nod your royal heads in assent now that I have destroyed the accusations advanced and have shown that we are godly, mild, and chastened in soul. 2. Who ought more justly to receive what they request than men like ourselves, who pray for your reign that the succession of the kingdom may proceed from father to son, as is most just, and that your reign may grow and increase as all men become subject to you. 3. This is also to our advantage that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life and at the same time may willingly do all that is commanded.
The nodding of the royal heads in assent to his Plea, which Athenagoras sought as a matter of justice, would in fact have been their conversion to a notion of justice unknown to the Roman law. It was in fact unthinkable, for it supposed a moral freedom without analogue in the Greek philosophical tradition from Parmenides to the Stoics. Yet it is possible, even probable, that Athenagoras had earned the emperors' respect. Although his public defense of Christianity was treasonable, worthy of death, he was not pursued, although Trajan's rescript required it. Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, sparing him this, could concede no more.[111]
William R. Schoedel (Plea), Gustave Bardy (Supplique), and Bermard Pouderon (also Supplique), have observed that Athenagoras' theological explanations often falter; Bardy has particularly remarked this of those analyses bearing upon divine providence as at once universal and concretely historical. This is hardly surprising, for that consideration introduces the mystery of the relation of our moral freedom to the divine omniscience and omnipotence; its theological exposition would wait upon Augustine. Bardy believes that these speculative incoherencies have a single remedy, their reference to his Supplique 10.5 (pp. 60-61) where the tangled logic of Athenagoras' theological discourse finds its sole clarification in the parallelism he has set out between the power of the divine unity and the unchanging order of the divine Names which constitute that free unity. .
Schoedel, Bardy, Pouderon and Marcovich alike recognize the centrality of Athanagoras’ Trinitarian doctrine to his theology. When his theology falters, it is to his liturgically underwritten and liturgically inspired assertion of the intrinsic ἕνωσις and τάξις of the One God that one must return, for his faith does not falter. Its complete expression, at once succinct and radical, is the text of Plea 10, 5, set out above, repeated here:
Who, then, would not be astonished to hear men who speak of God the Father, and of God the Son, and of the Holy Spirit and who declare both their power in union and their distinction in order, are called atheists?
Athenagorus is the first of the Apologists to recognize that within the unqualified unity of God there is an inherent order of Names, a τάξις, which never changes, that of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This insight clearly presupposes the Trinity, as a matter too obvious to require discrete affirmation, but goes well beyond its confession to enter into the mystery, by noting that the liturgy insists on the priority of the Father to the Son, and the Son to the Holy Spirit. Trinitarian theology begins with this foundational truth of the faith, and rests upon it still, for the heart of the apostolic tradition is the Church's Eucharistic liturgy, set out by Paul in I Cor. 11:23-26, whose celebration depends upon the apostolic succession. Schoedel's “Introduction,” xxxiii-iv, presents an outline of Athenagoras' argument in the Legatio; Bardy, “Introduction,” 44-61, presents a condensation of theology underlying it, and Prouderon, op. cit, 63-68, has provided a "Structure de la Supplique'" All of them are levied upon here.
Joseph Lienhard of the theology faculty of Fordham University has pointed out to me that Schoedel’s “Introduction” (xxi-xxii) notes Athenagoras’ departure from the Middle Platonic tradition of his time in professing a doctrine of creation which contrasts the created to the uncreated as non-being is contrasted to Being. His identification of Being with God, as opposed to the Ideas of Middle Platonism, permits the metaphysical refinement of the relation of God to the material world. This relation is the particular subject of the De Resurrectione, whose attribution to Athagoras is contested. Although defended by so eminent an authority as Bernard Pouderon, Robert.Grant rejects it, while William Schoedel and Miroslav Marcovich doubt it.[112] However, the headnote of Schoedel's edition and translation of the De Resurrectione attributes it to the “same author” as the Plea.
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The development of Western Christology rests firmly upon two bases: Irenaeus and Tertullian; Hippolytus, writing in Greek, had no lasting influence in the West. Irenaeus and Tertullian affirmed the personal unity of Jesus as at once fully divine and fully human; each refused a mixing of his divinity and humanity in that unity, and refusing as well their dissociation.[113]
Their ground for the affirmation of the unity of Jesus, as for the refusal of all that would threaten that unity, is of course the apostolic tradition which, by the end of the second century, was taking the form of the New Testament, itself inseparable from its liturgical hermeneutic, the preaching of the Church by the episcopal successors of the Apostles, conscious of their responsibility for preaching and defending the truth of the Church’s worship of her Lord.
By latter half of the second century, Gnostic movements had become a major threat to the infant Church, as is evident from Justin’s early polemic against them: Irenaeus’ monumental Adversus Haereses relied on Justin’s lost work of the same title in his treatment of the early Gnostics. This work and Tertullian’s Contra Marcionem are our major sources of information on the Gnostic perversions of apostolic tradition, which, as J. N. D. Kelly observes, “came within an ace of triumphing over the primitive Church.”[114] He adds that the extraordinary pastoral vigilance of the bishops was a major factor in the defeat of Gnosticism. We find an exemplary instance of this vigilance in Irenaeus, whose theology is a synthesis of vigorous, well-informed polemic directed against the Gnostic appeal to a higher “wisdom” (Gnōsis) Γνῶσις) than that of the apostolic tradition, joined to an exposition of that tradition, as in the Presentation of the Apostolic Preaching.
Irenaeus stands at the transitional point between Theophilus and Athenagoras, who used the Greek philosophical tradition rationally to confront the challenge of the Hellenistic culture to Christianity, and the application of that rational analysis to defeat the Gnosticism then threatening the Church.
Justin Martyr, who founded a Christian school at Rome in the mid-second century, and was martyred in 167 by reason of its success, was the first of the Apologists to recognize and respond to the Gnostic challenge to the historicity of Jesus the Christ. He met the Gnostic, rationalization of the divine Monarchy by insisting upon the concrete personal distinction of Jesus from the Father from whom he proceeds as Named, as given dominion over the whole creation by the Absolute Father who, as absolute, is impersonal, and thus incapable of a personal relation to creation, willed the creation of the universe and to this end generated and Named the Son, Jesus, to be its overlord, in a moment remotely corresponding to the Church’s doctrine of the Father’s Mission of Christ our Lord, in whom the universe is created.
Justin does not mention the Holy Spirit and developed no Trinitarian doctrine, but his foundational insight into the Father-Son distinction was developed by Athenagoras, Theophilus, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian before the end of the second century; Origen’s speculative genius furnished its comprehensive theological synthesis within the first third of the following century.
Tertullian’s Apologeticus, Hippolytus’ Refutatio Omnium Haeresim, and Origen’ Peri Archon explicitly reject the implicit subordination of the Son to the impersonal Father whom Justin had identified as absolute, although Justin’s nascent theologizing had so focused upon the plenary authority over all creation given the Son by his Father’s Naming as to have simply ignored its subordinationist implication−which implication is effecttively annulled by the quasi-absolute (i.e., immobile) Father’s Naming of the Son. Justin’s interest was in the total authority of the Son over all creation, At the same time, Tertullian’s insight into the divine Unity as the “Trinitas” of Father, Son and Holy Spirit dropped all subordination in the Trinity. His development of the Greek Apologists’ postulate of a divine Τρíας, (Trias), despite their use of terms taken from Greek philosophy, particularly Stoicism.
Irenaeus was a native of Asia Minor, probably of Smyrna, where he was privileged in his youth to have known and heard its bishop, St. Polycarp, evidently as his disciple. Polycarp, soon to be martyred, had himself been a disciple of the Apostle John.[115] Other than that, we know nothing of Irenaeus’ early life. At some indeterminate date in his maturity he came to Rome and apparently spent some years there. Only thereafter, in 177, when he had settled in what is now Lyons in southern France, do we have a definite date: he is listed among the priests of Lyons in that year. In the same year, a time in which the persecution of Christians, renewed under Marcus Aurelius, was particularly relentless in the area of Lyons, the clergy of Lyons sent Irenaeus on a mission to Pope Eleutherius in Rome. During Irenaeus’ absence from Lyons, Pothinus, the aged bishop of that city, suffered martyrdom. Upon Irenaeus’ return to Lyons, he succeeded Pothinus as bishop, and remained in that office until his death around the year 200, perhaps as late as 202.
Shortly after Irenaeus had become a bishop, whether of Vienne or Lyons or both, succeeding the martyred Pothinus, Marcus Aurelius died (180) and the persecution he had initiated ceased. There followed a period of relative peace, broken by the sack of Lyons by the troops of a victorious Emperor Septimius Severus who, on February 19th, 197, defeated his rival, Decimus Clodius Albinus, in the battle of “Lugdunum” (later, Lyons).and permitted his troops to celebrate their victory by sacking that nearby city. Because Irenaeus’ death is datable only as between the last years of the second century or the opening years of the third, it is possible that Irenaeus died in 197 during the sack of his city by the troops of Septimius Severus after his victory over Albinus in February of that year, which might also account for his reputed martyrdom. This is of course no more than a reasonably well-founded surmise.
In any event, the death of Marcus Aurelius(180) was followed a period of relative peace which permitted Irenaeus to take up his teaching office, writing the Adversus Haereses in five volumes, and later, his Demonstration of the Apostolic Tradition, which Pope Benedeict XVI has described as the “oldest catechism of Christian doctrine,” The Adversus Haereses remains a primary source of information on the Gnostic heresies, particularly the Valentinian, which then and for much of the third century posed a deadly threat to the historical faith of the Church.
Irenaeus’ Christology is of the first importance; the precision of his summation of the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ as “one and the same” Son of the eternal Father and of the Virgin Mary has never been surpassed. Two and a half centuries after his death, that radical insight into the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ became the leitmotiv of the Chalcedonian Symbol; it is the foundation and the source of all subsequent dogmatic formulations of the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord.
Against the Gnostics, Irenaeus insisted on the unity of God, of Christ the God-Man, and of creation, particularly of man as inherently corporeal, as made from earth (Gen. 2:7). His insistence that the historical Jesus, the second Adam, is “one and the same,” at once the Son of the Father and the Son of Mary, is said with a soteriological emphasis: what is not assumed is not healed (quod non assumptus, non sanatus). Therefore Jesus must be fully human. Thus he understands theophanies of the Old Testament as theophanies of Jesus the Lord, as Justin had,
The three decades of Irenaeus’ episcopacy at Lyons span the period in which the second century’s defensive apologia of the faith became a theologia founded not in philosophical wisdom, but in the truth of the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord. This confidence in the truth of the faith forced the de-Hellenization of the Catholic mind, requiring its departure from a naïve subscription to the immanent necessities of the Middle-Platonic version of cosmological rationality, in order to uphold the truth of the faith, which knows no immanent necessities, but only the freedom of the Revelation of the mystery of Christ.
The personal conversion from cosmology to history is never complete. Our intellectual spontaneities remain cosmological, locked into the fragmentation of the intellect inherent in our fallen flesh. It is too much to say that the conversion from cosmology begins with Irenaeus, for Justin had urged the same conversion, composing an Adversus Haereses, now lost, which certainly anticipated and undoubtedly contributed to the five volumes Irenaeus wrote under that title. It was Irenaeus who first published a refutation of dehistoricizing of the faith by the Gnostic dualism with the full resources of the New Testament to aid him.[116] On this he spent his time and energy until 189. The Adversus Haereses in five volumes remains a primary source of information on the Gnosticism, particularly Valentinian, which then and for much of the third century threated the historical faith of the Church. Thereafter, he published his brief Demonstration of the Apostolic Tradition, which Pope Benedict XVI has described as the “oldest catechism of Christian doctrine,” and spent the rest of his life writing and publishing
Irenaeus’ permanent contribution to Christology is his development of the Pauline doctrine of the Christ as the Second Adam, (Rom. 5:12-21; I Cor. 15:21, 46; Eph. 5:21-33) whose recapitulation of all things in Christ (Eph. 1:10: anakephalaiososthai ta panta en to Christo) restores what was lost to all mankind by our solidarity with the first Adam’s sin. Our comparably mystical solidarity with the second Adam’s recapitulation of all things in himself restores us to that freedom which was lost in the first Adam.
Irenaeus is dependent upon the parallel Paul places between the two Adams to the point that he regards “recapitulation of all things in Christ” as the summary statement of the work of our redemption. Only a development of the meaning which Paul gave to headship could render theologically intelligible our parallel solidarities, at once in the sin of the first Adam and in the Sacrifice of the second Adam. Daniélou has established Irenaeus’ awareness, as well as that of Clement of Alexandria, of the nexus between I Cor. 11:3, Eph. 1:10, and Eph. 5; see endnote 117, supra. The interrelation of these texts, and their ultimate dependence upon the authority of I Cor. 11:3, underlies Irenaeus’ heavy reliance on the doctrine of fall and redemption set out by Paul in Rom. 5-8.
The Church’s tradition was for Irenaeus, as later it would be for Augustine, an utterly reliable mediation of the truth of Christ and thus the firm foundation of theology: He could not but see his theological task as defensive. The Gnostic preaching was then a direct and deadly threat to the apostolic faith in the Peresonal unity and thus the human historicity of Jesus Christ the Lord, and therefore to the truth of the Church’s faith in the revelation given in the Christ. Irenaeus’ theology is an extended reply to that threat. Its unity is simply the coherent unity of the faith: the analogia fidei, the apostolic tradition that is the historical foundation, the concrete a priori which grounds theology as such. Thus grounded in the “true gnosis,” Irenaeus attacked the false gnosis of the Gnostics, stressing the Pauline themes of the two Adams, and of the recapitulation of all things in Christ, the “second Adam.”
J. N. D. Kelly has observed that Irenaeus sums up the primitive theology of the second century Apologists[117] and that, while he is influenced by the Apologists, his Christology is that of the apostolic tradition, particularly of St. John and of St. Paul. Kelly’s insinuation (Doctrines, 101-02) that the Apologists were at odds with the apostolic tradition is quite unwarranted; e.g., Theophilus’ use of Stoic terminology was in service of his doctrine of the divine Trias (τρíάς, τρíάδος) which is an evident rejection without remainder of the pantheist dualism of Stoicism. Athenagoras’ recognition of the liturgical order of the divine names as a τάξις is a further insight into Trinitarian unity of God as manifest the intrinsic unchanging order, repeated throughout the Church’s liturgy, which founds all doctrine. Athenagoras and Theophilus both upheld the apostolic tradition of the Father’s mission of the Son to give the Holy Spirit; they both upheld the divinity of the Son and the Spirit. They provided the foundation indispensable for the development of the doctrinal tradition in the spirit of the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lerins, whose canon of orthodox belief: “that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all” holds today as it did in the fifth century: in sum, the development of doctrine cannot be a departure from the apostolic tradition.
Irenaeus emphasizes particularly the ”logos sarx egeneto” of the Johannine Prologue, its parallel in the account in Phil. 2:5-7 of Jesus’ kenōsis, and the doctrine of the headship of second Adam set out by St. Paul in I Cor. 11:3, and developed by him in Rom. 5 and 8, in I Cor. 15, which undergirds the recapitulation theme in Eph. 1:10 and Eph. 5:21-33, also in Col. 1:15-20. Within the apostolic tradition represented by the Gospel of John and the Letters of Paul the unity of these Christological foundations is evident, for the Prologue understands “Logos” to be a title of Jesus, whose pre-existence “in the beginning;” is that of the “Alpha” who is also the “Omega,” the transcendent Beginning and the End, spelled out more completely in Col. 1:15-20. The recitation in the Prologue of the mission of the Logos into our fallen history, i.e., his becoming “flesh,” is the precise equivalent of the Pauline account of the kenōsis of Jesus the Lord set out in the hymn adapted by Paul in Phil. 2:6-7; it agrees with the primordial transcendence of the second Adam as presented in I Cor. 11:3, in Romans 5, and in the reports by Jn. 8:58, and Mk. 14:62, of Jesus’ attribution to himself of the “ego eimi” (ἐγώ ἐιμί) of Exodus 3:14.
J. N. D. Kelly’s observation that Irenaeus sums up the primitive theology of the second century Apologists has been noted, but, whatever the influence upon him of the Apologists, his Christology is that of the apostolic tradition, particularly of St. John and St. Paul. Irenaeus emphasizes particularly the “logos sarx egeneto” of the Johannine Prologue, its parallel in Phil. 2:5-11, and the doctrine of the second Adam developed by Paul in Rom. 5 and 8, in 1 Cor. 15, in Col. 1:18, and last but not least the recapitulation theme in Eph. 1:10 and Eph. 5:21-35. However, Kelly’s summary of Irenaeus’ loyalty to the apostolic tradition, which he identifies with the faith of the Catholic Church, fails to note the grounding of Irenaeus’ recapitulation doctrine in the summary statement of the Trinitarian foundation of headship in I Cor. 11:3 as this relates to the doctrine of the fall explored in Rom. 5-8, whose use of the sarx-pneuma polarity is unintelligible apart from the doctrine of the Christ as the second Adam.
The apostolic tradition represented by the Letters of Paul and the Gospel of John presupposes the unanimity of these doctrinal foundations, at once Trinitarian and Christological. Therefore their compatibility presents no problem, for the Prologue understands “Logos” as a title of Jesus the Lord, whose pre-existence. “in the Beginning,” is that of the Alpha and the Omega, the transcendent Beginning and the End. The Johannine Christology is at one with that of the hymn in Phil. 2, and with the primordial transcendence of the second Adam as presented in I Cor. 11:3 and Rom. 5-8. It is as inspired by this tradition that Irenaeus would teach that Jesus is “one and the same Son,” of the eternal Father and of Mary his mother, a radical affirmation of his Personal unity which the Ephesian Formula of Union will define, and which will be the leitmotif of the Council of Chalcedon.
J. N D. Kelly considers the Catholic tradition to be the “starting point” of theology;[118] however, his notion of theology is inadequate. Cf. Vol. III, endnote 248, citing John McGuckin’s agreement with Kelly that the permanent task of theology is providing for the prior possibility of the Incarnation. It is at this point that Kelly goes astray, for the Catholic Church regards the apostolic tradition as the foundation of theology, but does not understand theology to be cosmological quest for the conditions of possibility of the truth of the Catholic faith that Jesus Christ is Lord. That Jesus Christ is Lord is the Mysterium fidei: it has no antecedent possibility and cannot be provided with one..
Kelly can hardly be blamed for this mistake, for the normative Catholic Christology at the time of his writing was as it had long been, that of St. Thomas, a clearly cosmological quest for the conditions of possibility of the Catholic faith in the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ. As a matter of definition, Jesus’ Personal unity is the radical Mysterium fidei, and as such it can have no conditions of possibility. It is hardly surprising that St. Thomas, unable to find any, should finally deny that Jesus Christ the Lord is the subject of the Incarnation. For St. Thomas and his followers, the subject of the Incarnation had ceased to be historical, and in the end could only be the eternal “immanent Trinitarian” Son. Therefore: it is he, not the historical Jesus the Christ, who “became flesh,” Having denied the historicity of Jesus the Lord, the “one and the same” Son whose Personal unity was affirmed eight times in the Symbol of Chalcedon, St. Thomas and his disciples could not but proceed to deny historicity to Jesus’ “flesh” as well; under that rationalist aegis his “flesh” became his abstract “human nature,” not his historical submission to our fallenness. The Thomist Christologial project is all too familiar. Its futility has been stressed from the outset of this work.
However, it has been argued that on occasion Irenaeus also nods. His theology has been read by an Argentine Jesuit, Juan Ochagavia, to deny the Personal consubstantiality of Jesus the Christ with the Father.[119] It is not too much to describe this indictment as bizarre. J. N. D. Kelly, writing the fifth edition of his classic Early Christian Doctrines a dozen years after Ochagavía’s libel was published, ignores it. Robert Grant’s fine study of Irenaeus, published six years later, knows nothing of it. Both consider Irenaeus to be committed to the defense of the apostolic tradition against the most serious enemy of his time, the Valentinian Gnosticism, whose dualism was confusing and endangering the faith of many in the latter decades of the second century.
It is clear enough that Irenaeus’s immunity to cosmological confusion of Gnosticism is due to the factual apostolicity of his Christological interest, which is thereby spontaneously historical, intent on teaching the reality of Jesus Christ the Lord, the Mystery of Faith rather than accounting for it. He takes for granted that which the Gospels and the Letters of Paul teach and which the Apologists after Justin, particularly Athenagoras and Theophilus of Antioch, had also understood. More than three centuries later, in the first half of the fifth century Christology had become intent upon the rationalization of the unity of the Christ, and would not attain, even in its mature Antiochene and Alexandrine expressions, the faith that the Logos is Jesus the Son of Mary, who is the eternal Son of the eternal Father.
Irenaeus’ identification of the Logos with Jesus, the “one and the same Son” of the Father and of our Lady, neatly and conclusively sums up the Apostolic tradition. This profound insight, paralleled in Tertullian’s De Carne Christi 18, incapable of further development, survived the next two and a half centuries, to become the controlling theme of the Symbol of Chalcedon.
Only when the pre-existence of the Logos is thus conceived, as that of the Lord Jesus, the one and the same Son, i.e., as human, as created, as unfallen, therefore as primordial, viz., ”in the beginning” rather than as eternal and nonhistorical, can Catholic theology avoid entering upon a quasi-Gnostic dehistoricization of the entirety of the Catholic tradition. Irenaeus’ long battle with the Gnostic dehistoricization of the Lord made him immune to any dehistoricization of the Logos. While in some passages he spoke of the Logos in a philosophical and Platonic sense, it is clear that for Irenaeus the Logos is Jesus, the second Adam, the one and the same Son of the Father from eternity, and of the Virgin in our fallen history.
Irenaeus maintained the apostolic understanding of the pre-existence of Jesus, as taught by Paul in Phil. 2:6-7 and in his vision of Jesus as the second Adam, and in the Johannine Prologue, whose ascription of a “beginning” to the Word can only refer to the same “beginning” which Paul identifies with Jesus in Col. 1:17: i.e., with the event of the historical Son’s historical Mission, whose terminus is the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve. Thus, as we have seen, the Fathers have understood Jn. 19:34 to be the fulfillment of the prophesy of Gen. 2:24. Kelly notes (Doctrines, 148) Irenaeus’ insistence that the Christ is the agent of his own Incarnation: this interpretation of Lk. 1:35 was universal from Justin Martyr to the first decades of the fourth century; and with Athanasius survived to its last quarter, as Ernest Evans has shown.
For Irenaeus, the ‘second Adam’ is the transcendent object of the Church’s faith and the subject of the New Testament. Irenaeus so stresses the identity of the historical Lord Jesus, the Christ, with the primordial Second Adam, the one and the same Son, as to see in Jesus the Christ’s recapitulation of all things in himself the summary statement of his redemption of the fallen creation.[120]
This solidly historical foundation freed Irenaeus’ Christology from any need to account for the Son’ Incarnation. Kelly observes that, even more than Justin, Irenaeus understood the Incarnation to be the deed of the preexistent Logos, whom Kelly assumes to be the eternal Son, sensu negante, and thus ignores the fact that Irenaeus’ emphasis upon the second Adam understands him to be the one and the same Son, whose pre-existence is primordial, human as well as divine. Irenaeus could not have been ignorant of the cosmological dualism infecting the Greek consciousness in his time, but his Christological focus upon the “one and the same Son” owes nothing to Hellenism. He had no need to speculate upon the manner of the Incarnation; even in defending its historicity against the Valentinians. Irenaeus, with the Spirit Christology of the third century generally, understood the Logos of Jn. 1:14 to be identically the second Adam. This was the doctrine of the Apostolic Fathers; it pervades the Letters of Ignatius Martyr, was taken for granted by Hermas, Barnabas, by the author of the Letter of Diognetus, by the author of II Clement, and by theologians contemporary with him, such as Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Clement of Alexandria,
Irenaeus joins Justin in reading the Old Testament theophanies as proper to Jesus. His concern for the role of Christ in these appearances is at one with Justin’s and may be derived from him. It is evident that Irenaeus’ intimation of the deficient humanity of the Christ of the Old Testament theophanies is irreconcilable, not only with his primary Christological focus upon the Personal unity of Christ as the new or second Adam, but also with the Old Covenant, whose theophanies are clearly personal and historically concrete. Therefore they are compatible only with the primordiality of Jesus’ Personal pre-existence, in which the fullness of humanity and divinity are mysteriously united without confusion in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Person who appeared to the Patriarchs and to Moses. The subject of the Old Testament theophanies was not an abstract and nonhistorical Logos: their Christian interpretation can refer only to the Lord, the “Adonai” who is the Jesus the Christ. For it only thus, as primordially preexisting in the fullness of divinity and of humanity, that Irenaeus can name Jesus the “one and the same Son.”[121] The cosmological confusion by which, living in the latter decades of the second century he could not but be affected. is easily dispelled: Irenaeus is a consistent witness to the apostolic faith in the primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Lord.
In the article cited, Lucien Regnaux develops at length Irenaeus’ appreciation of the inseparability of the role of the second Eve, almost indistinguishably at once the Virgin and the Church, from the role of the second Adam in the recapitulation and restoration of all things in her Lord. The attributes of motherhood, of nourishment, of mediation, are proper alike to Mary and the Church. Irenaeus is the first to develop the Eve-Mary parallel, already remarked by Justin in what is perhaps the most luminous passage in his works. Irenaeus understands the first Adam to have been born of the virgin earth, the second to have been born of the Virgin Mary. He draws out the parallel between Eve’s solicitation to disobedience by the Serpent, and Mary’s free obedience to Gabriel’s announcement to her of her election freely to become the mother of the Emmanuel. Irenaeus has been described as the founder of Mariology: he offers an anticipatory justification, invoking the communication of idioms, of the Theotokos title given Mary at Ephesus; he also intimates her freedom from sin.[122]
It was Irenaeus’ insistence upon the Personal unity of divinity and humanity in “one and the same Son, together with its Mariological implications, that was remembered over the next two and a half centuries. The affirmation of Jesus’ Personal Unity, seven times repeated, in the Symbol of Chalcedon, served to transcend the intervening Christological confusion generated by the otherwise universal theological dehistoricization of the Johannine Logos by Nestorians and Monophysites alike. Irenaeus’ insistence that Jesus’ personal humanity is grounded in his Mother’s found dogmatic expression in the title of Theotokos given her at Ephesus, and that Council’s affirmation of his consubstantiality with us was repeated by the Symbol of Chalcedon, which referred eight times it to Irenaeus’ doctrine of “one and the same Son.” Regnaux has also pointed out the likely interrelation of Mary and the Church in Irenaeus’attribution of what appears to be the same salvific, recapitulative role, that of the second Eve, to our Lady and to the Church.
If Irenaeus is not a systematic thinker in the sense of employing a formal theological method, his work is certainly a fides quaerens intellectum; a theological synthesis of the apostolic tradition, crystallized in Scripture and the preaching of the Church. He rarely departs from the ecclesial idiom drawn from Scripture and the apostolic tradition. This, for him is the true gnosis, while that of his adversaries is a false gnosis, one unworthy of the name.
The range of the true gnosis is universal, embracing the entirety of the economy of salvation and thus of salvation history as such. Irenaeus’ emphatic defense of the unity of God and of Jesus, of the unity of the Old Covenant and the New in a single salvific history whose Lord is Jesus, whose offering of the One Sacrifice, the recapitulation of all things in Christ, restores the free unity of creation lost by original sin, reaffirms the apostolic foundation of all doctrine and so of all Catholic theology. It is on this ground that Irenaeus developed a unitary vision of the redemption worked by Christ who, sent by the Father to give the Spirit, is the source of the free unity of the redeemed universe; he is the second Adam whose recapitulation of all things is the transcendent subject of Irenaeus’ Christology. To be thus the source of the unity of the substantial reality that is creation, as has been stressed heretofore, is to hold the office of headship. Irenaeus’ concentration upon the Personal unity of Jesus is at one with his recognition of Jesus’ headship of all creation, and thus with his application of the Pauline recapitulation theme to the headship of all things by and in Christ.[123]
This nexus is of the first importance for the analogia fidei and for the systematic inquiry which feeds upon the intrinsic coherence, the free unity, of the ecclesial tradition. The apostolic and ecclesial tradition of the revelation that is given us in Christ is basically liturgical, and radically Eucharistic. The “true gnosis,” as Irenaeus called his doctrine, rejects outright the Gnostic flight from history. It demands of every Christian that historical responsibility, the covenantal fidelity whose supreme expression is martyrdom. This fidelity is at one with the faith and spirituality of the Church, and with the lived faith that Jesus is Lord. This truth, this gnosis, this mystery, cannot be transcended; Irenaeus’ grasp of it is finally mystical, finding it an inexhaustible source of a spirituality of universal import and application. His spirituality was heavily relied upon at Vatican II.
It is worth remarking that the fruit of his mature years as the bishop of Lyons, defending the Church against the Gnostic denials of the unity of the Lord Jesus by developing and preaching a true gnosis, is Irenaeus’ concise summary of Christological orthodoxy in the maxim that Jesus is “one and the same Son.” It was equally instrumental in the defense of the Personal unity of his Lord at Chalcedon two and a half centuries later, when competing dehistoricizations of Jesus the Christ, by Nestorius and Eutyches again threatened the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ.
Tertullian’s theology, Christological, Trinitarian, and sacramental, is foundational for the Latin tradition. Its impact upon the Latin Church is comparable to Origen’s upon the Greek tradition; his Peri Archon is nearly contemporaneous with Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean. Tertullian has been well described as “a source and standard to which Latin theology never ceased to have recourse,” and as the finest intelligence of his time.[124]
Born to pagan parents in Carthage perhaps as early as 155, he was well educated in Greek and Latin literature as well as in the Roman law. He was a successful and perhaps eminent practicing lawyer when, about 195, he became a Christian.[125] Thereupon he undertook the advocacy of the Christian faith which occupied the rest of his life. Pierre de Labriolle has described his undoubted genius:
Endowed with a mind fundamentally positive and practical, with a talent tempered to a superior fineness, which knew how to bind together in vigorous systems, theology, morality, and discipline, without mentioning the Latin tongue itself which he constrained with so much learning to new uses, this original and powerful personality inaugurated Latin Christian literature, in a manner which was most resplendent.[126]
Msgr. Ronald Knox is less positive.[127]. He finds in Tertullian’s conversion to Montanism the first clear expression of that “enthusiasm” which Knox explored in his classic study of the history of religion. For those unfamiliar with Enthusiasm, Msgr. Knox’s first page describes at some length what he intends by the term: a few lines from its first paragraph are excerpted here:
There is, I would say, a recurrent situation in Church history―using the word ‘church’ in the widest sense―where an excess of charity threatens unity. You have a clique, an élite, of Christian men and (more importantly) women who are trying to live a less worldly life than their neighbours, to be more attentive to the guidance (directly felt, they would tell you) of the Holy Spirit. More and more, by a kind of fatality , you see them draw apart from their co-religionists, a hive ready to swarm. There is provocation on both sides; on the one part, cheap jokes at the expense of over-godliness, acts of stupid repression by unsympathetic authorities; on the other, contempt of the half-Christian, ominous references to old wine and new bottles, to the kernel and the husk. Then, while you hold your breath and turn away your eyes in fear, the break comes; condemnation or secession, what difference does it make? A fresh name has been added to the list of Christianities.
Msgr. Knox believes this flaw to have infected all of Tertullian’s work, leading him finally into Montanism:
To me he is a born arguer, who talks himself, rather than thinks himself, into extreme positions, and is too dazzled by his own eloquence to recede from them. That he ever practised as an orator is in doubt;1 but his nagging logic stamps every line of him as the work of a man bred to the forum.
Knox, Enthusiasm, 45.
And again:
He is never profound, never opens a new window on some aspect of theology; he will stick to his brief.
Ibid., 46,
In the latter comment Msgr. Knox far exceeds his own brief; Tertullian’s Christological and Trinitarian insights, condensed in duae substantiae, una Persona, and tres Personae, una Substantia, expressed the apostolic tradition with a precision unknown before him and unsurpassed since. His Christological formulae have entered into the Symbol of Chalcedon. Msgr. Knox’s criticism is pertinent insofar as it bears upon Tertullian’s conversion to Montanism, while ignoring both his genius and the permanent signifycance of his theology,
Tertullian wrote a number of works before writing his masterpiece, the Apologeticus, during the reign of Septimius Severus, about 197.[128] It is addressed to the magistrates of the Roman provinces who had immediate oversight of the persecution of Christians. In it he presented himself to them as a Christian advocate arguing with learning and eloquence the case against the automatic incrimination of Christians and the execution of those who, like him, refused to abandon their faith under pressure. Clearly, he spoke for the ordinary run of the routinely persecuted, hoi polloi, the multitude of insignificant people whose only crime was believing that Jesus Christ is Lord, quietly living that faith and often willing to witness to its truth to the end. Tertullian’s showing forth of the content of their faith was indispensable to his argument; thus he set out the elements of his own Christological and Trinitarian faith. Ernest Evans, who has published, inter alia, unsurepassed editions of Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean, De Carne Christi, and De Resurrectione, maintains that, apart from dropping the inappropriate expression of the full humanity and full divinity of Christ as a “mixtio” in him of the divine and the human, Tertullian’s Christology underwent no notable change thereafter.[129]
Tertullian’s two theological paradigms, the one Trinitarian, the other Christological, are indispensable to Catholic theology in the Latin West, and have been written into the doctrinal tradition. Both rely upon a subtle interrelation of “substance” and “person” in two distinct but inseparable contexts. Here they are introduced.
This formula is so universally accepted in Western Christology as to have become a commonplace and so to have lost its depth. Attempts to fit it into an existing theological or philosophical formats obscure it by begging of questions which never occurred to Tertullian. The basic mistake is the interpretation of ‘substance” as “nature:” i.e., as abstract, although it is evident, and for fifteen centuries has been defined, that Jesus was an historical man and, as historical, a human Person, the human Son of a human mother, and Personally consubstantial with us. That he is the eternal Son of the eternal Father is similarly defined, in such wise that his mother is the mother of God, Theotokos. Jesus is then fully, i.e., substantially divine, and fully, i.e., substantially human, a Person at once human and divine, “one and the same Son.”
This is the ancient Catholic tradition, the Spirit Christology taught by the Apostles, celebrated by the Eucharistic liturgy, enshrined in the books of the New Testament, affirmed by the Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists of the second century, by the close of which Irenaeus had condensed his theology in the succinct assertion that Jesus is “one and the same Son.” It was defined by the first four Councils, the last of which, the Council of Chalcedon, wrote Irenaeus’ recognition of the full humanity, full divinity, and Personal unity of the Christ into its Symbol as the touchstone of the Catholic faith that Jesus is the Lord.
Nonetheless, this Christology has been rejected by the bulk of Latin and Greek theology from the second decade of the fourth century, down to the second decade of the present century, which is to say, .for most of the two millennia since the one and the same Son, by the offering of his One Sacrifice, on the Altar and on the Cross, fulfilled his mission from the Father to give the Spiritus Creator. It must here be noted that in Tertullian’s De Carne Christi 18, almost coincidentally with Irenaeus, he affirmed the full, substantial humanity, the full, substantial divinity and the Personal unity of Jesus Christ the Lord.
Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine is inseparable from his Christology: Jesus the Christ’s revelation of himself as the Son is his revelation of his Father, by whom he is sent to give the Holy Spirit, who is therefore sent by the Father through the Son. Here again, Tertullian is the first to have taught the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, the primordial Sermo, whose historical mission by the Father is eo ipso his revelation of the Trinity. The revelation is Personal, therefore mysterious, incapable of reduction to information and, for that reason, inexhaustible; it is also fascinating, incapable of being ignored. Its Truth is therefore free, capable of appropriation as a gift; and otherwise unavailable. The reception and appropriation of this gift of Christ himself is personal, a conversion to the Catholic faith that he is Lord, not as dominating the universe, but as liberating it from its ancient imprisonment. There can be no other, the alternative to the freedom of faith in Jesus Christ the Lord is self-enclosure in an uninhabitable cosmos, the autonomous self. Once personally received, whether as by the Apostles, or by those taught by them, faith in Christ judges and cannot be judged: this is implicit in the freedom of its reception for, as freely received, it is a conversion from the determinist cosmologies that are its alternative.
The Church’s Trinitarian faith is historical, for it rests upon the Event of the Incarnation, which is the revelation of the Trinity. The Church’s historical faith in the absolute unity of God has an analogue in the nearly instinctive monotheistic cosmologies of the pagan cultures, but only in Judaism were these converted to faith in the God who is the Lord of history. The Jewish faith in the Lord of history found its final expression in the Messianic hope for a divinely anointed King, a Christ, whose rule will finally bring peace and prosperity to the fallen world. The Christian faith that Jesus is that King, that Lord, separates Christianity from Judaism, which does not accept Jesus as the Messiah. Nonetheless, the Christian faith in the One God is an inheritance from Judaism, and the Christian interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures as prophetic of the New Testamant links Christianity to Judaism inseparably. As Pope Pius XI observed, “spiritually we are Semites.”
The Christian insistence, from Tertullian onward, upon the substantial unity of God, “mia ousia , mia hypostasis,” defeated at the Council of Nicaea the Arian assertion that belief in the divinity of the Son, Jesus the Christ is a denial of the divine unity, while at the same time freeing that divine unity from the threat of its subordination to a cosmological rationale that would reduce it to an impersonal absolute, a Monas whose historicity could only be mythical. The Christian faith in the Trinitarian unity of God upholds the Jewish insistence upon the immanence of the One God in history. Thus understood, it has a perduring ecumenical significance.
*♦ The Editorial Stance of Ernest Evans
Ernest Evans is a patristic scholar of great erudition whose reputation has long been secure, nor is it under question here. Rather, the present sketch of Tertullian’s Christological and Trinitarian doctrine relies upon his authority more than upon that of any other author.
It is necessary to discuss Evans’ editorial relation to Tertullian’s Christological and Trinitarian doctrine simply because it is adverse. Evans considers Tertullian’s Spirit Christology, the apostolic orthodoxy of the second and third centuries, to have become obsolete and have been tacitly dropped during the fourth century. He praises Eusebius of Caesarea for dismissive criticism of this Christology in Contra Marcellum and Ecclesiastica Theologia, and expresses satisfaction with what he believes to have been its abandonment thereafter.[130].
Notwithstanding this persuasion, Evans’ exposition of Tertullian’s Christological and Trinitarian theology is painstaking and accurate, insofar as the present writer may judge. The extensive “Notes and Commentary” concluding his Against Praxeas, 183-331, is prefaced by a hundred similar pages in On the Incarnation (82-183) and another hundred and fifty in On The Resurrection (188-340). The three ”Notes and Commentary” are invaluable aids to the appreciation of Tertullian’s theology, and of patristic scholarship generally. However, Evans’ explicit rejection of the Spirit Christology in favor of his personal commitment to the systematic dehistoricization of the subject of the Incarnation entails his rejection of the communication of idioms in that subject, whom he has reduced to the ‘immanent Son,’ the pre-human divine Word . Consequently, for Evans it is not the primordial historical Jesus the Lord who is the subject of the incarnation, but the eternally pre-existent divine Son who cannot become flesh (caro, sarx) in the historical event of the Incarnation and kenōsis, but who supposedly becomes human, in the abstract sense of assuming a human nature.
Evans prefaces the “Notes and Commentary” of his On The Incarnation and On the Resurrection with expressions of a personal theological stance entirely incompatible with Tertullian’s Spirit Christology and also with the Church’s doctrinal tradition.[131] His abstraction of Christology from history inevitably entails the dehistoricization of the Mission of the Son; for Evans, it is the immanent Son, not Jesus, who is sent by the Father, and who, with the Fall, becomes “flesh.” It must follow that the flesh (caro, sarx) is also dehistoricized, for the “immanent Son” is incapable of becoming fallen. Consequently, in common with many if not most contemporary theologians, Evans supposes the Incarnation of the Word to be his assumption of a “human nature,” i.e., of an abstraction, for humanity as concrete, as historical, is personal; it has no other objectivity. While Evans is well aware that Tertullian uses “flesh” historically, i.e., in the sense of personal subjecttion to sin and death, his own rejection of the Spirit Christology as obsolete appears throughout his editions of the Adversus Praxean, the De Carne Christi, and the De Resurrectione Carnis.
Questions immediately arise. Evans is well aware that Tertullian has identified the Word of Jn. 1:14 (“Sermo” is Tertullian’s preferred translation of the Latin Verbum and the Greek Logos) with the primordially pre-existent Jesus.[132] Evans’ rejection of the Spirit Christology as mistaken rests upon his replacement of it by one in conformity with a criterion more reliable than the pre-Nicene rendition of the apostolic tradition. While Evans does not label his Christology, his express identification of the Incarnation as the assumption by the non-human Verbum of a human nature conforms to the Logos-sarx Christology which had become common early in the latter half of the fourth century. Like Evans’ Christology, the Logos-sarx Christology is characterized by the dehistoricization of the subject of the Incarnation and therefore of the Father’s Mission of the Son. It assumes the subject of the Incarnation to be the second Person of the Trinity, whose pre-existence is ab aeterno, sensu negante: i.e. not the primordial pre-existence of the “one and the same Son” of the Father and of the Virgin.[133] The currently dominant version of the Logos sarx Christology is Thomism, a systematic rejection of the human Person of Jesus, the primordial Sermo of Tertullian’s Spirit Christology. It must follow that the Thomist version of the Logos-sarx Christology must refuse the Creeds of the first four Ecumenical Councils, which affirm that Jesus is the subject of the Incarnation, confirming Tertullian’s Spirit Christology, and consequently the communication of idioms in the Jesus, the subject of the Incarnation. That is he the subject of the Incarnation is the faith of the Church: Jesus Christ is Lord.
In the Apologeticus Tertullian simply asserts the unity of the two substantiae, the divine and the human, in the una persona of Jesus the Lord. Apart from two inconsequential references to their “mixtio,” Evans, in his now classic edition of the Adversus Praxean, recognizes as a constant Tertullian’s commitment to the Spirit Christology of the apostolic tradition, whose hallmark is the primordial pre-existence of the Word, the Logos, the Sermo, who is Jesus the Lord. Well into the fourth century the accepted reading of Lk. 1:35, referred its “πνεῦμα ἅγιον” to the primordial Jesus Christ, thus understanding him as the agent of his own Incarnation. Evans considers this exegesis of the Annunciation narrative to be unsupported by the text.[134]. He prefers the interpretation by Cyril of Alexandria, whom he understands to consider the Holy Spirit to have been active in the Incarnation of our Lord. This would violate the liturgical order of the Trinitarian Names, τάξις (taxis) the unchanging sequence of the Naming of the τρíας, of the Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, established by Athenagoras and Theophilus in the second century, wherein the Mission of the Son precedes the Mission of the Holy Spirit. In brief, the Holy Spirit is sent by Jesus the Lord, whose mission from the Father is precisely to bestow the Holy Spirit, the Spiritus Creator. To reverse this sequence is to deny the Trinity.
Evans’ personal rejection of this doctrine cannot but entail some distortion of Tertullian’s theology. It first appears in his discussion of Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine in the Apologeticus, where he assumes that, by reason of the intent of that work to establish the “worshipfulness of Jesus,” Tertullian cannot presuppose Jesus’ divinity, but must establish it. Consequently, he must begin “at the beginning” with the end in view the estabishing of the divinity of Christ, i.e., ”his worshipfulness,” in order that it may be attributed to him. This he undertakes by examining his “substance.”
However, Tertullian’s text, in Apologeticus 17 and 21, takes the Christ’s divinity for granted: his “worshipfulness” is never in question. Further, as has been seen, Tertullian identifies Jesus’ ‘substance,’ the Logos, with the Person of Christ, as Evans acknowledges.
Evan’s development of this approach to Tertullian’s exposition of his Trinitarian doctrine is inconsistent. It is even confused, in that he recognizes the apostolic tradition of Tertullian’s Christology and does not attempt to reduce Tertullian’s Sermo to an abstract, immanent-Trinitarian standing. That would force Tertullian to abdicate his commitment to the Spirit Christology of the apostolic tradition, a commitment which Evans elsewhere recognizes over and again. Nonetheless here he has written:
It was the apologist’s purpose to persuade his audience that Christians are not atheists. He might be supposed to have done so when he had declared in categorical terms their belief in one God, the creator of the universe. Christians are monotheists: that there is no god but one is a fundamental fact which admits of no compromise; for that faith they suffer persecution. If he could have left the matter there, he would have been saved a complicated explanation. But he could not leave it: Christ is too important to be left out, and it is Christianity, not mere monotheism, that he is defending. So he has to explain who Christ is and why he is worshipful, in such terms as not to compromise the essential fact of the divine unity. And the terms are ready to his hand: they are the common property of the Christian apologists and theologians, to be traced back through Irenaeus, Theophilus, Athenagoras, Justin, to the Gospel of John, and so well established in Christian thought as to have found their way even into gnostic travesties of the Gospel.
Like his predecessors, he begins at the beginning. There is no question of beginning with Jesus of Nazareth and working upwards to the divine Word: not in this way is it possible to account for the worshipfulness of Jesus while safeguarding the divine unity. His substance must be explained first, or the quality of his nativity will not be understood. The word, the reason, the power, by which God created the world, which indeed is the artificer of the world, is itself a substance, which we designate spirit―for God is spirit―who manifests himself in speech, reason and power. That Greek philosophers used the term λόγος to describe the creative principle, may save our doctrine from appearing strange to the heathen, though that does not exhaust its content. For the Logos of whom we speak is spirit, which implies objective reality and moreover personality, and the word, reason and power displayed at the creation are activities of his but are not he.
Who is he? He is the one brought forth from God, and by that bringing forth was begotten; and because of the unity of substance, because he is what God is, he is called God. He is called God, not as a mere appelative: deus dictum, spoken of as God in those Scriptures of ours which treat facts as facts, and treat only facts as facts.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 61-62.
We have noted Tertullian’s explicit affirmation of the Spirit Christology which Evans considers to have been effectively universal until well into the fourth century; the “spirit which came down upon a certain virgin, and was made flesh in her womb” is a conflation of Lk. 1:35 and Jn. 1:14; the subject of both is the primordial Christ:
Him therefore whom they supposed to be a man for his humility, they must needs regard as a magician for his power, seeing that he with a word cast out devils from men . . . making it evident that he was the Word of God, the Logos, that primordial first-begotten Word with power and reason for its escort and spirit for its basis, the same Logos who with a word both was making and had made all things.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 60, translating Apologeticus 21
The words of the annunciation to Mary, quoted by Tertullian in the form Spiritus dei superveniet in te, are taken to mean that God the Word came upon the blessed virgin and was the agent of his own Incarnation. Since God is spirit (John 4:24), Spirit in the Scriptures can, he thinks, be a term of substance, denoting in any Scriptural text, all or any of the three distinct divine Persons. In this particular case a comparison with John 1. 14 is thought to require the identification of spiritus dei with the Word who was made Flesh. (emphasis added).
Ibid., 63.
It evident that the “agent of his own incarnation,” i.e., “the Word made flesh,” must pre-exist his Incarnation. Tertullian, as Evans notes, held to the apostolic tradition recited in Lk. 1:35, which affirms the pre-existent subject of the Incarnation to be the primordial Jesus the Lord and not, as is too often supposed, the eternally preexisting, “Trinity-immanent Son,” the second Person of the Trinity. Evans has been careful to note Tertullian’s commitment to the apostolic tradition: two pages later, he observes that:
The identification of spiritus dei with the Word who was incarnate, was regarded by Tertullian as part of the received tradition. It can be referred to in controversy with the Jews:
Adv. Jud. 13: cum virgo Maria verbo dei praegnans inveniretur;
And it finds a place in the regulae veritatis:
Adv. Praxean. 2 : hunc (sc.sermonem) missum a patre in virginem et ex eo natum.
It is in fact found in a large number of writers, both before and after Tertullian, and until the fourth century was the accepted view. . . .
Ibid., 65
The “Spiritus dei” of whom Luke in 1:35 writes “Spiritus dei superveniet in te” and by whom the apostolic or ”received tradition” understands the virgin to have become pregnant, and consequently teaches to be the agent of his own Incarnation, obviously pre-exists his Incarnation primordially and therefore humanly. It is he, the primordial Jesus Christ, whom in Phil. 2:5-13 Paul identifies as the subject of the kenōsis, that entry of the primordial Jesus into our fallenness that John will designate his becoming flesh.
These latter passages manifest Tertullian’s adherence to the Spirit Christology of the Apostolic Fathers and of Justin, who took for granted what Paul taught in Phil 2:7, i.e., that it is the preexistent Jesus the Lord, the Christ, who “is the agent of his own Incarnation,” and whose pre-existence is in consequence primordially integral from the instant of his Mission from the Father, by which he is “the Beginning” (Col. 1:18). The primordial Christ, the Sermo, the Beginning, is also the End, the achievement of his redemptive exercise of headship over the fallen creation, complete in his offering to the Father the One Sacrifice, the death by which he conquered death, to rise again and recover that glory which was his before the “world” began, viz., his primordial integrity, the Spiritus dei that was his before his Incarnation, and now is his again by his victory over death. Jesus’ historical Mission began with the Incarnation; it will end with his coming to judge the living and the dead. The point is not developed here but it is important to recognize that Jesus’ Lordship of history is precisely his Eucharistic immanence within it, which transcends the fragmentation of fallen space and time, bestowing upon it the free unity of the One Flesh instituted by the One Sacrifice on the Altar and the Cross.
Tertullian concludes by identifying the Word with the divine substance, a postulate which, taken literally, has Monarchian implications which Evans ignores.[135] Well he may, for Tertullian ignores them also; his view of the “substantial” unity of the Trinity renders it indivisible, but is no bar to the objectivity of the Persons who constitute it. He has already finessed this difficulty by accepting the liturgical distinctions between the divine Names, the unchanging order in which they are Named, and their substantial unity in the Trinity, the mystery of the economy, which he sums up as: “una substantia, in tribus cohaerentibus.” The latter phrase refers of course to the Names, later to be designated Persons, but without understanding “person” as a category for, as Persons, they retain the liturgical ordering of their Names. The substantial Trinity is “in tribus cohaerentibus,” and the “tribus” are liturgically Named, not predicamentally numbered; they are not fungible, not interchangeable members of a species, as Basil of Caesarea was later tempted to suppose. Tertullian evidently fumbles with an explanation of how the Three are in fact three: he speaks of three “forms,” but not clearly.[136]
Tertullian’s evocation of a divine Trinitas is more than a translation of the Trias proposed by Theophilus of Antioch ca. 180, and which Athenagoras joined to the intrinsic order (τάξις; taxis) of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that is their unity, their Trias. Theophilus was insightful in recognizeing that the Church’s worship was not of a monad, but that the three Names are One God, hence a Trias. Tertullian saw beyond him that the Father, the source of the Son and the Holy Spirit, is so as himself a member of the Trinity. This insight, which is also Justin’s, is forced by the Church’s liturgy: e.g., the doxology. Tertullian also saw that this divine order of equal and indissociable members could only be free, and must have an immanent-Trinitarian source or beginning (Archē) of that freedom: it could not be extrinsic, for the liturgy did not permit the Son to be less divine than the Father, or the Holy Spirit less divine than the Son. Yet further, any Trinitarian inequality could only be a subordinationism, a fragmenting of the One God.
How then to understand the Father as the Archē? Clearly the Father, as the source of the divinity of the Son and the Spirit, and thus of the Trinity, must be himself without a beginning in order to be the origin of the Trinity. At the same time, he must be within the Trinity: otherwise there would be no Trinity. Tertullian doubtless learned this from Justin’s paradoxical posing an Absolute as the Father of the Son, of Jesus the Lord. Justin was not an explicit Trinitarian, although his Dialogue with Trypho refers several times to the Holy Spirit. His Christology in any event exhibits a degree of cosmological rationality: Justin understands God as God to be absolute, omniscient, omnipotent, and immobile, incapable of immanence in what is not God, incapable then of historicity. Apart from an incongruous identification of the Father with the Absolute in Adversus Praxean 5, Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology relied upon the apostolic tradition, rather than upon the philosophical tradition. While agreeing with Justin in naming the Father “tota substantia,” he did not understand him to be the divine substance as Justin did. Tertullian understood: the Father to be a member of the Trinity, its source, its Head., a most profound insight into the mystery of the Trinity, which he never tried to explain or justify.
Evans understands Jesus to pre-exist only as the eternal Son; this flatly contradicts Tertullian’s Spirit Christology, for which Jesus is the primordially pre-existent subject of the Incarnation and therefore of the kenōsis. This is simply the apostolic Christology, which knows the Father’s Mission of the Son to be historical, the Mission of Jesus the Lord; the historicity of his Mission is the defined doctrine of the great Councils, i.e., Nicaea, I Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon.
In his edition of Tertullian’s De Carne Christi, Evans devotes a long paragraph to the subject of that work, the “flesh” (caro) of Christ. He contrasts Tertullian’s use of “body” (soma, corpus) with “flesh” (sarx, caro) as carrying or permitting the connotation of dead as opposed to living, of inanimate as opposed to animate, while ”flesh” refers to what is alive or potentially alive: it designates the material of which the animate body consists and, in the case of living bodies “involves” the soul, however that term be understood. He concludes:
The subject of the present treatise (De Carne Christi) is not the Body of Christ in either the natural or the mystical or the sacramental sense of that phrase, but his Flesh: that is, the substance, nature, attributes and origin of the whole of that human nature which the divine Word assumed at the Incarnation. The question under discussion is one of substance, even of material: not of body as the organized vehicle and instrument of human life, but of the verity of the human nature of Christ as involved in the statement that his flesh is truly flesh and his soul is truly soul, both the one and the other derived by natural descent from the progenitors of all mankind. (emphasis added)
Evans, On the Incarnation, at 82 (emphasis added)
This analysis requires qualification. Its first sentence identifies the ‘Flesh’ of Christ with his humanity, which Evans describes abstractly as “the whole of that human nature which the divine Word assumed at the Incarnation.” Insofar as Evans here intends this paragraph to be statement of the Christology of Tertullian’s De Carne Christi, it is clearly in error, for it imputes to Tertullian’s Sermo Evan’s nonhistorical reading of the logos sarx egeneto, whereby the Incarnation must also be nonhistorical, no longer the Event of the Incarnation-kenōsis, but rather the ‘assumption’ by the nonhistorical Logos of a nonhistorical “human nature” remote from the deprecatory historical significance of “Flesh” as fallenness.
For Tertullian, the flesh of Jesus the Christ, i.e., of the primordial Sermo who “became flesh,” is his fallen human Person. In the moment of the Incarnation, the integral Person, at once divine and human, the primordial Sermo, entered into our fallenness, into our submission to death, and into our fear of death. Named by the angel of the Annunciation, conceived by the Virgin, Jesus became flesh, the agent of his own Incarnation, as we have seen Evans elsewhere recognize.[137] This Event, the Incarnation, is the foundation of Tertullian’s Spirit Christology, and the defined doctrine of the Church. The second sentence of the paragraph excerpted supra insists that
the question under discussion” is the verity of the human nature of Christ as involved in the statement that his flesh is truly flesh and his soul is truly soul, both the one and the other derived by natural descent from the progenitors of all mankind.”
Ibid.
This emphasis upon the historicity of the flesh of Christ shifts the subject from the abstract ‘human nature” earlier affirmed to have been assumed by the Word. It is sustainable only in recognizing that the concrete, historical humanity of Christ can only be Personal. There is no impersonal humanity in history. As concrete, Jesus’ humanity, derived by descent from Adam and Eve, truly flesh and soul, cannot but be Personal, for the derivation is by the Virgin’s conception of him, thus it is that “Jesus” is the human Name of her human Son. Tertullian insists upon the Personal historicity in Jesus the Christ of the flesh-soul distinction which he sets out in Adversus Praxean 2 and again in De Carne Christi, as earlier in the Apologeticus, 21, 17-20. Flesh and soul, while remaining distinct, are unified in the fallen Personal humanity which, by his Incarnation, Jesus derived from our fallen progenitors. Tertullian takes for granted that the creation accounts in Gen. 1 and Gen. 2 entail a single human substance, embracing all mankind as descendents of the first Adam and first Eve.[138]
Evans accepts this historical derivation of Jesus’ “human nature.” His reference to the “substantial unity“ of Jesus’ humanity is rather due to his need to assert its concreteness without admitting that it is Personal. Rather, he uses “substance” in the sense of Tertullian’s Christological formula, “duae substantiae, una persona,” to stress the objectivity of the full humanity and the full divinity of Christ. He presents Tertullian as holding that all human beings possess their human credentials, their “flesh,” by reason of their descent from Adam and Eve. Their flesh is their personal subsistence in the one substance of fallen historical humanity.
However, Evans’ recourse to “substance” to denote Jesus’ humanity takes him half-way to Praxeas’ monarchial use of “substance” to avoid “the use of “Person.”[139] Evans of course affirms the Personal divinity of Jesus, but only as abstracted from his Personal humanity, which makes it difficult to distinguish the Personal divinity of the immanent Son from impersonal substantial divinity of Monarchianism, for they are the same abstraction from the historical Revelation, Jesus the Lord, whose Personal humanity is his Personal historicity. Abstraction from his historicity is abstraction from his Person and from his Personal revelation of the Trinity. God then becomes the cosmological Monas, equivalently Justin’s Unnameable Absolute, and Praxeas’ divine substance. In this abstraction from the Trinity in which the Son is supposedly immanent, the ‘immanent Son’ becomes indistinguishable from the divine substance, for in denying his Personal humanity, we deny the economy in which the Revelation of his Person and his Mission is given.
Evans’ personal Christology, in supposing the Incarnation to be the eternal Word’s assumption of an impersonal abstract human substance, cannot associate the abstract “flesh,” the dehistoricized ”human nature” thus “assumed,” with the historical fallenness and mortality connoted by “flesh” in the Old Covenant usage as well as by John and Paul in the New Covenant. In the Letter to the Romans, Paul describes our fallen existence in terms of the dialectical tension between our personal fallen solidarity with the flesh (sarx, caro) of the fallen Adam; and our personal redeemed risen solidarity with the risen second Adam (pneuma, spiritus), with his victory over death by his institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, on the Altar as on the Cross.
Tertullian’s Spirit Christology is not a theology in the sense of the speculative product of a fides quaerens intellectum; it is the appropriation by an extraordinary intelligence of the Church’s faith in the risen Lord. This is the sitz im leben of Tertullian’s doctrine of the “Flesh” of Christ. Its personal expression is always flawed, always incomplete, but au fond Jesus’ “flesh” is his Personal immanence in our fallen history, as his “Spirit” is his Personal transcendence of that history by his sacrificial institution of the New Covenant, his union in One Flesh with the second Eve. His One Sacrifice establishes his Eucharistic Lordship of history as its Alpha and the Omega. By his Eucharistic immanence in our history, the risen Jesus is the Light of the World, the Mysterium fidei who illumines our darkness until he comes again.
It is worth remarking that, contra Evans, the Flesh of Christ, the subject of Tertullian’s treatise and so of Evan’s commentary, is in fact sacramental: e.g., “The bread I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh” (Jn, 6:51) and “for my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (Jn, 6:55). Tertullian’s debate with Gnostic heretics who denied the historical concreteness of the Incarnation led him to equate “caro” with “corpus” in those controversies, in which the anti-docetic thrust of his argument presupposes the unity of soul and body in the Personal “flesh” of Christ.
The permanent liturgical proclamation of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord underlying the Eucharistic anamnesis could not rest short of the Chalcedonian proclamation of double homoousion, divine and human, that is inseparable from Lordship of Jesus because integral to it. Notwithstanding this sacramental memorial of his life, death and resurrection, there persists, under Gnostic auspices long outworn, a sub-theological resistance to the historical Lordship of Jesus the Christ.
Evans’ description of Tertullian’s theology is characterized by its pervasive ambiguity. Evans knows that it is Jesus the Lord, the Sermo, whose “worshipfulness” he assumes the Apologeticus intends to justify, while yet supposing Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine to be concerned solely with Jesus’ Personal divinity, not with his Personal humanity. In Tertullian’s “duae substantiae, una persona” Christology it is clear that both his human and divine substances are indispensable to Jesus’ Personal unity. However, Evans reads the Apologeticus as focused upon Jesus’ Personal divinity, which focus he considers indispensable to Tertullian’s project of showing Jesus be shown to be “worthy of worship.” Rather, the Apologeticus is intent upon establish that Jesus the Christ in fact is worshipped, and is known so to be by its readers, for its protest is addressed to the Roman officers charged with enforcing the official criminalization of that worship.
The historical a priori of Tertullian’s Apologeticus 21 is the apostolic tradition that Jesus is the Christ (Phil. 2;11; Col. 1:19). This in fact is where Tertullian begins the exposition of his Christology, some of which Evans has translated in Against Praxeas, 59-60. There he has made it entirely clear that Tertullian well knew that we have no knowledge of the Trinity apart from its historical revelation in Christ, the Sermo whom the Father has sent to give the Spirit.[140]. Tertullian means by Sermo what Origen, twenty years later, will understand by “Henōsis” (Ἕνωσις), i.e., the primordial Jesus Christ. But Evans takes for granted that in Apologeticus 21 Tertullian understand Jesus’ Person to be divine. His argument to this effect is instructive:
Homo deo mixtus, an expression repeated elsewhere (De Carne Christi 15), is afterwards rejected as unsatisfactory (Adv. Prax. 27). Also the phrase caro spiritu instructa (which does not seem to recur and may be considered to have been tacitly rejected), whether it means ”flesh accoutered with spirit” or “flesh constructed by spirit”, might have been thought to make the humanity of Christ the centre of his personality, except that the whole tenor of the passage is against this view, as also is thQTe phrase which shortly follows, ostendens se esse verbum dei, id est λόγον. In this sentence the genders are carefully managed, the transition from verbum dei illud primordiale primogenitum to eundem qui verbo omnia et faceret et fecisset indicating once more that the recognition of the personality of the Word of God is essential to the understanding of who Christ is.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 62-63.
Evans here displays the presuppositions of his Thomistic Christology, viz., (1) that the Personal subject of the Mission of the Son, and thus of the Incarnation, is the eternal Logos, sensu negante, and (2) that consequently it is necessary to choose between Christological alternatives which exhaust the possibilities: either a Nestorian denial of the Personal divinity of Jesus, or the Apollinarian denial of his Personal humanity. Both postulates reject the doctrine of Chalcedon, affirmed at the beginning of the Symbol and seven times repeated, that Jesus is one and the same Son. This is the apostolic tradition, upon which Tertullian’s Christology is founded, and which Irenaeus will summarize in Naming Jesus the one and the same Son, of the Father and the Virgin. Tertullian also asserts Mary’s motherhood of the Son.[141]
Were Tertullian’s discussion of the Trinity in the Apologeticus as abstracted from its historical revelation as Evans would read it, viz., as the dissociation of the Son from his historical Personal unity, the one Son of the Father and of Mary, and the consequent bestowal upon him of the non-historical, abstract, cosmological unity of the “immanent Son,” he would have denied in the Apologeticus what he vigorously defended in the De Carne Christi and the De Resurrectione Christi. Further, Evans maintains that Tertullian never departed from the Christology of the Apologeticus which, ut supra, identifies the dei filius with the Sermo whom Tertullian, in the Apologeticus, identifies with Jesus the Christ, not with an “immanent Logos.” The passage in Apologeticus 21, 17 on the Logos is followed by 18-20, which clearly identify the Logos, i.e., the Sermo, with the historical Jesus the Christ.
Only Tertullian’s forthright affirmations of the Spirit Christology in his Apologeticus and De Carne Christi can provide the hermeneutic for the last of his Christological treatises, the Adversus Praxean. What is said there of the Son, of the Sermo, is said of Jesus Christ, the subject of the Father’s Mission of the Son who, in obedience to his Mission, emptied himself of the Personal integrity proper to his primordial pre-existence to become enfleshed, incarnate, subject to death, as the head of the human universe which is created in him through his Gift of the Holy Spirit, for which he was sent by the Father. The Personal humanity of the subject of the Mission of the Son, and so the Personal primordiality of the subject of the Incarnation, i.e., of the kenōsis, is the subject of the New Testament because it is the subject of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, inter alia, of the anamnesis which, while time lasts, celebrates the historicity of the Son of God. The dei filius of Evans’ Christology cannot be the subject of the Mission of the Son, for it is not an event: neiher the Incarnation nor the kenōsis, of the primordial Sermo.
Tertullian’s Christological treatises, loyally edited by Evans, are a constant, continual affirmation of the communication of idioms in the Sermo, the primordial Christ whose obedience to the Father’s Mission is the longed-for renewal of the universe described by Paul in Rom. 8. There can be no doubt that Tertullian understood Jesus Christ to be the subject of the Incarnation, and in fact to be its agent, as had Justin.
The Scriptural “facts” to which Evans alludes are historical, deriving their free significance from the primordial Event of the Incarnation of the primordial Sermo who is made Flesh. Tertullian knows no other Sermo than this, for the Names, Christ, the Lord, the Son, the Word (Sermo), are titles of the historical Jesus, given him at his Incarnation by the Angel, and by the apostles during their reception of his revelation of himself and of his Mission, and inseparable from the apostolic tradition.
Evans’ refused Tertullian’s primitive Spirit Christology in favor of a Logos-sarx Christology of the Thomist Logos-sarx pattern, wherein the subject of the Incarnation is understood to be the Son sensu negante; his pre-existence is not primordial, but eternal, not human but divine, not the “one and the same Son” of the Father and of the Virgin Mary, but of the Father only. It follows that his Incarnation must be understood abstractly, i.e., as his becoming human, not his becoming flesh, not his entry into the degradation of the good creation brought about by the Original Sin of Adam and Eve.
Evans’ view of the Incarnation is therefore not Tertullian’s, whose Sermo is fully human and fully divine (duae substantiae, una persona). Neither is it that of the apostolic tradition, which knows nothing of an eternal Word sensu negante.
While Evans has no intention of imputing his Christology to Tertullian; he does suppose it to be the subject of Tertullian’s presentation of his Trinitarian doctrine in the Apologeticus. This would require that Tertullian reject the Spirit Christology which Evans shows Tertullian to have been committed, but which he considers Eusebius of Caesarea to have rendered obsolete. This Logos-sarx persuasion does in fact affect Evans’ interpretation of Tertullian’s Christology. As for Evans’ proposition that Eusebius of Caesarea’s criticism of Marcellus rendered obsolete the apostolic Spirit Christology, the dogmatic definition of that Christology by the Councils of Nicaea, I Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon may be thought more significant than Eusebius’ rejection of the authority of Nicaea in favor of the imperial theology.
Before proceeding with the exposition of Tertullian’s Christology and Trinitarian theology, it is necessary to address a problem raised in the Adversus Praxean 27. The Adversus Praxean is from beginning to end Tertullian’s confrontation with Praxeas, a Monarchian heretic, whom Tertullian intends to drive from the field. Nothing is known of Praxeas beyond what is provided in Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean.
In the first Chapter of the Adversus Praxean Tertullian condemns Praxeas whose Monarchianism Tertullian knows to be false to the apostolic tradition, and therefore a failed Christianity. He accuses Praxeas of having imported his Monarchian heresy from Asia into Rome. If its logic is pushed, Monarchianism is a unitarian denial of the Trinity, a reduction of the One God to a divine substance, a Monad. A generation later, in Libya, its logic would be pushed by Sabellius to that point, which grounded Paul of Samosata’s denial of the divinity of Jesus. Although Tertullian labels it a heresy, Praxeas’ Monarchianism is probably less heretical than archaic. In the same first Chapter of the Adversus Praxean, Tertullian proceeds further to condemn Praxeas as an anti-Montanist, in that he prevented the publication of a Roman approval of Montanism which Tertullian believed already to be in hand.
At this time, ca. 212, Tertullian has passed out of his semi-Montanist phase, and was committed to the Montanist cause, as is apparent in the first Chapter of the Adversum Praxean. Tertullian’s Montanism will finally separate him from the Church after Callistus began to grant absolution to Christians guilty of what Tertullian, like Hippolytus, considers to be unforgiveable sins; this he cannot accept. There is no reason to suppose his dissent to have been doctrinal, although with the development of ecclesiological doctrine it would come to be doctrinal. At any rate, throughout the first twenty-six chapters of his Adversus Praxean Tertullian attacks Praxeas in terms of an entirely orthodox Christology and Trinitarian doctrine which, in Evans’ informed opinion, he never ceased to hold.[142]
In this work Tertullian is intent upon refuting the unitarian or anti-Trinitarian dimension of the modalism to which Praxeas, as a Monarchian, is committed. From first to last, he focuses upon Praxeas’ss Trinitarian heresy, viz., upon his denial of the Personal distinction between the Father and the Son and the Spirit, and his attack is personal from the outset. In this the polemical style of the Adversus Praxean contrasts sharply with the tone of the De Resurrectione, whose argument Tertullian presented almost with the dispassion of a lecturer rather than with the personal animus characterizing the Adversus Praxean.
Tertullian’s attack upon Praxeas is based upon the apostolic tradition, which is to say, upon the Spirit Christology and the objective distinction between the Persons of the Trinity, both of which assign ”substantia” a meaning incompatible with Monarchianism. He uses the novel term, Persona, to designate the union of the divine and the human substances in the Christ, and also to designate the concretely distinct Names in the Trinity. The Monarchian Praxeas does not admit the possibility of a higher metaphysical unity than substantia and consequently denies the intelligibility of Persona in Christology. He regards the notion of concretely distinct Names in the divine substantia as incompatible with its absolute unity, and conesquently denies the intelligibility of the Trinitarian use of Persona. In sum, he denies a metaphysical union of substances in Christ or anywhere else, and regards the assertion of a Trinity of concretely distinct divine Names, i.e., Persons, in the One God as a lapse into tritheism.
Tertullian knows it is useless to contend with Praxeas de haut en bas. If he is to refute Praxeas' Monarchianism, he must accept its premises, and demonstrate their absurdity, their undermining that remnant of Christianity to which Praxeas, a Christian of sorts after all, does in fact adhere: he believes in the Incarnation, in sense that substantial humanity and substantial divinity are factually if irrationally joined in Jesus.
It is in this context that Tertullian undertakes to confute Praxeas. In the following excerpt from Adversus Praxean 27 he refers to the Annunciation narrative in Lk. 1:35:
Behold they say, “it was announced by the angel, Therefore that which shall be born of thee shall be called holy, the Son of God 9: And yet the statement was made concerning the Spirit of God. For certainly it was of the Holy Spirit that the virgin conceived, and what she conceived she brought to birth. Therefore that must have been born which was conceived and was to be brought to birth, that is, the Spirit, whose name also shall be called Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us. 1 But flesh is not God, that it should be said, It shall be called holy, the Son of God; but he who as God was born in it, of whom also the psalm <speaks>::Because God as man was born in her and hath builded her by the will of the Father. 2 Who, being God, was born in her? The Word, and the Spirit who with the Word was born by the Father’s will. Therefore the Word is in flesh;
9 Luke 1. 35. Evans’ translation supplies a definite article “the Holy Spirit” that a current edition (28th; 2012) of Nestle-Aland of the Greek New Testament does not support. Evans has shown elsewhere that Tertullian identified “Spiritus superveniet in te” with the Sermo. The definite article is proper to the Holy Spirit (τὸ πνεῦμα ἅγιον, as in the final phrase of the Nicene Creed), while the reference to “holy Spirit” in the Annunciation Narrative in Lk. 1:35 has only πνεῦμα ἅγιον, without the article.
1 Matt. 1. 23. The RSV reads; “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emman ́́́́u-el.
2 Ps. 87. 5. The RSV reads: “And of Zion it shall be said, “This one and that one were born in her”; for the Most High himself will establish her.”
Evans, Against Praxeas, 172-73.
Were Tertullian writing here within the context of his own Spirit Christology rather than that of Praxeas’ Monarchianism, he would have made the crucial error of denying that the “flesh” is God, i.e., of denying that the Word became flesh, and thereby is flesh. However this is radically to misread him, for his attack on Praxeas forces him to using Praxeas’ terms, for Praxeas does not accept Tertullian’s. If he is to convince Praxeas of his error, he must do so within Praxeas’ universe of discourse, and so cannot refer to the Personal unity which Jn. 1:14 presupposes and which, while basic to Tertullian’s Christology, is anathema to Praxeas’ Monarchianism.
Instead, Tertullian’s condemnation of Monarchianism is limited to and exploits the Monarchian identification of the divinity of Christ with his divine substance, which the Monarchian unitarianism must identify with the substance of the Father and, given the unity of the divine substance, with the Spirit as well. This leads to consequences embarrassing to Praxeas, were he to remain loyal to the Monarchian unitarianism, which Tertullian’s attack upon this heresy demands that he shall. Loyalty to Monarchianism requires interpreting the Annunciation Narrative, Lk. 1:35, to mean that Mary conceived and bore Jesus’ divinity, his Spirit, for it is by the Spirit that she conceived, and what she conceived she bore. The Spirit, as Mt. 1:23 informs us, is “Emmanuel,” God with us” Jesus’ substantial divinity.
Unable to appeal to the unity of the two substances in the Person of Jesus, it follows that Tertullian cannot describe the substantial flesh of Jesus as holy, for only the divine substance, “spiritus,” is holy. Although “he who was God was born in it,” according to Psalm 87, 5, which Tertullian here reads, as a Monarchian would read it, to refer to the divine substance, which alone is Spirit, i.e., God, even though Named Emmanuel, for Tertullian must also read “God with us,” i.e., Emmanuel, as a Monarchian would, as designating the divine substance. Tertullian must understand, with Praxeas, the Naming of Jesus as “Emmanuel”, i.e.,“God with us” in Mt. 1:23, to be the Evangelist’s teaching that it is the divine substance, Spirit, who is “God with us.” Together with a tendentious reading of Ps. 87, 5, these scriptural citations serve to introduce the conjunction of the Christ’s substantial “flesh” with his substantial “Spirit,” the divine substance which Mary conceived and bore, giving him her own flesh, which justifies the final “Therefore the Word is in flesh;.”
This clause introduces the famous ‘either-or’ of the manner of the Incarnation of the Sermo, the Logos of Jn. 1:24. Either the Incarnation is the event of the transfiguratio of the Logos, whereby the Logos, the spiritus dei, is intrinsically changed, or it is his being “clothed with flesh:” indutus carne. It must be noted here that the Monarchian posture of Tertullian’s refutation of Praxeas’ Monarchianism requires that it be the divine substance, the Spiritus, of Jesus, not his primordial Person whose Incarnation is here in view, and further, that the “flesh,” caro, with which he will be clothed is also dehistoricized, to become his human substance, not his entry into Personal fallenness and mortality:
igitur sermo in carne; dum ut de hoc quaerendum, quomodo sermo caro sit factus, utrumne quasi transfiguratus in carne an undutus carne. immo indutus, ceterum deum immutabilem et informabilem credi necesse est, ut aeternum. Transfiguratio autem interemptio est pristini: omne enim quodcunque transfiguratur in aliud desinit esse quod fuerat et incipiat esse quod non erat. deus enim neque desinit esse neque aliud potest esse. (emphasis added)
Evans, Against Praxeas, 124 ; Adversus Praxeas 27, 11-16.
As he has earlier noted, Evans here translates Tertullian’s Sermo as Word:
Therefore the Word is in flesh; while we must also enquire about this, how the Word was made flesh, whether as transformed into flesh or as having clothed himself with flesh. Certainly as having clothed himself. God however must necessarily be immutable and untransformable, because absolute and eternal. But change of form is a destruction of what was there first: for everything that is transformed into something else ceases to be what it was and begins to be what it was not.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 173.
Evans had earlier announced (Ibid., 137, n. 10), that “From now onwards we translate Sermo, which we have hitherto represented by “discourse”, by its usual English equivalent, “the Word.”
As translation, this is unexceptionable, but “Word” is unlikely to evoke in the mind of the reader the meaning Sermo has in the Spirit Christology proper to Tertullian, viz., the primordial Jesus the Lord, sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit. Rather, it will be read in the context of the pervasive Thomism, viz., as the eternal Word who, emphatically, is not the “one and the same Son” of the Father and of Mary. However, within the context of the dispute with Praxeas carried on in Chapters 27 through 31 of the Adversus Praxean, the dehistoricization of the Sermo conforms to Tertullian’s adoption of the Monarchian unitarianism in order to refute it from within.
Tertullian, with the intention of refuting Praxeas’ Monarchianism, has adopted its limitations pro tem, specifically the denial of Jesus’ Personal unity, and the consequent dehistoricization of the Sermo, which is to say, the dehistoricization of the subject of the Incarnation, Jesus the Christ. Limited by this polemic strategy, Tertullian can no longer identify the Sermo with the primordial Jesus the Lord. “Sermo” now designates the impersonal divine substance, i.e., spiritus dei. The subject of the Incarnation is now the impersonal divine substance, the substantial Sermo that is the Monarchian Jesus. The Incarnation of the Logos, as understood by Praxeas, is here accepted by Tertullian: viz., that the Word, Jesus, the divine substance, becomes flesh. The quandary confronting to Praxeas is presented as though his own. The Monarchian premiss offers the two possible options. Either the divine substance, as identified with the Logos of Jn. 1:14, is transfiguratus in carnem (changed into flesh), which is clearly impossible to the divine substance, or, accepting the Incarnation as nonetheless factual, the Incarnation of the Logos must be the clothing of the Logos with flesh. By the Incarnation, the logos is “indutus carne,” “clothed with flesh.”
Tertullian uses this “clothing” idiom, “indutus carne” (“carnem”) or its variants only in polemical contexts, i.e, those wherein, one way or another, he is defending the Church’s faith in the Incarnation and the Resurrection of the Sermo against objections posed by a variety of opponents.
The source of the clothing idiom is probably Stoic, but in any case a determinist cosmology, in which the unqualified unity of being―substantia, ousia , hypostasis, or hypokeimenon─is a rational necessity, well expressed in the Aristotelian-Thomist understanding of substance as ‘indivisum in se, divisum ab omni alio’ (undivided in itself, divided from all else). This postulate bars all communication of substances, and renders unintelligible the free, historical unity of persona and trinitas.[143] In this determinist context, “indutus carne” denotes an a priori inexplicable and therefore nominal unity of substances, for example, that of the mutuality of the substantial soul and the substantial body to form a man, inasmuch as the Monarchian calculus excludes “person” a priori.
Tertullian uses indutus carne in the Adversus Praxean to affirm the yet more inexplicable union of the divine and human substances in the Monarchian version of the Incarnation, arguing that, inasmuch as within the Monarchian cosmology, a union of two substances would destroy each of them, one can speak to Praxeas of their concrete union only nominally, i.e., descriptively. The description requires a general term capable of broad application to any concrete combination of substances. Given the cosmological impossibility of all intrinsic substantial change, i.e., the transfiguretion of the substance in question, the sole remaining possibility is the assertion of an extrinsic change, a description of the cosmologically superior substance as “clothed” by the inferior substance: hence, indutus carne, whose meaning is intentionally extrinsic, i.e., metaphorical.
Earlier, in the De Carne Christi, in controversy with Valentinian Gnostics, with Marcian, and a dualist philosopher, Hermogenes, Tertullian used variants of indutus carne to designate in a manner comprehensible to them the cosmologically impossible yet concretely actual Event-mystery of the Incarnation of the primordial Sermo. However, in Adversus Praxean 27, having assumed the Monarchian modalism, and thus the modalists’ reduction of the Sermo to the impersonal divine substance, spiritus dei, he could pursue his case against Praxeas’ Monarchianism only by reference to the Incarnation of the now impersonal Sermo as indutus carne, -“clothed with flesh,” rather than transfiguratus in carnem, (changed into flesh). Read at the letter, Tertullian’s reference to the Incarnation of the Sermo as indutus carne denies the apostolic doctrine of Jn. 1:14 that the primordial Word (Sermo) became flesh (“and the Word became flesh”) rather than was clothed with flesh. To read it at the letter is to attribute to Tertullian a Christological heresy, which is on its face absurd.[144]
For it must be kept continually in view that the Adversus Praxean is a polemic document, a vigorous and sustained attack upon Praxeas’ Monarchian rejection of the Trinity, and thus upon his consequent reduction of the divine unity to a single absolute and therefore impersonal substance, a Monad traveling as the divine Monarchy, the one God. Tertullian’s attack on the Monarchian modalism by adopting its unitarianism in order to manifest its incoherence requires that Sermo no longer be a title of Jesus the Lord, but rather a designation of his divine substance. Apart from that acutely polemic context, i.e., in the Apologeticus, the De Carne Christi and the De Resurretione, Sermo designates the primordial Jesus, the subject of the Incarnation, and generally in the first twenty six chapters of Adversus Praxean, Sermo is a title of the promordial Jesus the Lord.
Chapters 27-31 of the Adversus Pr Adv. Jud. 13: cum virgo Maria verbo dei praegnans inveniretur;n
axean present the crux of Tertullian’s anti-Monarchian polemic. In these chapters, Tertullian develops the strategic Christological riposte to the Monarchian Trinitarian heresy which has converted the primordial Sermo of the Spirit Christology to the static impersonality of the divine substance, the spiritus dei. Thereby “Logos sarx egeneto” is understood to be said of the divine substance, not the primordial Jesus the Christ Thus it is that, in his contest with Praxeas, Tertullian permits the divine substance to “became flesh,” and then develops the consequence of that concession, the need for an impersonal, nonhistorical, paradigm of the cosmologized Monarchian reading of the Incarnation, one which, accepting the limits imposed by that cosmological flight from salvation history, might state how “becoming flesh” may, in a cosmologically acceptable manner, be attributed to the divine substance that Praxeas assumes to be Jesus.
Once achieved, the trap is set; Praxeas’ desire to affirm the Incarnation and the economy of salvation worked by the Christ of the Gospels will defeat his Monarchian unitarianism, for within it, the divine and the human substances in Jesus are distinct, mutually irreducible and, as substances, incapable of change without ceasing to be what they are. On the other hand, given the fact of the Incarnation, that Jesus is made flesh, both substances must have changed. The impersonal, nonhistorical human substance, “flesh, becomes factually related to the nonhistorical divine substance, the spiritus dei, the Sermo. At the same time, reciprocally, the divine substance, the spiritus dei, Jesus, is factually related to the human substance that is his “flesh.” We have seen the pivotal text:
igitur sermo in carne: dum et de hoc quaerendum, quomodo sermo caro sit factus, utrumne quasi transfiguratus in carne and indutus carnem. immo indutus.
Therefore the Word is in flesh; while we must enquire about this, how the Word was made flesh, whether as transformed into flesh or as having clothed himself with flesh. Certainly as having clothed himself.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 124; 173.
Thus, Tertullian will affect the Monarchian Christology, the depersonalization of the Sermo, impersonally understood by Monarchianism to be the divine substance, in such wise that he may now ask whether the “becoming flesh” attributed to the Sermo should be regarded as a “transfiguratio” or as an “indutus carne,” and answers, “immo indutus carnem.” He reasons, in accord with the limitation imposed by his hypothetical assumption of Praxeas’ Monarchianism, that inasmuch as “transfiguratio” entails a substantial change that is impossible to God, that Praxeas must accept the alternative; i.e., the Sermo, (in the impersonal sense of the divine substance) could have “become flesh” only as “indutus carne,” i.e., as having ‘clothed himself’ with flesh.
Continuing his strategic rejection of the unity of the two substances in the Person of Christ, and his consequent reliance rather upon the impersonal substantia divina and substantia humana to found his Christology, Tertullian now proceeds further to develop the implications of the Monarchian division of the Christ between his human substantia and his divine substantia, the former understood as that which in Jesus acts humanly, and the latter, as that which in Jesus manifests his divinity: e.g., it is Jesus’ humanity that dies, his divinity that redeems. Thus, arguing as though a Monarchian, he finds pseudo-Scriptural warrant for Praxeas’ Monarchianism:
Thus also the apostle teaches of both his substances: Who was made, he says, of the seed of David─here he will be man, and the Son of Man: Who was defined as Son of God according to the Spirit2─here he will be God, and the Word (Sermo) the Son of God: we observe a double quality, not confused but combined, Jesus in one Person God and man. I postpone the <consideration of Christ.>
2/ Rom. 1. 3, 4.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 174.
This is a confused and confusing statement. Its assertion that “the apostle teaches of both his substances (utraque eius substantiae)” presupposes their union in the Person who is Jesus, an inference later confirmed by “we observe a double quality, not confused but combined, Jesus in one Person God and Man.” However, this assertion of the Personal unity of Jesus is prefaced by the assertion of a literal “two Sons” doctrine, in which each distinct substance is considered not only a distinct agent, but also as a distinct ‘Son,” viz., the human “Son of Man,” the divine “Son of God. Specifically, the Word (Sermo), is regarded as the “Son of God,” and the human substance, flesh, “made of the seed of David” is the “Son of Man.” This eliminates the “one and the same Son,” of the Spirit Christology, which nonetheless is affirmed in the next sentence, which identifies the “combination” of human and divine substances with the “Jesus in one Person God and man.”. The final sentence of the excerpt, supra, postpones the consideration of “Christ,” and implicitly accepts the Monarchian distinction between the human substance, “Christ” and the divine Son, “Jesus.” This distinction will be pursued in the next Chapter, to the disadvantage of Praxeas, but it would be inconvenient to do so here. As it is, we are left in a quandary. On the one hand, Jesus is described as “a double quality, not confused but combined;” on the other, he is Named and thus is the Jesus of the Spirit Christology “in one Person God and man,” the “one and the same Son, fully divine, fully human.” The reference to his Person as “combined,” may appear problematic, no combination can provide the radical simplicity that is Jesus’ Person, yet Tertullian is explicit: “we observe a double quality, not confused but combined, Jesus in one Person God and man.” Tertullian’s theology of ‘person,” is not analytic; a person is so simply as recognized, as named. In the case of the Person who is Jesus, Tertullian is intent upon the coincidence in him of the fullness of divinity and of humanity: this affirmed, the manner of that coincidence escapes all scrutiny, but it is implicit in his attack upon Praxeas:
And in him (in illo) did there remain unimpaired the proper being of each substance, that in him the Spirit carried out its own acts, that is powers and works and signs, while the flesh accomplished its own passions, hungering in company with the devil3, thirsting in company of the Samaritan women4, weeping for Lazarus5, sore troubled unto death6 and at length it also died (emphasis added).
3 Matt. 4.2.
4 John 4.7.
5 John 11. 35.
6 Matt. 26. 38
And finally Tertullian concludes to that composite Monarchian Christology, in which it can be said of the divine substance, i.e., of God as Spirit, that by his union with a human substance, he is “clothed with flesh;” indutus carnem, for it admits of no explanation:.
But because both substances each in its own quality, therefore to them accrued both their own activities and their own destinies. Learn therefore with Nicodemus that what is born in the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.7 Spirit does not become flesh nor flesh spirit: Evidently they can <both> be in one <person>. Of these Jesus is composed, of flesh as Man and of Spirit as God: and on that occasion the angel, in respect of that part in which he was spirit pronounced him the Son of God, reserving for the flesh the designation Son of Man. Thus also the Apostle, in calling him even the mediator of God and man,8 confirms <the fact that that he is> of both substances. Lastly, you who interpret “Son of God” as the flesh, show me who the Son of Man” may be. Or is he to be the Spirit? But you wish the Spirit to be taken to be the Father himself, since God is Spirit: as though, just as the Word is God, God’s Spirit might not also be God’s Word (emphasis added).
7 John 3.6.
8 I Tim. 2. 5.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 174-75.
Evans’ editorial interpolations in this excerpt, viz., “Evidently they can <both> be in one <person>,” and “confirms <the fact that that he is> of both substances,” accord with Tertullian’s use of “composition” to account for the Personal unity of Jesus: “Of these Jesus is composed, of flesh as Man and of Spirit as God.” Tertuillian’s understanding of “person” is phenomenological; “Person” in Christ is the corollary of his “Name,” Jesus, and “Person” is also the corollary of each of the Trinitarian Names: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He does not provide an analysis of this correlation: it is obvious that Persons are Named, and that the Names are Personal; they are not categories, as Person is not.
Tertullian accepts the Spirit Christology’s recognition of the unity in Jesus of substantial humanity and substantial divinity as the foundational mystery of the faith, the subject and postulate of all theological inquiry. While he early learned to avoid as inappropriate the use of “mixture” to describe the unity of these substances in Jesus the Christ, he used it again of him in the De Carne Christi without noticeable embarrassment.
Tertullian’s acceptance of the composite and therefore impersonal Monarchian Christology, which recognizes no concrete unity transcending that of substance, is a device for refuting Praxeas’ adherence to it, is feigned; it is not a personal conversion to it. This is confirmed by the distinct agencies which Tertullian’s text assigns to each substance, and by the corresponding reading of the message of the “angel” of the Annunciation, whom Tertullian, in the assumed role of Monarchian, does not allow to have been the Naming of Jesus, but is said instead to have “in respect of that part in which he is spirit, pronounced him the Son of God, reserving for the flesh the designation of Son of man.” Tertullian is careful of his language here; the strict association of Jesus’ “Name” with his “Person” proper to his Spirit Christology is sedulously respected in this Monarchian text; its pronouns (‘he,’ ‘him’) can refer only to the Person who is Jesus. His Name and the pronominal references to it are Personal, as are the pronouns supplied by Evans’ editing.
We encounter the same recognition of the Personal unity of Christ in the “composed” in the underlined clause, i.e., “Of these Jesus is composed”, supra. is Evans’ translation of Tertullian’s “constitit.” The composition in view is of two substances, the union in Jesus of the substantial divinity of Christ, i.e., Spirit, with the substantial humanity of Christ, i.e., flesh. Given that these are distinct substances, there is no possibility of an actual numerical unity of Spirit and “flesh,” for that would reduce them to a third entity, and destroy both: thus Tertullian’s “neque caro spiritus fit, neque spiritus caro. In uno plane esse possunt” asserts the immutability of both substances, and the “evident” fact of their union, “in uno” to which Evans properly adds “person.” Absent the mix of substances which Tertullian has foresworn, this numerical unity can only be Personal. In order to confirm that the Christ is in both substances, Tertullian relies upon Paul’s statement that the one man, Christ Jesus, is the mediator between God and man, .which “confirms <the fact that that he is> of both substances; again Evans’ editorial insertion is to the point; the subject “of both substances” can only be the “he” who is Jesus.
The final two sentences of the excerpt supra conclude Ch. 27 and introduce the return to Spirit Christology in Chapter 28, in which Tertullian’s enemy is as always, Praxeas, not only here in Adversus Praxean 27, but throughout the whole of that work. We now move on to Chapter 28, and Tertullian’s postponed explanation of “Christ.” We are again concerned with the Monarchian unitarianism, its refusal of concrete distinctions between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
28. And so you make Christ into the Father, you great fool, because you do not even examine the very force of this name, if indeed “Christ” is a name and not a title: for it signifies “anointed.” Yet “anointed” is no more a name than “clothed” or “shod”, but is something attributive to a name,. If as the result of some quibbling Jesus were also called “clothed” as he is called Christ from the sacrament of anointing, would you, as you do here, call Jesus the Son of God but believe “clothed” to be the Father? Now, concerning Christ, If the Father is Christ, the Father is anointed, and by someone else at that: or if by ;himself, prove it. But that is not the teaching of the Acts of the Apostles in that cry of the Church to God, For in this city have all assembled together, Herod and Pilate with the gentiles, against thy holy Son whom thou hast anointed.1 Thus they testified that Jesus is the Son of God and that he was anointed by the Father. Consequently Jesus will be the same as Christ who was anointed by the Father, not the same as the Father who anointed the Son.
1 Acts, 4. 27
Evans, Against Praxeas, 175.
Tertullian’s argument is still with the Monarchist Praxeas, the “great fool,” but in Chapter 28 he is relies upon Praxeas’ evident acceptance of the attribution of Christ, i.e., “Anointed,” to Jesus. Tertullian proceeds to insist that “Christ,” is thus proper to the Son as to demand that Personal distinction of the Son from the Father which the Monarchian Praxeas refuses to allow. Tertullian invokes the apostolic tradition concerning Jesus whom, in the preceding Chapter 27 he has affirmed to be “Jesus in one Person, God and Man,” as the indispensable preliminary to the consideration of “Christ,” for Jesus is the subject of the Father’s anointing and thus is ineluctably the Christ. Tertullian vindicated the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ simply to force Praxeas to face the impossibility of identifying the Anointed Son with the Father who anointed him. Tertullian’s loyalty to the Spirit Christology of the apostolic tradition grounds his indictment of Praxeas’ Monarchianism, whose error is rather Trinitarian than Christological, but whose weakness is its failure to link the Jesus of the economy of salvation to his primordial mission from the Father to give the Holy Spirit, as Tertullian demonstrates here in Chapter 28 as elsewhere in the last five chapters of the Adversus Praxean.
In Chapter 29 Tertullian returns to theme of Chapter 27. He begins by pivoting upon his condemnation, throughout Chapter 28, of the Monarchian identification of the Son and the Father. In the first sentence of Chapter 29, he agrees that this identification is blasphemous, but in a Monarchian context, in which the divine Names refers to the divine substance of the Father and the Son. Tertullian has previously identified the divine substance with the Person of the Father as begetting the Son, who by that begetting is shown to be distinct from the Father, but of the same substance, hence divine. Thus he is unable to accept the death of Jesus, the divine substance, reserving it to his human substance, which he also personifies as the Christ, the subject of the Father’s anointing, whom he has just finished identifying with Jesus, who is thereby the Christ.
In this, he manifests another affinity with Origen’s Christology: both insist upon the full humanity and the full divinity of Jesus the Lord, and both understand the communication of idioms in Jesus as a communication of Names, thus of Persons.[145] Both should then accept the death of Christ as the death of God, but neither entirely avoided the cosmological postulate that what is divine, as a matter of definition, cannot die.
Thus quasi-persuaded, and accepting as heretofore the Monarchian concentration upon the divine and human substances of Christ to the detriment of his Personal unity, Tertullian indicts the Monarchian willingness to agree with him that the divinity of the Son did not die, but only his humanity, as nonetheless blasphemous, for the Monarchian identification of the Son with the Father is Patripassionist, resulting in the crucifixion of the Father, and the application to him of the Deuteronomic curse upon the crucified: .
29. Let this blasphemy be silent, be silent. Let it be enough to say that Christ the Son of God died, and this <only> because it is so written. For the apostle, stating without risk that Christ died, adds According to the scriptures,7 so as by the authority of the scriptures to soften the hardness of the statement8 and avert offence to the hearer. And yet, since in Christ Jesus there are two substances, a divine and a human, and it is admitted that the divine is immortal, as that which is human is mortal, it is evident in what respect he says that he died, namely in that he is flesh and man and Son of Man, not in that he is spirit and Word and Son of God. By saying then that Christ–that is, the Anointed–died, he makes it clear that that which was anointed died, that is, the flesh. “So,” you say, “we also, by the same reasoning as you, say that the Son <died>, do not blaspheme against the Lord God; for we say that he died not in respect of his divine but of his human substance.” Yet you do blaspheme, not only because you say the Father died, but also <because you say he was> crucified. For by converting Christ into the Father you blaspheme against the Father with that curse1 upon one crucified which by law accrues to the Son, because it was the Christ, not the Father, who was made a curse for us.2 Whereas we, when w say that Christ was crucified, curse him not, but relate the curse of the Law, because neither did the Apostle blaspheme when he said this.
7 I Cor. 15, 3.
8 Jn. 6, 60.
1 Deut. 21.23.
2 Gal. 3. 23
Evans, Against Praxeas, 176-77.
Praxeas is equally clear that divinity cannot die, and that therefore the Son died in his human substance, not in his divine substance, and seeks by this agreement to avoid the charge of blasphemy, but Tertullian will not permit this, for Praxeas, in refusing a concrete distinction between the Father and the Son, must conclude to Patripassionism; if the Father is not distinct from the Son, he must have suffered on the Cross, which requires that the Father be the Christ. In arguing thus, Tertullian reasserts the theme of Chapter 28, his identification of the Jesus, God and Man, with the Christ, which his earlier attribution of suffering and death to Jesus’ human substance might appear to have .denied. Thus in Chapter 29, he argues that precisely because the divine substance is immortal, to ascribe the Passion to the Father, who is not enfleshed, is to invoke upon him the Deuteronomic curse upon whoever is hanged upon a “tree,” which curse the New Testament applies to the crucifixion. It must follow that Patripassionism blasphemes the Father.
Chapter 30 continues the assault upon the Monarchian doctrine:
30. Otherwise, if you will persist further, I shall be able to give you a harder answer and to put you in conflict with the statement of the Lord himself, so as to say, why do you ask questions about that <answer>? You have him crying aloud at his passion, My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?1 Consequently either the Son was suffering, forsaken by the Father, and the Father did not suffer, seeing he had forsaken the Son: or else, if it was the Father who was suffering, to what God was he crying aloud? But this utterance of flesh and soul (that is, of manhood [hominis]), not of the Word and Spirit (that is, not of God) was sent forth for the express purpose of showing the impassibility of God, who thus forsook the Son when he delivered his manhood [hominem eius] to death. This was in the apostle’s mind when he wrote, If the Father spared not the Son.2 This also Isaiah an earlier <authority> stated: And the Lord delivered him for our iniquities. He forsook in that he did not spare, he forsook in that he delivered. Yet the Father did not forsake the Son, since the Son placed his own Spirit in the Father’s hands.4 He placed it <there> in short, and straightway died; for while the Spirit remains in the flesh the flesh cannot die at all. Thus, to be forsaken by the Father was to the Son death.
1 Matt. 27. 46.
2 Rom. 8. 42
3 Is. 53. 6.
4 Lk. 23. 46.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 178.
After having carefully established the Spirit’s immunity to suffering and death, in such wise that to suffer and to die is proper to the substantial and consequently personal “manhood” of the Son, but not to his substantial Spirit, Tertullian continues his stress upon the distinction of the Son from the Father, and from the Father’s gift to him of the Holy Spirit, while careful to avoid mention of the Trinity, which Praxeas does not accept: He recites what Praxeas does accept, the Christian mystery, the Ascension of the Son, who did so as clearly human, to be seated at the right hand of the Father, thus distinct from the Father, and from the Holy Spirit, the Gift whom the Father gave him to pour out upon creation. It is the Son as at once God and man whose enemies will be put under his feet; who will come again above the clouds of heaven as he also ascended. It could not be more clear that Tertullian is here appealing to Praxeas the Christian who as Christian, must disavow his Monarchian heresy to admit the economic distinction of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It is difficult to understand the Montanist emphases of the final clauses; the first Chapter of Adversus Praxean blames Praxeas as the anti-Montanist who damaged the Montanist prospects in Rome under Pope Zephyrinus. This reminder of an ancient animus would not have pleased Praxeas, but that animus drives much of Tertullian’s attack on Praxeas:
The Son therefore both dies and is raised up again by the Father according to the scriptures.5 The Son ascended into the higher parts of heaven, as he did also descend into the inner parts of the eaerth.6. This is he who sitteth at the right hand of the Father,7, not the Father at his right hand. This is he whom Stephen sees, when he is being stoned, still standing at the right hand of God,8 as thenceforth to sit, until the Father do put all his enemies under his feet.1 This is he who is also to come again above the clouds of heaven in like fashion as he also ascended.2 This is he who poured the gift which he has received from the Father, the Holy Spirit, the third name of the deity and the third sequence of the majesty, the preacher of the one monarchy and also the interpreter of the economy for those who admit the words of the new prophecy and the leader of all truth3 which is in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, according to the Christian mystery (emphasis added).
5 I Cor. 15. 3.
6 Eph. 4. 9.
7 Mark 16. 19.
8 Acts 7. 55.
1 Ps. 110. 1.
2 Acts 1. 11: Lk 21. 27.
3 Jn. 16. 13.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 178-79.
In order to be understood by the Monarchian Praxean, Tertullian must speak of the “deity,” i.e., the Monarchist divine Substance, instead of the Trinity but, in thus addressing, he has not himself ceased to identify the divine substance with the Trinity. Thus he goes on to the “deity” of which the Holy Spirit is “the third Name” who, in Tertullian’s Spirit Christology, is the third Person of the Trinity, but whom Praxeas would identify with the divine substance, the Monarchian “spiritus dei,” the “deity.” Intending to prove to Praxeas the concrete distinction between the divine Names and, as also himself a Montanist and thus particularly intent upon the distinct divinity of the Holy Spirit, Tertullian now asserts of the Names ---whom Praxeas recognizes, for; as a Christian, he is accustomed to their liturgical recitation---a “sequence (gradus) of majesty” of which the Holy Spirit is the third. This “sequence” Praxeas must recognize to be liturgically underwritten. Tertullian proceeds to develop the implication of this gradus: a concrete distinction between the Names which bars their identification. The Holy Spirit is the “preacher of the one monarchy,” and also “the preacher of the economy,” for those (who accept the “new prophecy” (i.e., the Montanists). Thus the Holy Spirit” is the leader of all truth, a truth which is “in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, according to the “Christian mystery.”
For Tertullian, as for Hippolytus, “economy” designates the mystery of the Trinity, equivalently “the Christian mystery” which the Monarchians as Christians respect, but which they deny to be a Trinity. Given that the “third name of the “deity” is “Holy Spirit,” it must follow that the first “name” of the “deity,” and of “the sequence of the majesty,” is “Father,” and the second “name,” that of Son. For Tertullian. “name” and “person” are correlatives, but now he ignores that correlation, affirming three divine “Names,” but avoiding any mention of “person,” the novel term which Praxeas distrusts, and not he alone: the contemporary bishops of Rome, the Popes Zephyrinus and Callistus, resist it as well.
Tertullian is insistent against Praxeas upon their distinction and their gradus, the word he had earlier used (in Adv. Prax. 2) to emphasize that the equality of the members of the Trinity is compatible with their distinction. Tertullian cannot of course rest his argument against Praxeas on the Trinity, it being the Trinity to which Praxean objects. He regards Tertullian’s assertion of three divine “Persons” as a tritheistic affirmation of three distinct divine substances and thus as a denial of the one God, the Monarchy. Yet, despite his stress on the Holy Spirit’s preaching of “the one monarchy,” i.e., the “deity” to which he does not refer as the Trinity, Tertullian also has the Holy Spirit “interpreting“ the economy for those (Montanists) “who admit the words of the new prophecy.” For the third century theology, “economy” designates the mystery of the Trinity; Tertullian’s use of it is integral with his attack upon Praxeas the Monarchist who, if familiar with the term, would reject it, and if unfamiliar, would only be puzzled. He would not have been puzzled by Tertullian’s insertion of Montanism into the discussion; here he would have been on firmer ground. Here perhaps we find Tertullian carried away by his own rhetoric, as Msgr. Knox has thought
Although the Father, Son, and Spirit constitute a “sequence of majesty,” it is a sequence of Names which each designate the unique divine substance, the spiritus, the “deity” by coincidence with which each “name” designates the same divine substance, The Father’s deliverance of the Son is a deliverance to his death, whereby the Son is freed from his flesh by returning his “spirit,” his divinity, to the Father. In that moment of death, free of the flesh, he ascends to the Father; this does not mean that he is no longer corporeal; here “flesh” retain its historical meaning, fallenness and mortality; it is from this degradation that the Son has been delivered by his Ascension to the Father in his primordial integrity..
Chapter 31, Tertullian’s final assault upon Praxeas’s Monarchianism, is grounded in the apostolic tradition. Evans’ translation is here presented in full:
31. Moreover this matter is of the Jewish faith, so to believe in one God as to refuse to count in with him the Son, and after the Son the Spirit. For what <difference> will there be between us and them except that disagreement? What need is there of the Gospel, what is the confidence of the New Testament which establishes the Law and the Prophets until John,4 unless thereafter Father, Son and Spirit, believed in as three, constitute one God? It was God’s will to make a new covenant for the very purpose that in a new way his unity might be believed in through the Son and the Spirit, so that God who had aforetime been preached through the Son and the Spirit without being understood might now be known in his own proper names and persons. Therefore let them beware , those antichrists who deny the Father and the Son5: for they do deny the Father while they identify him with the Son, and they deny the Son while they identify him with the Father, granting them things they are not and taking away things they are. But he who shall confess that Christ is the Son of God—not the Father—God abideth in him and he in God.6 We believe the testimony by which he has testified concerning his Son: He that hath not the Son hath not life.7 But he has not the Son who believes him to be other than the Son (emphasis added).
4 Matt. 11. 13
5 1 Jn. 2, 22.
6 1 Jn. 4. 15.
7 1 Jn. 5. 9, 12.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 179.
The radical novelty of their historical faith and consequently of its historical impact required of the second and third century theologians that each invent a “new hermeneutic,” a coherent language capable of expressing a coherent free inquiry into the mystery revealed in Christ. The invention of a hermeneutic is a matter of assigning new meanings to words long in use, borrowed from their cultural usage, by using them in the novel context of affirming the freedom of the truth of a historical revelation, a revelatory Event, which can only be received as Personal, as the mystery and the gift of Truth. This Christian hermeneutic is always a refusal of the cosmological wisdom of the Greek mythical and philosophical tradition which, having denied the intelligibility of history, is unable to accommodate the freedom of the Truth revealed in Christ. From the age of the Apostles, this was an oral hermeneutic; forged by the Apostles the needs of their encounter with the Christ, whom they began to understand to be the Lord by meeting him and hearing him speak of himself as the object of the promises and prophecies of the Old Covenant, assigning them a new significance by reason of their fulfillment in himself. This message was heard be men who were themselves Jews; they could accept it only as the fulfillment of their own fidelity to the God of Abraham, of Jacob, of Isaac, of Moses. Their following of Christ is foundational for the Christian hermeneutic, whose first task was to explain the fulfillment of the Old Covenant prophecies in Jesus the Lord.
The hermeneutical task of third-century theologians was simplified by their common commitment to the Spirit Christology of the Apostles, whose hallmark is the primordial pre-existence of Jesus Christ, the subject and the agent of his own Incarnation, first emphasized by Justin. There is always a temptation to place what is heard in its former context, that of the cosmological speculation of the pagan world, whose hallmark is a continuing quest for the necessary causes of the cosmos, the inhabited world. Tertullian’s theological vocabulary offers a few clear instances of this borrowing; e.g., substantia. This term possesses a very broad meaning in the Latin world, but it acquires new meanings in Tertullian’s theology, where it is used to designate what is one in God and two in the Christ. Persona has usages in the pagan world whose origin is difficult to assess, and whose meaning yet more so. Tertullian could hardly been ignorant of them, but they do not interest him. He uses persona in its ancient liturgical sense, that of “name.” To know a person is to know his name. The identity of “name” and “person,” inescapable in daily experience, has critical significance in Christology where Persona and substantia designate respectively what is one and what is two in Christ and, in Trinitarian theology, what is three and what is one in God.
Tertullian reaffirmed in Adversus Praxean 2, the divinity, humanity and Personal unity of Jesus Christ as set out in the Apologeticus 2.[146] His concern was to defend the Christian tradition, and so was an affirmation of the faith of the Church rather than a speculative search for a deeper understanding of its mystery. His refusal to submit the Christian faith to philosophy,[147] like his vehement defense of the full humanity, full divinity, and Personal unity of the Sermo, rests upon the apostolic tradition; he has no interest in theological method. Famously the first to propose the substantia–persona paradigm in theology, he does so to underwrite the apostolic tradition, not to explain it. Thus it is that, in the Apologeticus 21 and again in the Adversus Praxean 2, he identifies the Trinity as the single and indivisible absolute Divine Substance, comprising and constituted by three divine Persons, each of whom possesses Personally the fullness of that divine substantia. Irreducibly distinct from each other but in a strict and unchangeable relation to each other, they constitute the substantial tri-unity of God, the Trinitas. This is the doctrinal tradition challenged by Praxeas. Tertullian draws out the implications of that tradition in his polemic against those who dispute it, but he does not attempt a speculative quaerens intellectum in the manner of Origen.
This hardly deprives his work of theological significance. The first four ecumenical Councils, like those after them, are similarly unconcerned for theology, and thereby affirm the challenged elements of the apostolic tradition, which alone can ground the freedom of theological inquiry. Tertullian’s terminology is not technical. When Evans concludes that by substantia Tertullian intends a concrete individual thing, that term was a lexical commonplace long before Aristotle and the Stoics rationalized it. Thus, when Tertullian using Persona to designate what is one in the Sermo, he means “his very self,” i.e., that which is named, that which is spontaneously recognized as incapable of categorization[148] Evans further points out that Tertullian’s use of Persona to denote what is three in the Trinity suggested its equivalent, πρόσωπον, to Greek theology, having prompted this Greek rendition by Hippolytus, although evidently too late to inform Origen’s Peri Archon.
Daniélou notes that both Braun and Moingt arrived at the same conclusion.[149] Evans’ assessment of Tertullian’s terminology has been supplemented by those of Moingt and Braun, which Daniélou has summarized.[150]
Daniélou’s summary of the highlights of this vocabulary begins with substantia, He repeats Réné Braun’s rejection of Evans’ supposed association of substantia with Aristotle’s “first substance) (πρωτή οὐσία), based upon Evan’s sic dicta “purely philosophical” use of substantia to impose an Aristotelianism upon Tertullian, which is hardly the case. Evans understands Tertullian to use substantia to mean a concrete existing thing, which is merely the ordinary historical use of the word. Tertullian does not attempt to develop its metaphysical import, although his realistic, i.e., historical, use of substantia to denote concrete unity, whether in Christology or in his Trinitarian theology, has unavoidably metaphysical connotations. However these are expressed in the major qualifications developed by Tertullian and unique to him: status, census, and gradus. Evans is well aware that none of these are the abstract categories of Aristotelianism. All of them apply historically whether to substantia or to persona.
Evans refers to Aristotle’s πρωτή οὐσία as conveying the metaphysical significance of Tertullian’s substantia, viz., the immanent unity and indivisibility of a concrete object or thing (indivisum in se, divisum ab omni alio). He recognizes the categorical implication of the Aristotelian πρωτή οὐσία. i.e., the predication of substance (δεύτερα οὐσία), but he does not thus understand Tertullian’s term: persona to be immune to categorization, for persons can only be named, and persona is not a name.. Again, this is only the ordinary meaning of the word. Tertullian uses substantia in Christology to designate the concrete humanity and the concrete divinity that unite in the mystery of the Person of Jesus the Christ. In Trinitarian theology, he uses substantia to designate the absolute immaterial unity of the Trinitas. In this he simply affirms the apostolic tradition which, oral before it was written, Evans is unlikely to have read as Aristotelian. Tertullian’s interests are not speculative, and substantia is little developed in his theology, except insofar as its use forces the development of an ancillary vocabulary of historical attributes of substantia and persona. In recognizing Tertullian’s use of substantia to denote a concrete thing, Evan’s accepts, with Braun, the ordinary historical meaning of the word. Tertullian’s Christological use of it, Una Persona, duae substantiae, invokes the Christian tradition. In that historical context, substantia denotes the concrete unity and, in that sense, the metaphysical reality, the fullness of concrete humanity and of concrete divinity, in the Persona of Christ. This use of duae substantiae anticipates by twenty years Origen’s union of duo hypostaseis, i.e., the human hypostasis of Jesus and the divine hypostasis of the Son, in the Henōsis who, from the Beginning, i.e., from the primordial Mission of the Son, is the primordial Jesus the Christ. Origen was unaware of the Greek translation of Tertullian’s “Persona “as “Πρόσωπον” and, in its absence, used “Ἓν” or “Ἓνωσις” to denote the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ. Had he been acqainted with Tertullian’s use of Persona, as rendered by Πρόσωπον, to designate what is one in Jesus the Christ, much misunderstanding would have been avoided. No one has thought diophysism inherent in Tertullian’s duae substantiae, una Persona Christology, nor would it have been thought inherent in Origen’s Christology, had he spoken of the unity of the duo hypostaseis as the mia Prosōpon who is the primordial Jesus Christ, rather than as the Henōsis of the Name of Jesus and the Name of the Son in the Name of Jesus the Christ.
Daniélou notes that for Tertullian, what is substantia is also corpus, in the sense of objective and real. He applies corporeality to whatever is concretely actual, whether to flesh, body, soul, persons whether human or divine, and finally to the Trinity. In his controversies with Gnostics, Tertullian sometimes uses corpus in the sense of flesh, intending to affirm in Christ what the Gnostics deny, “a certain continuum of soul and body,”
Daniélou proceeds next to Tertullian’s use of census, the reference of every substantia that has a beginning to the source of its beginning. Census has no application to God the Father, who has no beginning. For instance, the natural (i.e., fallen) man has his origin in Adam, until given a new origin (recenseatur) in Christ, the new Adam. Tertullian applies census to Churches, whose authenticity and authority depends upon their uninterrupted apostolic origin. He applies it to the two substances of Christ; the human substance has its origin in the Virgin, and thus ultimately in Adam; the divine substance of course has its origin in God; he uses it also with respect to the genealogies of the Old and the New Testaments. He used census only once with reference to the Trinity, to describe its origin as the ‘unfolding’ of the Trinity from its source in the Father: see endnotes 148 and 421, infra. Finally, Tertullian uses census of the origin of evil in “the limitations of created freedom,” as in the fall of Lucifer.
The next term explained is status, which designates the relation of a substance to other substances, the objective fact of the relation, not as imposed ab extra but as intrinsic to each of them, inherent in its intrinsic intelligibility as substance. “Each nature is something stable, and imposes a law on judgment, to judge it as it is.” The use of this term to describe a factually stable situation is original with Tertullian. It has a very broad range of application, for it underlies the stable intelligibility of the Trinity and the world. Its Trinitarian application is of particular importance. The status of God the Father is unique: as uncreated, eternal, without beginning or end, he alone has no census, no origin. Immanent within the Trinity, i.e., the Principium of the Trinity, he possesses the fullness of divinity, but does so as ingenerate. He is the source of the Trinity in that the Son is begotten by him and the Holy Spirit proceeds from him through the Son. This divine status, the possession of the fullness of divinity, is proper to each Person of the Trinity; each possesses it uniquely (the Father as ingenerate, the Son as begotten, the Holy Spirit as poured out) in such wise that they differ not in their status, in their divinity, but in their gradus, in the order of relation that is their Trinitarian unity.
The last term Daniélou examines is gradus. Tertullian’s Trinitarian use of gradus is equivalent to Greek apologists’ earlier use of τάξις to designate the order of procession of the Persons within the Trinity. Unfortunately, Tertullian’s use of “ordo” is insufficiently precise for that purpose. Daniélou notes that Moingt’s index requires five pages to cover the range of meanings in Tertullian’s use of “ordo.”.
The coining of τρíας by Theophilus of Antioch to designate the unity of the divine substance recognized that the interrelation of the Father, Son and Spirit was not a subordination. In the first place, he understood the τρíας to be immaterial, incapable of division; rather, it bespoke the liturgically established unity of Father, Son and Spirit, revealed by Jesus the Lord and affirmed in every liturgical celebration.
Athenagoras of Athens was the first to use τάξις to describe their interrelation, (A Plea for Christians, X), as Tertullian was the first to use gradus. Both have been charged with subordinationism, but subordination within the Trinity is an evident contradiction in terms, for it assumes the material division of the indivisible divinity. The Trinitarian use of gradus to distinguish between the Father, Son and Spirit is most succinct in Adversus Praxean II, 4: “They are three, not by status, but by gradus.”
Other uses of gradus by Tertullian abound. Daniélou insists that gradus “always points to a progressive series” and that in more precise applications, it indicates an “organic bond between the various data of the series.” (op. cit., 356). It can refer to stages in spiritual progress, to progressive levels of sanctity. Tertullian uses it to describe the progressive revelation from the Old Testament to the New, and the progressive revelation of the Father through the Son and the Spirit, whose liturgical reception is the inverse of the revelation of the Father, who is known only through the Holy Spirit given by the Son.
However, while Moingt and Braun have supplemented Evans’ survey, they offer no theologically significant corrective of it. Particularly, Evans’ recognition of Tertullian’s strict association of “name” with “person” remains of the first importance to the understanding of his Christology and, manifestly, of his Trinitarian theology, to which the substantia–persona paradigm is crucial.
Nonetheless, following Moingt, Daniélou does not consider “persona” to form part of Tertullian’s Trinitarian vocabulary, noting that Moingt does not include that word in his index of the foundational elements, the “special categories,” framing Tertullian’s systematic exposition of the Trinity. He has also excluded “census” outright; see endnote 421 infra. Daniélou recognizes with Moingt that Tertullian is the first to use persona in Trinitarian theology, which leaves unexplained its absence from Moingt’s index. Daniélou also agrees with Evans that Tertullian thus made the concept of ‘person’ available, as prosōpon, to the Hellenistic tradition. However, he is less than clear on Tertullian’s use of persona, remarking that “It certainly does not coincide with what later theologians mean by the term persona” (at 364). In fact, Evans has made it clear that Tertullian identifies “person” with the subject of naming. This is the commonplace phenomenological and historical use of the term. While it does not correspond to Justin’s notion of the Naming of the Son as his relativization by his Absolute source, neither is there any reason that it should; Tertullian’s view of the Trinitarian economy places the unbegotten Source of the Trinity within the Trinity. Daniélou thinks Moingt to have minimized the significance of persona in Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology because he believes the term to be linked to the manifestation of the Son and Holy Spirit via the economy of salvation rather than, more pertinently, to what he has named the “inner structure of the divine reality:” here Moingt invokes a reminiscence of the apophaticism of Gregory of Nyssa and, currently, of John Zizioulas. the Metropolitan of Pergamo. Moingt argues that the real data concerning the internal structure of the Trinity in Tertullian’s writings must be sought in his use of such terms as substantia or forma rather than in his employment of words like persona or οἰκονομία.[151]. Moingt’s association of the “real data concerning the internal structure of the Trinity” with abstraction from the economy deprives the “data,” thus abstracted, of all historical application. They are then without theological significance. We know of the Trinity only by its economic revelation, from which no theology of the Trinity can prescind without depriving itself of an object. The Catholic faith knows nothing of the Trinity in dissociation from the economy of salvation: viz., in dissociation from its revelation in Christ our Lord.[152].
When the Trinity is dealt with in abstraction from its revelation by Christ, which is to say, from the economy of salvation, it becomes immediately plastic, open to whatever reading may support an arbitrary ex parte interest. Inevitably, having foregone as irrelevant the Church’s liturgical-doctrinal tradition of that revelation, the alternative is its nonhistorical rationalization, inevitably its accommodation to the translator’s personal persuasion, which cannot be considered theological in the Catholic sense of fides quaerens intellectum. In a famous passage, Adversus Praxean 2, Tertullian employs such terms to give precision to his account of the reality of the Trinitarian Persons.
…they (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are all of the one, namely by unity of substance, while none the less is guarded the mystery of that economy which disposes the unity into a trinity, setting forth Father, Son and Spirit as three, however not in quality but in sequence, not in substance but in aspect, not in power but in (its) manifestation, yet of one substance and one quality and one power, seeing it is one God from whom these sequences and aspects and manifestations are reckoned out in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 132.
However, at p. 50. Evans had observed that the meaning of this passage is hardly clear: ”A new examination of the terms seems necessary.” Inasmuch as no one has improved upon them in the past sixty years, the necessity for their reexamination is perhaps overdrawn. But Daniélou is even less impressed by Tertullian’s exposition of the Trinity:
Tertullian does not manage to get beyond the combination of a modalism with regard to the distinctions of the individual persons and a subordinationism with regard to their existential plurality.
Daniélou, Latin Christianity, at 364.
Here Daniélou ignores Tertullian’s separation of the concrete Trinitarian Names within the indivisible unity of the divine substance, the Trinitas, and the application of Persona to those Names in Adversus Praxean 2, which is to say, he supposes Tertullian’s Trinitarian analysis, una substantia, tres personae, to have been annulled by his Stoicism. In fact, Tertullian’s early identification of substantia with trinitas excludes the alleged subordinationism. The Christology and Trinitarian theology of Tertullian’s masterwork, the Apologeticus, are the subject of the De Carne Christi and the De Resurrectione Carnis, which in the De Prescriptione Haereticorum he identifies with the apostolic tradition. Tertullian’s foundational identifycation of the divine substantia as Trinitas and his use of tres Personae to designate the Names who constitute the Trinitas are a permanent contribution to the doctrinal tradition. The Greek equivalent of Tertullian’s Trinitas, ὁ τρíας, had been used in a substantive sense by Theophilus of Antioch more than thirty years earlier. In this connection, Evans introduces his discussion of Tertullian’s theological terminology with the observation that, while the expression “tres personae” does not appear in any of Tertullian’s works, it is clearly implicit in them, and Evans proceeds to develop that implication..[153]
Further; Tertullian’s Persona-substantiae distinction is not an attempt to solve the problem of the One and the Many in God. Rather, it is a succinct summary of the Trinitarian faith, liturgically explicit in Mt. 28:19, in terms which do not compromise its historicity or its freedom. Tertullian’ Christological and Trinitarian doctrine saved the Western Church from the futile cosmological attempts to provide for the antecedent possibility of the Incarnation which confused the Eastern Church until these concerns were summarily dismissed at the Council of Chalcedon. Tertullian’s Christology was written into the Symbol of Chalcedon precisely as supportive of the Personal unity of Jesus as “the one and the same Son.”
Notably, Tertullian’s Apologeticus armed the Western Church against the modalism and adoptionism revived by Paul of Samosata fifty years later, whose memory troubled the Greek Church thereafter as though putting in issue the legitimacy of the Nicene use of “homoousios” to affirm the full divinity of Jesus the Christ. It is in this doctrinal sense, proclamatory rather than explanatory, that Tertullian’s “persona-substantia” paradigm is as indispensable to his Trinitarian doctrine as it is to his Christology. Certainly the conservative third century Western tradition saw in his Trinitarian formula neither modalism nor subordinationism, but rather an emphasis on the distinction between the Trinitarian Persons which in their eyes threatened the divine unity. Only the liturgical celebration of the Trinitarian Names sustains the faith in the concrete divinity and the irreducibility of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whose designation as “Persons” Tertullian, and the primitive Church, took for granted. The liturgical celebration of their distinct Names in the unity of their Personal gradus (ordo, τάξις) requires that the divine substance be the Trinitas.
The charge of subordinationism, whether latent or patent, in Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine is refuted by his subsequent denial of any division in the divine substance. Such subordinationism is often attributed to the third century theologians, to Tertullian and to Hippolytus as well as to Origen. It was rejected ca. 180, with Theophilus of Antioch’s definition of the divine substance as a τρíας, a Trinity, to be adapted over the next twenty years by Tertullian and Hippolytus, and then given a theological ratio by Origen. It is not possible to be at once a Trinitarian and a subordinationist. The foundation of the Trinitarian and Christological doctrine of Tertullian and of Hippolytus, and of Origen in his Peri Archon, is the Spirit Christology which as Evans has noted, (Adversus Praxean, 69), was practically universal until the latter fourth century. It is presupposed by the affirmation by the Council of Nicaea of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and implicitly with the Holy Spirit, whom the Nicene Creed includes within the object of the Church’s Trinitarian faith. Precisely this Personal consubstantiality of the Persons of the Trinity with each other is required by Tertullian’s inclusion of the Father within the Trinity. It is a point upon which he was never confused, for it is simply the apostolic tradition. He never departed from the liturgically-mediated rule of faith, as is clear in his having from the outset understood the Father to be a member of the Trinity, which would not otherwise be a Trinity. It is evident that the Father cannot be at once a member of the Trinitas, one of its three Persons, and be identified with it, as would be the case were the Father identified with the divine substance. The doctrine of Headship, its nuclear statement in I Cor. 11:3, from its Christological application in Romans 5, and the further development of that Christology in Ephesians and Colossians, requires the head’s immanence in the substance of which he is the head. This doctrine is implicit in the Trinitarian doctrine of Tertullian and Hippolytus, and begins to be explicit in Origen’s Peri Archon. Origen invokes it in recognizing Christ’s headship of the fallen Church, but does not grasp the universality of its application, i.e., that creation is in Christ, the immanent head of the universe, before the fall and after it. Origen turns rather to the doctrine of the epinoiai (Wisdom, Word,) of the eternal Son to account for the intelligibility of creation. Crouzel has noted the Platonic affinities of this doctrine which, given that creation is in Christ, constitutes a surd in Origen’s theology, for it cannot be integrated into its foundational synthesis of the divine Son and the human Jesus in the Henōsis who is the primordial Jesus Christ the Lord, as will be seen.
Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine of three Persons constituting the divine Trinitarian substance is radically Nicene and Chalcedonian. His identifycation of the divine substance as the Trinitas, and of the divine Persons as members of the substantial Trinitas, have no foundation in Stoicism nor in any other cosmological rationale. They express Tertullian’s commitment to the faith of the apostolic Church. His doctrine of the substantial Trinitas comprising tres Personae survived the Eusebian confusion pervading the Orient in fourth century simply because it is a free assertion of the faith grounded in and controlled by the Catholic liturgy, and therefore, while cosmologically indigestible, its orthodoxy is manifest in the adoption of his language by the Symbol of Chalcedon. It is the foundation of the Nicene proclamation of the homoousios of the Son, the Christ sent by the Father to give the Spirit, with the Father and the Spirit.
Tertullian produced no speculative theology; he was not interested in theory. His apostolic Christology is the basis, the presupposition of his brilliant defense of the faith that Jesus is the Lord. Affirmed by the first four Ecumenical Councils, it must follow that the apostolic Christology is foundational and criteriological for all authentic theological developments. As had Justin Martyr, Tertullian accepted the universally-received cosmological identification of the divine Substance, the “Godhead,” with a single Self, a Monas, but he ignored its standing as the cosmological absolute and converted it to the Christian faith, making the Father to be a member of the Trinity: thus, while he is the source of the Son and the Spirit, the Father does not transcend them.[154] Therefore the Father is the divine tota substantia, as the source from whom the Son and the Spirit proceed. Thereby the Father, possessing the “plenitudo substantiae” is the source of the Trinity, but as immanent within it, not as transcending it. This is the Pauline doctrine of the Father’s headship of the Trinity (I Cor. 11:3).
Thus it is only in his Mission of the Son, the primordial Jesus the Lord, that the Father is revealed to be the free source of the free unity that is the substantial Trinity, and that Jesus is revealed as the source of the free unity of redeemed free substance of humanity and thereby of the free unity of the universe he redeemed. As the first Adam’s refusal of headship is the cause of the fall from the primordially good creation into the sarkic disintegration of the historical universe, its only possible unity is the free unity whose only source is the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh, the New Covenant, the redeemed universe, by the One Sacrifice of its immanent head, Jesus the Son, the Lord, the Christ. The risen Jesus the Christ’s transcendence of the fallen but redeemed creation is his continually redemptive Eucharistic immanence within it as its head, consubstantial with the Father, and, as our head, consubstantial with us. It is as Eucharisticaly present as at once the High Priest of the One Sacrifice and its Victim, the Lamb of God, that he is the Lord of history, its Alpha and its Omega, its Beginning and its End.
Within the pagan cosmology, “Father” is not understood to be a relative Name; it denotes rather the dominion of the monadic Deus unus over all that is not God. The recitations of this divine dominion in the ancient mythologies constitutes the foundational wisdom of the pagan cultures. The Greeks understood themselves in the light of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the myths collected by Hesiod in his Works and Days. With the “invention of the mind,” i.e., the waning of the uncritical mimetic culture ca. 500 B.C., there arose a leisured clerisy whose leisure prompted a personal quaerens intellectum into the mimetic presentation of the divine, and, eo ipso, a personal dissociation from the uncritical cultic mimesis, the liturgical inculcation of the pagan mythic wisdom via the poetic tradition against whose anti-intellectualism Plato railed.
This emergence of self-consciousness was of course gradual. It may be significant that it took place in the colonial milieu of southern Italy, a locale remote from the influence of the major temples of the Greek mainland. The new wisdom did not at all discard the old, the mythos in terms of which the people of the mimetic cultures knew their world, but rather retained it in submitting the poetic mediation of the mythos, its liturgical recital or anamnesis, to a criticism which assumed the superiority of rational objecttivity over uncritical interiorization of the poetic anamnesis of the mimetic wisdom of the myth.
It is not possible to determine the initial moments of this process: It may have had its source in the number-mysticism of the Pythagoreans, which raised the problem of the one and the many, and perhaps underlay the Two Ways of Parmenides, who in choosing the way of reason over that of concrete experience locked reason into a radical monism. The rational quaerens intellectum was thereafter baffled by the insoluble problem of synthesizing ‘the one and the many.’ Its earliest expression, apart from the number mysticism of the Pythagoreans, is Heracles’ aphoristic rejection of the static monism of the Eleatics, i.e., Parmenides and Zeno, in favor of a cosmos constituted by an irrational flux. A century and a half later Plato managed to combine the two, assigning irrational dynamism to the realm of history, and rational permanence to the ideal Forms. This conformed to the ancient mythos, which universally identified the divine transcendence of the one God, the Monas, with his absolute absence from history, a polarity realized in the ‘sky god,” the deus otiosus, the ‘lazy god,’ who is nonetheless the cosmic Father, the cause of the universe. This incongruity was exploited by the Eleatics, whose logic required the transcendence of the One while denying the rationality of a “many.”
The Greek Apologists, i.e., Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch and Athenagoras of Athens, were the first to recognize that the apostolic tradition of Jesus’ revelation of the Father required that this Name, “Father,” have a relative, i.e., not absolute, priority over the Son and the Holy Spirit, a relation that Tertullian terms gradus, i.e., “There is no suggestion of a scale of values. Gradus indicates simply an order of succession.”[155] Its Trinitarian application states only the order of the procession from the Father of the Son and the Holy Spirit; it excludes an absolute priority of substance in the Father. Rather, the Father’s priority is that of the immanent Source, not simply of the Son and the Spirit, but of the Trinitarian Substance, of which he is a member, as the Source, the Head, the Begetter, thus the Father, of the Son, and the Source of the Holy Spirit, and thereby of the Trinity. This constitutes the radical mystery of the faith.
Tertullian’s insight into the Trinitarian Godhead includes at least one recognition of the Pauline doctrine of headship (I Cor. 11:2-16).[156] According to Paul, the Father is the head of the Trinity, the Son is the head of all men (παντὸς ἀνδρὸς; i.e., all husbands) in that he is the source of the primordially free unity of the human substance in which he subsists, as the husband is the source of the free nuptial community in which as head he subsists. This office of the head, as the source of the free unity of the substance in which he subsists, is revealed to be proper to headship as such, whether it be the Father’s headship of the Trinity, Jesus’ headship of the human substance, or the husband’s headship of substantial nuptial unity of husband wife in marriage, or Jesus’ offering of the One Sacrifice, by which those consubstantial with him are given the freedom to be free. The head is always consubstantial with the members of the substance in which he, as head, subsists, which members, given their Trinitarian imaging, cannot be less than three: e.g., husband, wife, and their covenantal bond. Tertullian’s radical insight into the Trinity, whose unity is that of una substantia, and whose plurality that of tres personae, has its foundation in the apostolic faith of the Church. It has no other possible basis, and Tertullian looked for none, contemptuous of the Gnostic assaults upon it. Neither could the quasi-monadic rationalization of the Monarchy divine unity by the conservative Bishops of Rome in the early third century long resist Tertullian’s insight into what is One and what is Three in God; His insistence upon the objective distinctions between the Names integral to the baptismal affirmation of the apostolic faith in the One God was invincible, and prevailed.
Tertullian’s failure to distinguish between the eternal begetting of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit, and their historical Missions, does not reduce his Trinitarian doctrine to the “economic Trinitarianism” formerly attributed to the Apologists and to him as well. His acceptance, in Adversus Praxean 5, of a version of Justin’s notion of a Father whose eternity is prior to his paternity, is archaic; Hippolytus had much the same notion of a Father who pre-exists his begetting of the Son. In Adversus Praxean 5, Tertullian supposes the Sermo be immanent in the Father as his Reason or Wisdom and, in an impersonal sense, as co-eternal with the Father as the pre-condition of the Father’s utterance of that Word (Sermo) which he is his begetting of the Son. However, unlike Justin, Tertullian places the Father within the Trinity, a concept probably unknown to Justin, whose Apologies do not mention the Holy Spirit; although mentioned in his Dialogue with Trypho, the mention of Holy Spirit is not within a Trinitarian context.
Inasmuch as here Tertullian linked the objective or Personal distinction between the Word (Sermo) and the Father, to the Father’s begetting of the Son as Sermo, it would follow that, as the Father’s Reason (Ratio), immanent in the Father ab aeterno, his eternal unity with the Father, as Ratio, is prior to his begetting, the Father’s utterance of his Ratio as Sermo, as the eternal is prior to the primordial (for Tertullian makes no distinction between the Begetting and the Mission of the Sermo). However, this consideration assumes, following Justin, an absolute cosmic God whom Tertullian, unlike Justin, identifies with the immanent Principium (Beginning) of the Trinity. There, as eternally begetting the Son and, through the Son, pouring out the Holy Spirit, he is Named “Father” by the Son: because, as thus Named, he is no longer absolute. Possessing the fullness of the divinity (tota substantia) and having no Personal Principium (census), the Father is the unique and eternal cause of the Trinity by his begetting of the consubstantial Son, whose source (Principium) he is. Through his begetting of the Son he is also the unique Principium of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father through his begetting of the Son. Personally possessing the fullness of divinity, the Father is the eternal source of that fullness possessed by the Son and the Spirit, whose Personal possession of it is nonetheless irreducibly distinct from his, by reason of being received, caused. By reason of their distinct modes of their reception of the fullness of divinity from the Father, i.e., the Son as begotten, the Holy Spirit as poured out, they are irreducibly, i.e., Personally, distinct from that of each other, as they are from the Father, their source. We may see here a recognition of the relativity of “Person” which Augustine will develop in the De trinitate, although Amphilocius had suggested it much earlier.
It is thus that the discourse in Adversus Praxean 5, intimating a quasi-temporal priority “ad usque filii generationem” of the Father to the Son, the Sermo does not touch the Trinitarian doctrine set out in the Apologeticus. Justin had simply accepted and thereafter ignored the subordinationism inherent in his notion of the Naming of Jesus by the absolute, the unnamable Godhead, for he understood that Naming to be the grant of unqualified power over the entire economy of salvation to Jesus, who by his Naming is less than the Father, relative rather than absolute, and only thereby is capable of immanence in history. Tertullian’s attribution of substantia to the Trinitas finessed the cosmological quandary posed by the Absolute Father’s “naming” of the Son, Jesus the Christ, simply by transforming Justin’s grant of absolute standing to the Father, that of the Monad, into the immanent Head (Κεφᾶλή, Caput) of the Trinity.
Nonetheless, Tertullian has been thought, as by Evans, as also by Daniélou and Quasten, to have accepted a diminished divinity in the Son and the Holy Spirit, in that as each has a “portio” of the Father’s “plenitudo substantiae;” each is a “derivatio totius.” Insofar as Stoic, Tertullian’s vocabulary and doubtless his imagination is materialist. To a degree, this is a human commonplace. There are too many passing references by scholars such as J. N. D. Kelly and R. P. C. Hanson to the “sharing” by the Son and the Holy Spirit in divinity of the Father to permit hasty judgments upon Tertullian’s Trinitarian orthodoxy based on a comparably literal reading of his Stoic hermeneutic. Aloys Grillmeier argues that Tertullian’s use of “portio” is not to be translated as “part.”[157] In this he is certainly correct, for Tertullian also refers to the Trinitarian substance as indivisible.[158]. We are dealing here rather with Tertullian’s attempt to account for the Personal distinctions within the context of the corporeality which he insists is inseparable from the substantial unity of the Trinitarian God. Something of the same problem would confront the Cappadocian Trinitarian speculation, nearly two centuries later, when Basil’s, (or Gregory of Nyssa’s) 38th Letter attempted to establish a Trinitarian vocabulary of ousia and hypostasis. Doubtless it owed nothing to Tertullian; further, it ignored the impact of Origen’s far more perceptive Trinitarian use of the same ousia-hypostasis language. Tertullian had not in fact anticipated Basil’s Trinitarian use of substantia and Persona, for Basil was still in the homoiousian camp, as was Gregory of Nyssa. The 38th Letter, “whoever was its author” (Kelly, Doctrines, 268) was written under the influence of the Eusebian subordinationism, as is evident in its generic interpretation of “ousia,” which implies the same subordinationism that Evans and Daniélou would attach to Tertullian’s use of “portio.”
We may interpret “portio” and the like in conformity with the Trinitarian doctrine in the Apologeticus, i.e., as designating the relation of the divine substantiae to the divine Personae: summarily, una Substantia in tribus personis; the distinction between the Personal unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit within the Substantia of the Trinity, the One God. It is to the Father, the Principium, the Beginning, the uncaused cause, the Head of the Trinity, that the Plenitudo belongs and, to each of the Persons proceeding from him, belongs a portio, a full possession, of that plenitude, the Father’s Personal divinity. This would entail a subordination of the Son and the Spirit were not the Father, as the head of the Trinity, thereby a member of it. He is its cause, but as immanent within it as its Source, not as constituting it. This decisive insight into the Mysteriun fidei rules out any subordinationist division of the Trinity such as may be thought implicit in such terminology as “portio” and ‘derivatio totius,;” that inference is at odds with Tertullian’s use of “substantia,” with its connotation of indivisibility, to name what is One in God, and of “tres Personae” to designate what is plural in the unity of the divine Substantia, viz., the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The use of “Godhead” to name the Trinity is imprecise; it can evoke the Personification, as its Head, of the divine Substantia, as has been seen; see Volume III, endnote 2.
Tertullian, like Origen, places the tota substantia in the Father as the Source of the Trinity, perhaps simply because the Father could not give the fullness of divinity to the Son and the Holy Spirit if he did not possess it. However, what the Father gives, in his begetting of the Son and outpouring of the Holy Spirit who proceeds from him through the Son, is his own Personal possession, as a member of the Trinity, of the Personal fullness of divinity. As the Head of the Trinity, he is its cause, but not in the subordinations sense easily read into the language of tota substantia and derivatio substantiae. The Father is not the substantia, the Trinity, nor does he transcend the Trinity as its cause, for as its Head he is immanent within it. The Trinity is uncaused as Absolute; the Father is uncaused relative to the Son and the Spirit for; as the Head of the Trinity, he is the immanent source of its free unity. Beyond the Church’s affirmation of the elements of that foundational mystery, theology cannot go.
Tertullian’s attribution to the Father of tota substantia in Adversus Praxean 5 is an echo of his debt to Justin, who understands the Father as the Absolute, the Unnameable, immobile and incapable of historicity who, in sending the Son into the world does so by Naming him. As Named, he is relative to the Absolute, less than absolute, over against the Absolute unnameable, immobile, one God who, as absolute, is incapable of immanence in relativities of history. For this, he, the Absolute, requires an emissary, by whose Naming Jesus the Son, the Lord, is relative, therefore exists, and to whom, as Named, as relative, the Absolute assigns the governance of the economy, the creation whose reality is the product of the Father’s Naming of the Son.
Tertullian does not recognize, much less resolve, the tota substantia dilemma; he toys with it in Adversus Praxean 5, but clearly cannot take it seriously, for from the outset, in the Apologeticus and again in the Adversus Praxean, he understands the Father to be a member of the Trinity, even if as its Source. It may be taken as read that Tertullian’s unchanged commitment to the Spirit Christology controls his Trinitarian doctrine, thus rendering it equally unchangeable. He accepts without question the absolute unity of God, and the Personal divinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: He affirms and defends the full humanity and the full divinity of Jesus the Lord, as a truth of the faith beyond dispute, upon whose paradoxes he is fond of dwelling, as in the De Carne Christi. So also he upholds the Father as the source, the Archē, of the Son and the Spirit. Having referred to the Father as potestas, as plenitudo substantiae, as tota substantiae, and having stressed the distinct divinity of the Son and the Spirit, he may appear to have left the divine substance in paradoxical, apparently subordinationist stance, but all possibility of that inference is directly countered by his explicit denials of a lesser divinity in the Son and the Spirit, as well as by the indivisibility of the divine Substance.[159] The Son and the Spirit are each distinct Persons: distinct from each other and from the Father from whom they proceed. They are divine Persons per substantiae propriatatem, which is to say, intrinsically and objectively. We follow Evans closely here:[160]
In a curious aside within a discussion of Athanasius’ Christology, Grillmeier refers to a quasi-Apollinarian Christology as one of “appropriation after the manner of the communicatio idiomatum” (Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, Vol. One: From the Apostolic age to Chalcedon (451); Second Revised edition, translated by John Bowden (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975) [hereafter Christ in Christian Tradition I]; Vol. Two, Part One: From Chalcedon to Justinian I: Reception and Contradiction. Tr. Pauline Allen & John Cawte (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975), [hereafter, Christian Tradition II/1]. See Christian Tradition II/1, at 313.
The communication of idioms in Christ is founded on his Personal unity. Contra Grillmeier, the communication of idioms has no application in the Apollinarian Christology wherein Jesus’ human historicity is “appropriated” by a non-historical Logos-hegemonikon to form, not a Personal unity, but a theandric monas whose monophysite unity cannot support the communication of idioms whereby Mary is the Theotokos. This mistake may explain Grillmeier’s willingness to associate Tertullian’s supposedly krasis (κρᾶσις) Christology with the communication of idioms, for Grillmeier’s use of the term does not rest on or imply a Personal unity in Christ.
As Evans has stressed, Tertullian knew from the apostolic tradition that the Apostles encountered Jesus as a Person, as a man to be Named, to be addressed, to be followed, to be loved, adored: The dilemma, inescapable when the subject of the Incarnation is dehistoricized, viz., when it is no longer Jesus who “becomes flesh,” but rather the pre-human Logos who becomes man, is foreign to Tertullian’s basic Christological insight into the Personal unity of the Logos of the Prologue of the Gospel of John, the pre-existent Jesus the Christ of Phil. 2:6-7, the Son of Mary as well as of the Father.
Tertullian’s dropping of the Christological use of “homo-deo mixtus” which he used in Apologeticus 21:14, from the Christology of the Adversus Praxean (xxii, 8) confirms the foundational substantia-Persona Christological analysis of the Apologeticus, the anticipation of the doctrine of Chalcedon whose Symbol. as has been seen, confirmed Tertullian’s emphasis upon the perdurance of the distinction between the two natures of Jesus in their unqualified Personal union.
Grillmeier disagrees: see Christ in the Christian Tradition I, 128-31. He maintains the “mixtus-krasis” of Apologeticus. 21:14 to be Tertullian’s basic insight into the unity of Jesus the Christ. His analysis relies upon a sharp distinction between the abstract generality of the Stoic hypokeimenon and its material realization in the ultimate individual concreteness of the idia poiotes (divine nature), which he assumes to be Tertullian’s Sermo or Persona. However, a krasis,(κρᾶσις) a mixture, cannot be the ultimate individual concreteness of Jesus the Lord. That uniqueness can only be Personal, the unity of his Name, a unity beyond all composition, beyond all metaphysical analysis. Further, the identification of “person” with the ultimate individuation of the Stoic hypokeimenon must leave open the question of whether the humanity of Jesus is Personal. However, Grillmeier maintains that Tertullian cannot be supposed to have intended to resolve that issue by ascribing the notion of persona to the Christ, thus anticipating Chalcedon. Instead, he supposes him to be intent rather upon upholding the duality of each substance (the divine and human natures) in Jesus (the idia poiotes), rather than upon “explaining” the unity in Christ of Personal divinity and Personal humanity.
It is quite true that Tertullian was not intent upon explaining Jesus’ unity: he simply affirms it to be Personal: therefore to be Named, not explained. The Person of Jesus is the Mysterium capitis, Mysterium fidei, to be affirmed or denied, but never explained. Whoever seeks an explanation of Jesus’ Personal unity in terms of showing its prior possibility thereby denies the mystery, and is left as here with abstractions whose radical incoherence has no historical resolution .
Evidently it is on the basis of Tertullian’s failure to explain the mysterious unity of the Christ that Grillmeier concludes that his una persona, duae substaniae is not an anticipation of the Chalcedonian ascription of Personal unity to Jesus─although for that matter, neither does the Chalcedonian Symbol offer an “explanation” of Jesus Personal unity; we have seen that it is much criticized for this supposed failure to justify its affirmation, seven times repeated, of his Personal unity. In sum, Grillmeier concludes, contra Ernest Evans, that Tertullian understood the unity of Christ in terms of the Stoic notion of krasis. He is not alone in this opinion:
If Tertullian does not interpret the unity of Christ in the light of the concept of ‘Person’, he has nevertheless a definite conception of the unity of the two substances in the incarnate one. Here he remains within the framework of the Stoic krasis doctrine, which knows of a mixtio or total mutual penetration (compenetratio) of solid bodies which retain their connatural characteristics in the process.
This has been demonstrated by R. Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap., (see La Christologia di Tertulliano (Paradosis xviii) Fribourg 1962).
Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, at 129; see footnote 76.
Grillmeier’s citation of his own footnote to bolster Cantalamessa’s authority is rather too much of a stretch; it can hardly be taken seriously. In place of his use of “demonstrated,” we may then read “argued,” “proposed,” “asserted,” and so on, without prejudice to Fr. Cantalamessa, whose work Grilllmeier here cites but does not quote.
Against Grillmeier’s dismissal of Tertullian’s affirmation of the Personal unity of Christ―which is hardly that of a “solid body” to be constituted by a krasis,[161] stands Tertullian’s repeated association of ‘name’ with ‘person;’ and his assurance that the human community is a single substance, constituted by the descendents of Adam and Eve. For Tertullian, substances, whether divine or human, spiritual or material, are not ‘named’; rather, they are designated, as by “Trinitas” for the substantial One God. The Trinitarian Names are the Members of the community constituted by their free Personal intercommunion. Directly, the Trinitarian community, the ”perichōresis” of a later theological development, is simply the Trinity in its free circumincession; analogously, it is also the created human image of the Trinity, the primordially good creation “in the Beginning,” i.e., in Christ, of the human substance in its free nuptial unity, the perichōresis of the man, the woman, and the bond of mutual love, that is the human imaging of the Trinity.
Grillmeier’s preoccupation with the abstract meaning of the Stoic hypokeimenon, viz., “as a single generality existing not in itself but precisely only in concrete manifestations” as contrasted with the meaning of persona which, derived from a passage from Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses, he understands to have “the meaning of concrete, ultimate form, of ultimate individualization, over against a single generality existing not in itself but only in concrete manifestations. (op. cit., at 128). His application of that abstraction to his Christology eliminates not only the Personal unity of the Christ, but also the substantial unity of the Triune God, as well as of the humanity constituted by the created progeny of our first parents. The incoherent Stoic cosmology recognizes reality only in the individual concretizations of the hypokeimenon. However, insofar as the radical “subject of attribution,” the hypokeimenon, is understood “as a single generality existing not in itself but precisely only in concrete manifestations,” it is a pure abstraction, like the Aristotelian and Thomist “second substance.” As the “substratum” that is logically prior to all general, specific and individual concretizations, it corresponds to the Aristotelian-Thomist materia in commune, again an abstraction, devoid of concrete existence.
The Logos (Sermo) already has a peculiar reality, a status, a persona, in God. As a result of his assumption of a human nature, however, this person of the Son has a twofold status, Godhead and manhood. Tertullian’s intention is to express this fact of the constitution of Christ thus composed and its relationship to the Father. In this he does not wish to bring the unity of the two substances in Christ into the foreground. He is more concerned to stress against Praxeas the Son’s own character as ‘person’ and against Marcion the distinction of the natures. So we find the statement: “Videmus duplicem statum, non confusum sed conjunctum in una persona, deum et hominem Jesus.” The ‘conjunctum in ‘una persona’ may not therefore be interpreted in such a way that it already provides the explanation of the manner of the conjunction of God and man in Christ. The way in which Tertullian conceives of this is to be discovered from other expressions, As a result of these it transpires that Tertullian has not yet considered what unity of person in Christ means, whether the ‘man’ in Christ has his own prosopon, In other words, the Chalcedonian problem of the relationship of nature and person has yet to present itself. Tertullian does not yet in in fact have the explicit Christological formula of the ‘una persona, duae naturae, duae substantia’, though he seems to be only a step from it. He is primarily theologian of the two natures or the two substances. This he says of Christ, whom he means to have clearly distinguished from the Father as a Person.
If Tertullian does not interpret the unity of Christ in the light of the concept of ‘person’, he has nevertheless a definite conception of the unity of the two substances in the incarnate one. Here he remains within the framework of the Stoic krasis doctrine,76 which knows of a mixtio or total mutual penetration (compenetratio) of solid bodies which retain their connatural characteristics in the process.
76. This has been demonstrated by R. Cantalamessa, op. cit., 135-150
Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 129-30.
On the basis of this detailed interpretation of Tertullian’s Christology, it is impossible to dissociate Grillmeier’s flawed reading of Tertullian from his evident approval of the Christology of St. Thomas, whose ascription of persona composita to Jesus resonates with Tertullian’s withdrawal from his early application of the krasis doctrine to resolve the duality of substances into Jesus’ concrete Personal unity, which krasis cannot do. Although in that mixture the divine and human substances remain distinct, their resolution within the unity of a Personal Name is impossible to explain, for that unity is precisely the Mysterium fidei, which no cosmological rationality, Stoic or otherwise, can address. Grillmeier immediately assumes that Tertullian accepts the Thomist notion of an “assumption of human nature” by the eternal Son who, as “Godhead,” is abstract from all that is historical.
Having misunderstood the communication of idioms as quasi-Apollinarian, i.e., as Monophysite, as composite rather than Personal, Grillmeier admits Tertullian’s concern for the communication of idioms in our Lord, but he does not recognize that the mystery of the Personal unity of the Lord Jesus is the sole possible foundation for the communication of idioms which, like the Personal consubstantiality with the Father which it implies, can only be Personal, for it rests finally upon the Personal homoousion of Jesus at once with the Father and with every human person. It has its first dogmatic expression in the Ephesian doctrine of Mary’s motherhood of God, the Formula of Union which taught her Son’s consubstantiality with her, and consequently “with us.” It received its definitive dogmatic affirmation in the Chalcedonian doctrine that Jesus subsists in the Trinity, whereby he is homoousios with the Father and the Spirit, and that he subsists in the human substance, whereby he is homoousios “with us,” as “one and the same Son, thus relating the Symbol of Chalcedon to the earliest patristic affirmation of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord. It is not for nothing that Tertullian’s Christological idiom was adopted by the Chalcedonian Symbol, nor is it surprising that the Thomist theology cannot accept the Chalcedonian definition of Jesus’ consubstantiality with us.
For St. Thomas, and for Grillmeier, “Jesus” does not Name a human Person; rather, “Jesus” Names the eternal Son, whom Grillmeier understands to be the one God. It must then follow that, because homoousios is a Personal attribute of Jesus, he cannot be consubstantial “with us.” It must further follow that Mary is not the Theotokos for, as a human person, she would not be consubstantial with her non-human divine Son, who, as consubstantial only with the Father, can have no consubstantial mother. These implications of the denial of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord do not need discussion. Boethius has dealt with them in his Contra Sermonem Eutychii et Nestorii, cited in Volume 3, endnote 1: see §§4-6, where he links them as consequent upon the same error:
I must now pass to Eutyches who, wandering from the path of primitive doctrine, has rushed into the opposite error and asserts that so far from our having to believe in a two-fold Person in Christ, we must not even confess a double Nature; humanity, he maintains was so assumed that the union with Godhead involved the disappearance of the human nature. His error springs from the same source as that of Nestorius. For just as Nestorius deems there could not be a double nature unless the Person were doubled, and therefore, confessing the double Nature in Christ has perforce believed the Person to be double, so also Eutyches deemed that the nature was not double unless the Person was double, and since he did not confess a double Person, he thought it a necessary consequence that the Nature should be regarded as single. Thus Nestorius, rightly holding Christ’s Nature to be double, sacrilegiously holds the Persons to be two, whereas Eutyches, rightly holding the Person to be single, impiously believes the Nature also to be single. And being confuted by the plain evidence of the facts, since it is clear that the Nature of God is different from that of man, he declares his belief to be: two Natures in Christ before the union and only one after the union. Now this statement does not express clearly what he means.
Boethius. Theological Tractates with an English translation by H. E Stewart, D.D., and E. K. Rand, Ph.D. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd; 1962), Contra Eutychen, V, p. 101.[162]
Tertullian concludes his Christological argument apodictically, appealing to the doctrine of the communcation of idioms latent in Jn. 3:13:
Non ascendit in caelum, nisi qui de caelo descendit.
This is the apostolic tradition, the Spirit Christology of the Apostolic Fathers, explicit in the ancient exegesis of Lk. 1:35, wherein the Spirit who descends upon the Virgin after her fiat mihi is Jesus, her Lord, her Bridegroom.
Evans considers it indisputable that the basis for Tertullian’s attribution of “Person” to the Son is the Apostles’ experience of Jesus the Christ, the Son of the Father: he was encountered by the Twelve in his Personal unity, as the Lord Jesus, sent by the Father, and the Revelation of the Father. It is thus that Tertullian’s application of the substantia-persona paradigm to Christology assigned Jesus the unity of one Person, in whom the divine and human natures (substantiae) are at one, yet as distinct and without confusion, each an irreducible and indispensable foundation of the actions of the God-man who is Jesus. Incidentally, it is inaccurate to regard the divine and human substances in the Person of Christ as principia quo of his redemptive actions. Although in se the substantiae are impersonal, they are not accidental perfections of the Son, not faculties, so to speak, for they are constitutive of his Person, as accidents cannot be, whether proper or predicamental. “Person,” whether said of Jesus or of those consubstantial with him, is utterly simple, uncomposite, capable of designation only by Name, incapable of categorical assessment, predication, or analysis.
Tertullian’s understanding of the Sermo, the Word, is that of the Apostles and the Apostolic Fathers: the Sermo is the primordially integral Person, human and divine, who is the subject of the Incarnation and the kenōsis. Tertullian’s adherence to the apostolic tradition relieves him of the insoluble problem of accounting for Jesus’ Personal unity―which Grillmeier accurately states he did not attempt to explain―for his Personal unity is simply the historical fact, the Mysterium fidei, the absolutely free Event which founds Tertullian’s theology. To repeat: this “problem” of providing the explanation of Jesus Personal unity can only be cosmologically posed: it has no properly theological existence, for it is not historical; rather, it is a cosmological descent into the ancient enigma of “the one and the many.”
Tertullian relies entirely upon the apostolic tradition of the Apostles’ historical experience of the historical Jesus the Lord. Basically, their spontaneous recognition that Jesus is concretely, historically, here and now, the Lord, the God-man. His Name, Jesus, is at once human and divine, the Mysterium fidei for which it is neither necessary nor possible to account. His Personal unity is the radical doctrinal datum, on which all the rest depends, and no theologian of the Catholic tradition may put it in issue. The apostles’ personal experience of Jesus as Lord is the ground, entirely historical, upon which Tertullian distinguishes Jesus’ Personal unity from the Personal duality of his human and divine Names: Jesus the Lord is una Persona, duae substantiae. Tertullian’s Christology is thus specified by the apostolic recognition of the Name, the Personal unity, of Jesus the Lord. The Eucharistic celebration of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is the historical foundation of the Latin Christology, which was not interested in the nonhistorical speculation which in the next century trapped the Greek theologians who followed Eusebius of Caesarea’s refusal of the liturgical authority of the Council of Nicaea. .
It is important to note that Tertullian took for granted the substantial unity of humanity as implicit in the creation accounts, in Gen. 1 and 2, of Adam and Eve, our progenitors.[163] We have stressed that his insight into the created unity of humanity, also common to the Apologists, is indispensable to any theological entry into the Church’s faith in the Lordship of Jesus, a Lordship which is eo ipso his headship of the humanity whose source he is and which is created in him. (I Cor. 11:2-16,; Eph. 2:10; Col. 1:15ff.) Tertullian’s supposition of the substantial unity of humanity was vindicated in the Ephesian and Chalcedonian doctrine of Jesus’ consubstantiality with us, which precisely requires the substantial unity of the human community, quite as his consubstantiality with the Father and the Spirit requires the substantial unity of the one God, the divine community that is the Trinity.
Tertullian insisted that the divine and the human substances in Christ continue to be distinct while united in the unity of his Una Persona. Even in the midst of his argumentative concession to the Monarchian aberration in Adversus Praxean 27, he affirmed the Personal unity of Jesus Christ, God and man, and continued to affirm it, throughout the next chapter of that work. His lucid statement of the irreducible persona-substantia distinction between what is one and what is two in the historical Jesus the Lord so influenced the Roman tradition that it was untroubled by theological controversies consequent upon Eusebian dehistoricization of the Word, the Christ, which in the following century divided the Church in the East. Tertullian’s insistence upon the historical Personal unity of the Sermo, the one and the same Son, the Jesus the Lord, prevailed over the dehistoricizing dynamic inherent in his ad hoc rejection of it in his dispute with the Monarchion, Praxean, who knew no Trinity, no Personal distinctions in God, and could be contended with only on that basis.
Étienne Gilson famously observed of such dehistoricized scenarios that upon a painted hook one can hang only a painted hat: in brief, there is no rational escape from an abstract point d’appui. If not foregone entirely, it must fragment all it touches in its futile but inexorable quest for immanently necessary rational unity. The only unity the creation that is in Christ can know is free. The sole foundation for Catholic theology, the sole “Beginning” of the Church’s faith, and therefore of theological enterprise which would explore its mysteries, is the irreducible Personal unity of the historical Christ, whose free historicity is that of the “whole Christ,” the second Adam who is immanent in history by the nuptial freedom of his union in One Flesh with the second Eve, instituted by the Event of the One Sacrifice, offered by the Lord Jesus on the Altar and on the Cross, inseparably.
Only the historical Event of the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus can ground the project which Tertullian undertook in the Apologeticus, the justification of the divinity of Jesus, of the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord. The supposition that his Apologeticus posits a “common ground” upon which the Christian and the non-Christian can discuss and debate the objective rationality of the Christian faith in the divinity of Jesus, as though together sharing a common rationality, is illusory; between contradictories there can be no common ground.[164]
Tertullian knew this well: his ironic question: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, or the Academy with the Church?” recognized the concrete alienation of its pagan addressees from the free truth of Christ, the mystery of faith, which can be affirmed only in faith, but not “explained:” i.e., not subordinated to the immanent necessities of fallen rationality.[165] The Apologeticus addresses precisely that pagan audience, those Roman officials charged with the persecuting Christians simply as such.
Tertullian’s basic Christological insight is that of the Johannine Gospel and the Pauline Letters, whose foundational postulate is the historical unity of the Lord Jesus, which can only be Personal.[166] The earliest post-apostolic expression of this faith is homiletic: we find it in Clement of Rome’s Letter to the Corinthians, and in the Seven Letters to the Churches of Ignatius Martyr; both presuppose the “Spirit Christology” of the Apostles, affirmed by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen, and by the Councils of Nicaea, I Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon. Tertullian, like Ignatius Martyr, knew this Person, the Lord Jesus, to be at once divine and human, a conviction systematized in his strict association of “name” with “person;” viz.: to be a person is to have a name, and what is named is personal. Jesus has a name, “Son,” which Irenaeus was the first explicitly to assert to be proper to him as at once man and as God: Jesus is “one and the same Son.” For Tertullian as well, Jesus is one and the same Son: he knows Mary to be his mother, and God to be his Father, This Personal unity is of course the direct implication of the earliest confession of the Church’s faith: Jesus is Lord. His Personal unity is unqualified; and therefore mysterious, at once true and incapable of explanation by inquiry into its presumed conditions of its possibility.
Jesus’ unity as thus Personal cannot be a composition of natures. As has been seen, this is the mistake of St. Thomas, who understood the unity of Jesus to be that of an Apollinarian “persona composita.” At first, so it may seem, did Tertullian:
The expression homo deo mixtus, repeated at De Carne Christi 15 (and cf. ibid., 3, deum in hominem conversum), was afterwards (Adv. Prax. 27) withdrawn as misleading and hominem indutus (which had already occurred De Carne Christi 3) substituted for it, though it is evident from the context in each case that Tertullian’s meaning is the same whichever expression he uses.
Evans, On the Incarnation, viii,
See Evans, ibid., at 62, for further commentary upon Tertullian’s use of a “homo-deo mixtus” idiom in Apologeticus 21, 14, and again in De Carne Christi 15, to describe the union of divinity and humanity in the Person of Jesus. Evans notes that Tertullian’s withdrawal of the “homo deo mixtus” did not mark a change of mind: he dismissed it as unsuitable, even misleading,, but not as inaccurate. This is clear from the brief excerpt supra.
The “homo deo mixtus”is clearly ill-suited to Tertullian’s basic insight into the substantial duality and the Personal unity of Jesus, an utterly simple and unique historical unity incapable of constitution by a “mixtio” in him of human and divine “substances” nor, for that matter, could it be conveyed by “hominem indutus,” whose clothing imagery was similarly incompatible with that Personal unity.
Presumably, by mixtio Tertullian had in mind was either the mixus or the krasis of Stoic philosophy, which in the Apologeticus he used unreflecively―or, at least with insufficient reflection―to account for the unity of divinity and humanity in Jesus. However, within Stoicism, the mix of Logos, whether as endiathetos, prophorikos, or spermatikos, with the coarser stuff which the Logos informs, is imperfect, less than permanent, involving no unity beyond the nominal unity and factual disunity of the materials thus mixed, which awaits always the purification of the immanent Logos (endiathetos) from that composition (krasis, mixtio) in which it has by emanation (prophorikos) become immanent (spermatikos) by way of the diakosmēsis-ekpyrōsis that is the cyclic re-structuring of the material universe. This reconstitution of the universe is inevitably succeeded by yet another ekpyrōsis, yet another return to the primordial status quo ante of the immanent Logos endiathetos which then must once again undertake the rationalization of the cosmos by uttering itself into immanence within what must be another cosmos.[167]
At bottom, Stoicism is a dualism; its diakosmēsis proceeds inexorably to an ekpyrōsis; in brief, this cyclic philosophy is only a rationalization of the phoenix myth, of the pagan ‘eternal return,’ the ‘moving image of eternity’ The Stoic krasis may account for the distinction of natures in Christ upon which Tertullian insists, but it cannot be thought to account for their indefeasible unity of Christ’s Person―upon which Tertullian is equally insistent―for, of that unity, i.e., the radical Mysterium fidei that Jesus is the Lord, no account is possible, and certainly not that of a finally impermanent, cyclicly annulled mixtio-krasis. It must be remembered that the Stoic hypokeimenon is concrete only as individuated; it is otherwise abstract.
Tertullian’s early designation of the unity of divinity and humanity in Jesus as a mixtio was an attempt to carry water on both shoulders: i.e., to accommodate in a single concept the irreducible Personal duality and Personal unity of Jesus in Apologeticus 21, 10-13, and in Adversus Praxean 2, 3, 11 and 12, the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, with the absolute unity of the Trinity.
Krasis denotes a composition whose unity, that of an ens concretum physicum, can only be nominal. In the end, Jesus’ Personal unity is the mystery of faith; it cannot be categorized, whether as mixtio or as krasis, but must be uniquely Named: the Name is Jesus. Tertullian’s strict correlation of Jesus’ Name to his Person required him to abandon his preliminary use of the krasis-mixtio which amounted to a cosmologically-grounded denial of the mystery of Jesus’ Personal unity rather than the affirmation of its historically objective truth, viz., the unity of divinity and humanity in Jesus the Lord. In the Apologeticus Tertullian is concerned to affirm Jesus’ Personal unity; in De Carne Christi, he defends the paradox of that Personal unity, at once human and divine. Evans has shown that elsewhere, citing the Adversus Marcionem, the Adversus Praxean and the De Carne Christi, Tertullian understands ‘person’ as the correlative of ‘name:’
The possession of a name indicates personality: cf. Adv. Marc. iv. 14 (quoted above), personam nominis. So also of common nouns, De Carne Christi, 13, fides nominum salus est proprietatem. Tertullian elsewhere remarks on the distinction between the proper and the attributive name: Adv. Prax. 28, quorum nominum (sc. Jesus et Christus) alterum est proprium quod ab Angelo impositum est, alterum accidents quod ab unctione convenit; so that the possession of both a name and a title does not imply division of personality. But neither “father” nor ‘son” is a title, and consequently dum filium agnosco secundum a patre defendo, observing that “there is a Son. I maintain that he is another beside the Father.”
Evans, Against Praxeas, at 48.
Then give back to Christ his trustworthiness, and it will follow that he whose will it was to walk as man also made soul perceptible under human conditions, not making it fleshly, but clothing it with flesh.
Tertullian, De carne Christi, 11, 35; tr. from Evans’ On the Incarnation, at 42-43,
It must be kept in view here that for Tertullian, Jn. 1:14 is normative. As Evans has spelled out in detail, Tertullian understands the primordial Jesus, i.e., the Sermo, to be the agent of his own Incarnation, by which he became flesh. He understands the “πνεῦμα ᾁγιον” of Lk. 1:35, in common with the apostolic tradition, to be the primordial Jesus. Thus, Tertullian is not speaking of a disincarnate Word who, as clothed with flesh, becomes human. Rather, clothed with flesh, the integral primordial Jesus enters into our fallen condition, emptying himself of his Personal integrity, to become like us in all but sin.
By describing the soul as “clothing itself with flesh” (induens se carne) Tertullian understands it as substantially distinct from the flesh with which it is nonetheless united. “Induens se carne”as said of the soul, does not mean that it has become flesh, but rather that it renders flesh perceptive, self-aware and in doing so constitutes the human person. This union of soul and flesh, constituting the human person, is affirmed as a fact whose reality requires only its recognition. Tertullian refers “induens se carne” to the inexplicable fact of the substantial soul’s informing the substantial corporeality of the individual man, a person who can only be named; he regards that naming as analogous to the Personal naming of Jesus the Christ. As he is concerned to assert, but not at all to provide for, the mysterious personal unity of the humanity proper to each of us, for he knew that every human being is a person, a unity incapable of categorization, a mysterious reality to be known only by naming, not labeling, and that the name is that of the “very self,” so he is able to link this lesser human mystery to its foundation in Jesus the Lord. However, when intent upon proving to Praxeas that his Monarchian Patripassionism is impossible, the he must speak of the Incarnation of the primordial Sermo, the Jesus Christ whose conception by the Virgin is his Personal “becoming flesh,” in terms which make no mention of the Person of the primordial Sermo (which the Monarchian Praxeas cannot accept), Jesus the Christ; thus he writes: “ita cum sit ipse de spiritu dei (et spiritus deus est) sarx deo natus, ipse est ex carne hominis et homo in carne generatus, as “induens se carne;”[168] he will go on to point out that Incarnation cannot be said of the spiritus who is also the Father, and who in consequence must be distinct from the Son.
Tertullian’s impassioned defense of the apostolic tradition rests upon his commitment to its veritas. Neither in the Apologeticus nor in his other works does he attempt to prove any element of it. E.g., he knows the historical Jesus’ humanity, his caro, to be ensouled like his own, but he feels no need to explain the evident fact of Personal unity; his references to it as the “clothing of the soul,” indutus carne, and the like are in no sense analytic: they are descriptive simply. He knows that recourse to the Middle Platonic analysis would render diophysite his Christology as well as his anthropology. He knows Jesus to be the eternal Son of the Father, the Sermo primordially sent by Him, to be conceived by the Virgin and, by his sacrificial death, to redeem the fallen universe. As Tertullian does not trouble to provide an account of the evident fact of his own personal unity, i.e., the union in him of soul and flesh, he is still less concerned to account for the Personal unity of his Lord. He dismisses out of hand the pertinence of the philosophical tradition to the apostolic tradition, whose prescriptive standing he was at pains to assert; opposition to it had no standing and could have none His theology has no speculative or theological content; his language is phenomenological and therefore historical, concerned with the factual truth of the faith. His works are apologetic expositions of the historical faith of the Church in Jesus the Lord, and in polemical defenses of the faith against its adversaries. For Tertullian, to Name Jesus is to affirm his Personal unity, which is historical and free. His Name, Jesus the Lord,: comprising two substances in one Person, the Mysterium fidei, the Sermo by whose Mission the universe exists.
It is thus that Tertullian’s historical Christology of one Person subsisting in two substances, a Christology founded upon the liturgical affirmation of the Name, of the Personal unity of the Lord Jesus, could use descriptive terms without at first recognizing their implication; Evans has drawn attention to his use of “homo-deo mixtus” in the Apologeticus, and dropping as inappropriate, save for one later use in the De Carne Christi Under this Stoic analysis (“mixtio” analysis, which Tertullian soon dropped divine Logos and the human soul which is the image of the Logos are both conceived nonhistorically: the Logos as distinct from humanity, the soul as distinct from its flesh, both joined to their counterparts in a krasis which leaves the Logos and the soul each entirely distinct from the courser material which it informs only by a “mingling” which is no more than a fine-grained conjunction of dissociated elemental particles incapable of constituting a unity beyond mere physical conjunction. In either case, their re-historicization as unities would require the dehistoricization of the mystery of Jesus, his “very self,” his historical Person, that of the Chalcedonian “one and the same Son”. To conceive of Jesus’ unity as a krasis would be to provide for the antecedent possibility of the union in his Person of humanity and divinity; similarly, to conceive of a merely human person as a krasis of his soul and his flesh is to deny his historical uniqueness, for it reduces that unity to a categorical level, participation in which is not unique and cannot be named once it has been submitted to the determinist analysis inherent in cosmological rationality.
Tertullian offered no metaphysical account of his selection of “person” to describe what is one in Jesus, or of “substance” to describe what is dual. His doctrine rests upon loyalty to the liturgical and scriptural mediation of the faith; his speculative interests were minor.[169] Doubtless largely for this reason, the common-sense clarity and precision of his Trinitarian and Christological formulae established the Western tradition thereafter, and preserved the Western Church from the Trinitarian and Christological controversies which ultimately divided Eastern Christianity. Once the cosmological fixation of the pre-Nicene theologians was understood at Nicaea to be incompatible with the faith in the Lord Jesus, it became possible ―and necessaryto base all further theological speculation upon the liturgically-grounded datum of the homoousion of the Son with the Father. The communication of idioms in the affirmation of Jesus’ Lordship had always implied this, but theological unfolding of that implication had been barred by the cosmological presuppositions we have examined.
Tertullian’s classic formula of one Person and two natures in the Lord Jesus underlined also the irreducible duality of the human and divine natures in the Person of Christ: viz., the two “substances” of the incarnate Word who, as divine, is at once consubstantial with the Father in possessing the fullness of the divine substance and who, as human, is consubstantial with us in possessing the fullness of the human substance which, contra the traditional cosmological anthropology, Tertullian held to mean historical humanity as such. He understood the human substance in the historical terms of the Genesis creation accounts, i.e., as the object of creation, which can only be substantial and therefore must be as numerically single as the divine substance, of which it is the image. In this, he anticipated the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son in its final statement: the Chalcedonian doctrine of the consubstantiality of Jesus with us, i.e. with every human being: in the language of the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus, repeated by the Symbol of Chalcedon, Jesus the Lord is “ ὁμούσιον ἑμῖν:”consubstantial with us.
Systematic incoherences appear in Tertullian’s Christology, e.g., in Adversus Praxean 5, but he ignores their systematic import: as Evans has noted, his Christology is the Spirit Christology which from the time of the Apostolic Fathers well into the latter half of the fourth century was simply presupposed. Tertullian, like his contemporary Hippolytus, had no interest in systematics; his Spirit Christology is finally a catechesis of the Apostolic tradition.
In the paradoxical passage in Adversus Praxean 27, in which he undertakes to prove Praxeas wrong in supposing that the divine substance in Jesus could become flesh, he accepts for the purposes of argument Praxeas’ notion that the governing principle in Jesus the Christ is the divine substance, which, inasmuch as it becomes must cease to be divine. This polemic agreement with Praxeas’ identification of spiritus, i.e., divinity, with an impersonal divine substance, of course contradicts Tertullian’s affirmation of the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, but Tertullian’s argument here is simply hypothetical, made only for the purposes of his proving its incoherence. His critique of Praxeas is grounded in his Spirit Christology, his faith in Jesus the Lord, whose possession of the fullness of the human substance makes him to be a human Person quite as his possession of the divine substance makes him to be a divine Person. Tertullian knows him to be the Son of Mary, the preexistent primordial Christ who, as Spirit, descended into the womb of the Virgin, from whom he took his flesh. As Evans notes, he affirms without reservation the Incarnation of the primordial Sermo. However, as has been seen, he can most simply show Praxeas the irrationality of his Monarchianism by developing, from within its own rationale, its impossibility; this he does with great forensic skill. Having shown Praxeas that he cannot, as a Monarchist, accept the “transfiguration” of the substantial divinity which his Monarchianism must identify with Jesus, he shows Praxeas that his own principles, viz., his denial of the possibility of a unity transcending that of substance, forces him to accept the alternative “clothing” idiom, viz., the divine substance becomes “clothed with flesh,” indutus carne, at the Incarnation. Read at the letter, this is the diophysism in which Diodore of Tarsus would be trapped by Julian the Apostate in the next century. Persisted in by the School of Antioch, it issued in the Nestorian heresy.[170] Whether grounded in the Monarchist lack of any notion of Person, or in the Logos-sarx Christology which is diophysite when its latencies are is pushed, the mistake is still commonplace; it is on this basis that contemporary theologians deny that the one Person, Jesus, can be at once the Son of the Father and the Son of Mary, “One and the same Son.
Apart from attacking the pretensions of the Gnostics, Marcionites, Monarchians, and on occasion the internal contradictions of a mere dualist philosopher (Hermogenes), Tertullian has no interest in speculative theology. He was well acquainted with Stoicism and with the Middle Platonism of the Greek philosophical tradition, both of which he finds entirely incompatible with the Spirit Christology of the Apostles, to which his commitment is adamantine. Tertullian never dehistoricized the primordial Sermo; He is the historical subject of the Incarnation, of the “and the Word was made flesh” (καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγενέτο). of Jn. 1:14. Diophysism is entirely alien to Tertullian’s Spirit Christology, as Evans has shown. The dilemma displayed in Adversus Praxean 27 concerns the Incarnation of the Sermo who literally, i.e., Personally, “became flesh” in emptying himself of his primordial integrity, his Lordship, took on the form of a slave, submitting himself to the fragmentation and mortality of the fallen historical humanity. In short, here Tertullian is intent upon proving to Praxeas that his reduction of the divine unity to the impersonality of a Monas excludes the Personal kenōsis of the primordial Jesus affirmed in Phil. 2:6-7, whose historical objectivity is for Tertullian a matter of faith, a faith which his argument supposes Praxeas to share. .
A century later Diodore of Tarsus gave the “clothing” language a diophysite interpretation, which, supposes the unity of Christ to be an impossible unity of natures, i.e., of substances, and consequently is unable sufficiently to integrate them to clearly to assert the divinity of Jesus. The corollary of this diophysism is the dehistoricization Mary’s motherhood of Jesus for, under that rubric, she becomes the mother, not of Jesus the Christ, but of his humanity.[171] However, in that same verse of the Adversus Praxean, Tertullian affirms the Spirit Christology (that Jesus is at once God and Man), from which Evans assures us he never departed. Tertullian’s statements of this Christology would enter into the Chalcedonian formula: viz., :“salva est utriusque proprietas substantiae” = “saving the properties of both substances:”; “substantiae ambo in statu suo quaeque distincte agebant” = “each substance acts distinctly according to its reality;” and “non confusum sed conjunctum in una persona deum et hominem Jesum” = “not confusedly but conjoined in one Person who is God and man, Jesus.”
The orthodoxy of Tertullian’s Christology is not open to question. He understood Jesus’ human substantia to be the ground of his Personal suffering and death. He understood his divine substantia to be the ground of his Personal Lordship, in sum, of his redemption of the good creation which was created in him, in the Beginning.
In an abstract consideration, each substance, whether the divine and the human, as substantial, is impersonal, and can neither suffer nor die, but the historical Sermo can and did, by reason of his human substantia. Upon this point Tertullian is entirely clear. The unity of the two substantiae in the Sermo, Jesus the Lord, is Persona Una Persona, the Lord Jesus whom Irenaeus named the one and the same Son, the object of the faith of the Church and therefore the subject of Tertullian’s theology, at once Christological and Trinitarian. Tertullian is clear that Jesus redeemed the fallen creation as at once a divine and a human Person, at once the Son of God and the Son of Mary. He knew Jesus’ Personal unity to be absolutely mysteryous, and made no attempt to explain it. For Tertullian, as for the apostolic tradition, it suffices that Jesus, by his One Sacrifice, by the outpouring of his Gift of the Spiritus Creator, freed the fallen world from its imprisonment by sin and death and the fear of death. He is the Revelation of his Personal truth, the Mysterium fidei, totally free, totally gratuitous, immune to analysis, lacking all prior possibility, the unique object of the apostolic faith that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Consequently there is no liturgical or doctrinal basis for the commonplace mistake, at once patristic, medieval, and contemporary, relegating Jesus’ suffering to his humanity and his Lordship to his divinity, as though each substance were an agent. Tertullian permits himself the use of such language in the Adversus Praxean simply because he wishes to point out its inner contradictions to his adversary who, in refusing “Person,” refuses any “conjunction” of substances beyond that nominal conjunction of the indutus carne, indutus hominem idiom which asserts a unity which cannot be explained from within Praxeas’ Monarchist world-view. But Tertullian’s resort to this language is entirely provisional, required by the context of the Adversus Praxean and not found elsewhere. In the De Carne Christ and the De Resurrectione, it is the Lord Jesus, sent by the Father, who suffered, died and rose again: it is the Jesus, the risen Eucharistic Lord of history, its Beginning and its End, who has made all things new, and who will come again to judge the living and the dead. Tertullian’s insistence upon the Personal unity of Jesus Lordship is past discussion: its Monarchian dissection is simply a denial of the communication of idioms in his Person by which he is Jesus the Lord, which is precisely that from which Tertullian would convert Praxeas by proving to him that his Monarchian refusal to recognize the concrete, ultimately Personal distinctions between the divine Names places him outside the faith of the Church.
Tertullian’s commitment to the communication of idioms in Jesus is that of Ignatius Martyr, Justin, and Irenaeus. Like all his Christian predecessors, he spoke historically of Jesus: thus he could and did assign human predicates to the Jesus the Son of God, and divine predicates to Jesus the Son of Mary. His theology rests upon the concretely historical union of Personal divinity and Personal humanity in the unique Person of Jesus the Christ, and avoids reference to abstract natures or essences. The “communication of idioms” was a liturgical commonplace from the first apostolic affirmation of the faith that Jesus is Lord. Implicit in the Nicene declaration of the Personal homoiousion of the Son with the Father, it was taught explicitly in the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus. Although the “clothing” idiom favored by the Antiochene theology remained in the Formula of Union, it is present there only to be transcended by the Formula’s magisterial proclamation of Mary’s motherhood of God, and the consequent consubstantiality of her Son “with us.” Eighteen years later the Council of Chalcedon reaffirmed the Ephesian doctrine of the communication of idioms and its corollary, that Jesus is consubstantial with us. The Council of Chalcedon further affirmed Jesus’ Personal consubstantiality is that of “one and the same Son,” of the Father, and of the Theotokos. This had been implicit in the Nicene doctrine of the Personal consubstantiality of Jesus which, invoking his Personal unity, could not but apply to his humanity as well as his divinity. Recognized at Ephesus as implicit in the Theotokos title given Mary and explicitly taught by the Formula of Union, it is again explicitly taught by the Symbol of Chalcedon.
More than two and a half centuries earlier, Tertullian had written into the Apologeticus the nuclear statement of the Personal unity of the Lord: duae substantiae, una Persona There he provided, and not only for the West, the persona-substantia distinction which removes ambiguity from the communication of idioms by ensuring that the unique agent of our salvation is the Person, at once divine and human, who is Jesus, the Lord.
We have seen that the distinctions Tertullian drew between the Personal divinity and Personal humanity, i.e., Jesus’ possession of the fullness of divinity and of humanity, and the unique, Personal agency of the Lord Jesus as our Redeemer, are written into the Chalcedonian Symbol. Tertullian refused to parcel out the causes of our redemption as between Jesus’ humanity and his divinity; these substances are not agents, but impersonal implications of Jesus’ offering to the Father of his One Sacrifice for the redemption of all creation.[172] In De Carne Christi Tertullian emphasizes the indignities undergone by Jesus, the Man who is God, before accepting the final indignity of death, which he conquered by the offering of his One Sacrifice to the Father, on the Altar and on the Cross. The author of our redemption is not a putatively nonhistorical Verbum of the Logos-sarx Christology, who by definition cannot die. Relying upon Irenaeus and Tertullian, the Chalcedonian Latin Christology rejected the futile Greek quest for a natural unity of the Trinity-immanent, pre-human, nonhistorical Logos with the human nature of Jesus at the level of nature, of physis, either despairing of it, with the Nestorian denial of Jesus’ divinity or, with Apollinarius, thinking to have achieved it, if at the cost of Jesus’ necessary submission to the immanent necessities of “nature” with consequent the denial of his divinity.
The Western Christological quaerens remained concrete, uncommitted to either of the speculative paradigms regnant in the East under the subordinationist influence of Eusebius of Caesarea, whether Logos-sarx or Logos-anthrōpos. Following Tertullian, the western Christology has been historical from the outset; it assumes the Personal historical unity of Jesus, as the God-Man or God-Son, with an unswerving insistence upon that Personal unity.of Jesus the Lord, fully God and fully man, the eternal Son of the Father, the historical Son of Mary. It is summarized in the Tome of Leo; thereby it entered into the Symbol of the Council of Chalcedon, whose Fathers recognized as normative the assertion by Irenaeus two and a half centuries earlier that Jesus is “one and the same Son” of the Father and of our Lady, the Theotokos.
Hippolytus is a near contemporary of Tertullian, and is closely associateed with him by reason of their common insistence upon the concrete distinction of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as Personae (Πρόσωπα, in Hippolytus’ Greek) within the divine and consequently Trinitarian substance. Further, they were both moral rigorists; both opposed the accommodation by the Popes of their time to the tensions between the demands of the Roman law and those inherent in Christian moral freedom, not least in marriage. Both wrote voluminously, Tertullian in the Latin of the African Church, Hippolytus in Greek which until the latter half of the third century was the language of Rome, where he spent his life. Despite the doubts of their orthodoxy by two Popes whose emphasis upon the divine unity placed both of them close to Monarchianism, Tertullian’s theological works are largely preserved, while those of Hippolytus have nearly vanished, due for the most part to the displacement of the Greek language by the Latin within the Roman world. By the end of the third century that sea-change was complete: the learned language of Rome had become Latin.
Hippolytus’ scholarly production, which may have been comparable to Origen’s [173]─had become increasingly neglected even in his own time, when Latin had began to displace Greek as the language of the Roman scholarship. That process, which was complete by the end of the third century, nearly removed Hippolytus from history. There exist no Roman records of his life or of his writings. Within a few decades of his martyrdom ca. 235 his works could be read by fewer and fewer Romans; there was less and less interest in them, even awareness of them, and a diminishing interest in translating or copying them. No particular effort was made in Rome to preserve such copies as existed. In fact, no Greek works by any of the third century Roman theologians have survived, apart from the papal correspondence between Dionysius the Great of Alexandria and Pope Sixtus II and Pope Dionysus, successive Bishops of Rome in mid-third century. Although Hippolytus was known and appreciated in the Hellenistic Orient, to the point that his works were copied into most of the Oriental languages, copies of them made at that time now exist mostly in fragments: After an exhaustive examination of all that is known of Hippolytus’ works, Marcel Richard sums up the result:
However, there exists no satisfactory edition of the fragments of this author, no warranted index of his vocabulary, no comprehensive study of his style and doctrine. It is not surprising, in these circumstances to discover a veritable anarchy of judgments bearing upon his literary heritage as well as upon his personality.[174]
This indecision persists, in spite of the devoted labor of many scholars, preeminent among them Marcel Richard, to discern and interpret what remains of Hippolytus’ work and, especially over the last two centuries, to recover what has been lost.
The problem posed to any study of Hippolytus’ Christology by the “véritable anarchie” by which M. Richard characterizes the academic appreciations of his life and work is evident. Such inquiry as is here undertaken cannot proceed without supposing the reality of its object, viz., the basic unity of Hippolytus’ theology. It is further evident that the unity postulated must be the raison d’être of the inquiry, its condition of possibility. If the unity presupposed is theological, and its content therefore intrinsically coherent, its investigation will entail a circularity of reasoning, a petitio principii undercutting the constructive use of its results.
The foundation, the a priori, of Catholic theological inquiry avoids this dilemma, for it is concrete rather than abstract, historical rather than speculative or methodological. The historicity of the personal quaerens intellectum that specifies theology as Catholic can only be personal participation in the liturgical celebration of the Church’s apostolic faith that Jesus is the Lord. The Church’s faith is historical, concrete, explicit, and sacramentally effective only in her liturgical worship of her Lord. This is the foundation of theology as opposed to the abstract speculation still dominating the studies of Hippolytus,[175] and it may be attributed to Hippolytus’ Christology without serious question. According to Photius,[176] Hippolytus described himself in his Syntagma as a disciple of Irenaeus, the pre-eminent Roman theologian at the dawn of the third century who, as earlier remarked, may have died in a raid upon Lyons by the victorious troops whom emperor Septimius Severus allowed to loot Lyons after defeating his rival, Decimus Clodius Albinus in the battle of “Lugdunum” (i.e., Lyons).
If Photius’ report is correct, Hippolytus will have been familiar with Irenaeus’ apostolic Christology, summed up in a famous formula, his Naming of Jesus “one and the same Son,” thus a Person at once human and divine, Jesus the Lord. However, Hippolytus’ subscription to the apostolic tradition does not rest on an arguable association with Irenaeus; it rests upon his ordination, around the turn of the third century, to offer the One Sacrifice in the Person of his Lord. This Eucharistic liturgy is at one with the apostolic tradition, the paradosis of I Cor. 11:23-26. The liturgical celebration of the communication of divine and human idioms in Jesus, the Personal object of the Church’s faith as expressed in and sustained by her liturgical worship which constitutes the oral apostolic tradition, the Eucharistic liturgy.
The present examination of Hippolytus’ doctrine therefore assumes Hippolytus‘ unreflective but liturgically explicit enlistment in the “Spirit Christology” of the third century. This Christology, apostolic in its foundation,[177] was effectively universal in his time, and consequently may be taken to have been foundational for his exegetical and theological insight.
A caveat is in order here. We are long accustomed to a variety of Christologies, each specified by its methodology: i.e., Augustinian, Thomist, Scotist, Suarezian, Salesian, etc. In the dawn of the third century, and for two decades thereafter, until Origen wrote the Peri Archon, theology and doctrine were all but indistinguishable. Tertullian and Hippolytus opposed the quasi-Monarchianism of the popes of the early third century with doctrinal arguments, not with speculative constructs. When, with Origen, theology became what Anselm, eight centuries later, would term “Fides quaerens intellectum,” it did so by a methodological, i.e., hypothetical identification of a systematic construct with the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, the “one and the same Son,” who is fully human and fully divine. This conviction, later expressed as the communication of idioms (i.e., Names) in Christ, rests upon a personal conversion from the cosmological wisdom of the pagan world, by which the innate quest for the one, the good and the beautiful becomes always a flight from history to the empyrion, a realm unsullied by the fragmentation inseparable from history.
Hippolytus had no use for the Greek cosmology. While his talent was not speculative, he recognized the incompatibility of that pagan wisdom with his Christian quaerens intellectum, which looked to no ideal eschaton, but in the here and now affirmed the truth of Christ, the mystery of faith.
Further, given the personal distaste for speculation which Richard has remarked in Hippolytus’ works, his Christology can only be that which in his time was taken for granted: that which was proclaimed by the apostles, as taught by the apostolic Fathers, and by the bishops of the teaching Church: viz., that Jesus Christ is Lord. This faith is radically Christological. Its Trinitarian content was liturgically assured; only in a century later would it challenged by Arius’ denial that Jesus is the “one and the same Son. Arius’ loyal supporter, Eusebius of Caesarea, similarly found that “communication of idioms” incompatible with the “common sense” identification of the Father with the divine substance, and consequently subordinated the Son to him. Thus condemned by the foremost academic authority in the Orient, the Spirit Christology was thereafter regarded as Sabellian by most of the Oriental bishops. Led by Eusebius, they denied the authority of Nicaea, thereby enlisting in that submission of the Catholic faith to imperial power which characterized the Orient, Alexandria apart, for most of the fourth century.
In the third century, the foundation of theological inquiry was as it remains today, the Church’s apostolic faith that Jesus is the Lord. The faith of the Church has its historical presentation in her liturgical worship, her celebration of the redemptive event of his One Sacrifice. Participation in this celebration prompts and sustains the fides quaerens intellectum that is Catholic theology, the sole object of whose quaerens is the inexhaustible Mysterium fidei, the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Hippolytus’ fidelity to the apostolic tradition is secure.
Marcel Richard notes that Hippolytus is the last Roman theologian to write in Greek until Pope Zachary, in the middle of the eighth century.[178] Hippolytus was a priest of Rome; there is no record of his living elsewhere. References to him as a bishop, as by Eusebius and Jerome, are without foundation. M. Richard thinks it probable that Hippolytus served as a priest of Rome under Victor (d. 198); if so, he could not have been much less than thirty when Victor died. This is consistent with the year conventionally assigned his birth, 170, Hippolytus has been accused of being the first Antipope─an indictment for which Richard finds no foundation. For the rest, his life and personality are known only through what remains of his works. This knowledge was meager until the discovery, in 1842, of his Refutatio Omnium Heresium, and its publication in 1851, which afforded an insight otherwise lacking into his doctrine and also his personality.
Hippolytus is perhaps best known as the author of the Apostolic Tradition, but Richard has questioned this attribution on grounds difficult to refute.[179]
A few of his exegetical works survive in their integrity: the Commentary on Daniel; the Commentary on the Beginning of the Canticle of Canticles; the Treatise On the Christ and the Anti-Christ; which quotes the Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles; a two-volume Commentary On the blessings of Isaac and Jacob (Gen. 27 and 49) and On the blessings of Moses (Deut. 33). Richard lists fifteen other exegetical works, known whether by their fragments, by the citation of their titles on the famous statue erected in honor of Hippolytus,[180] or by their mention in the works of other authors, notably Eusebius of Caesarea, Jerome, and Photius.
Of the fragmented exegeses of the Old Testament named by Richard we list here those which he frequently cites or quotes. These are: On the Hexaemeron; On that which follows the Hexaemeron; On the blessings of Balaam (Numb. 22-23), On the Great Ode; On the Judges (whose fragments Richard has edited); On Eleana and Anna, On the Psalms, and On the Proverbs (of which Richard has provided a new edition). Richard observes that, of the books of the New Testament, Hippolytus seems to have written only the Commentary upon the Apocalypse mentioned by Jerome. Other possible or likely references to it cannot be verified. There also remain fourteen fragments of a treatise or homily upon the eschatological discourse in Mt. 24:15-34, as preserved in Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopian catenae. There are also excerpts, preserved by Theodoret of Cyr, of the texts of two homilies, On the distribution of the talents (Mt. 25:14-31) and On the Two Thieves (Lk. 23:39-43).
Richard then turns to Hippolytus’ other exegetical works. The first title he mentions is inscribed on the base of the statue of Hippolytus: Ἀπόδειξις χρονων τοῦ πάσχα καὶ τὰ ἐν τῷ πίνακι.(Proof of the date of Easter on a little tablet) This is a treatise on the dating of Easter beginning with 222, the first year of the youthful and short-lived Emperor Severus Alexander. This chronology has no immediate pertinence to the present study of Hippolytus’ Christology, although it was of considerable interest to Hippolytus. The same may be said of another of his works on biblical chronology, cited on “the statue” as the Χρονικῶν (Chronicon); however, Richard understands both to cast light on the lost Hexaemeron and on its sequel, That which follows the Hexaemeron; he is intent upon their reconstitution from the fragmentary evidence at hand, for there are no other sources for Hippolytus’ doctrine of creation.
The third work listed is The Syntagma Against all the Heresies, described by Eusebius as a youthful prologue to the Refutation of all Heresies. Apart from this reference to it by Eusebius, the further description of the Syntagma by Photius permit its partial reconstruction by identifying excerpts of it from the works of Epiphanius and other ancient authors.
Fourth is the Treatise on the Universe, Its title appears on “the statue,” and is mentioned in the Refutation, x, 22. Contra Nautin, Richard maintains the attribution of this work to Hippolytus to be irrefutable. This work also was read by Photius,[181] who described it as published in two volumes, and as attributed variously to Justin, Irenaeus and Caius. Four fragments of the first volume have been recently found, edited, and published. They confirm Hippolytus radical hostility to the Greek speculation upon whose futilities these fragments comment. The second volume is known only from a remark on the creation of the firmament quoted in the De opificio mundi by Jean Philipon, from another brief extract by Photius in his notice of the book, and from an important fragment from K. Holl’s edition of the‘ “florilèges damascéniens” which provides the conclusion of the work. It treats of the last things: Hades, resurrection, judgment and paradise, which Richard believes to clearly have been inspired by the Ad Autolycum of Theophilus of Antioch.
Richard goes on to discuss the Refutation of All Heresies which, with Eusebius, he considers to be the continuation of the De Universo. He understands Hippolytus to suppose the generation of the Son to be the pre-condition of the Father’s will to create, but not to the prejudice of the Son’s generation as eternal, upon which Hippolytus also insists, probably influenced by Justin Martyr. Evans has observed of Hippolytus that he is strongly influenced by Tertullian: it is through him that Tertullian’s designation of the members of the Trinity as “persons” was handed on to the Greek tradition,[182] although Prestige is of another mind.[183] With respect to the Incarnation, Hippolytus bitterly opposes the Sabellian Patripassionism; his criticism uses the clothing imagery which Tertullian adapted in the polemic against Praxean in Adversus Praxean 27.
Richard reads Hippolytus to have held precisely that two-stage Logos-sarx Christology which Grillmeier has attributed to him (see endnote 121), viz., the distinguishing of a pre-incarnate Word who takes flesh from the Virgin and becomes the human Jesus, which he names the Logos ensarkos. This interpretation would lock Hippolytus into the Monophysite versus Diophysite dilemma were he speculatively inclined. However, Hippolytus’ use of kata pneuma, kata sarx is historical. It does not distinguish a pre-human Logos from an enfleshed Logos, but refers to the “one and the same Son” of the Spirit Christology as spelled out by Irenaeus, whom Grillmeier thinks may have been Hippolytus’ mentor. However in the end Hippolytus’ theological exposition of the apostolic tradition has the coherence of a catechesis rather than a system. Like Irenaeus, Hippolytus stressed the full humanity of Jesus, his full divinity, and his Personal unity. Like Ignatius Martyr, he referred to the preexistent Christ, the subject of the Father’s Mission, as “Spirit.”[184] Like Tertullian in his concession to Praxeas’ Monarchianism in the Adversus Praxean, Hippolytus assigned distinct Personal activities and manifestations to Jesus’ humanity insofar as these betookened weakness, and to his divinity, insofar as betokening the power and sublimity of God. The attribution of agency to the natures of Jesus rather than to his Person is an error which will echo down through succeeding centuries to our own time; it even found its way into the preparatory document for the Roman Synod on the Eucharist in 2005..[185]
Hippolytus makes a clear distinction between the eternal generation of the Logos by the Father, and his historical generation at the Incarnation. Finally, he affirms the divinity of the Holy Spirit, but offered no clear catechesis concerning the Holy Spirit.
Nothing is known of Hippolytus’ youth apart from what can be gathered from his writings. He is clearly the product of a Hellenic culture; Richard denies any Hellenistic influence upon his Greek; this would be consistent with Photius’ report of reading a lost work wherein Hippolytus described himself as a disciple of Irenaeus; Photius also praised his style for its disinterest in Attic purity.[186]. Hippolytus had certainly read Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses; he quotes it extensively in the Refutatio. He also quotes the Apologists, Justin and Theophilus of Antioch.
Although Richard mentions Hippolytus’ quotations of Justin, he provides no examples. This is rather odd. Justin was by far the most important and prolific of the Greek Apologists. While Richard properly names Melito’s development of typological exegesis, Justin was a contemporary of Melito, and exploited typological exegesis at length in his Dialogue with Trypho. Further, Justin lived, taught, and was martyred in Rome. His work could not but have been more familiar to Hippolytus than that of Melito, for Sardis in western Turkey was distanced from him by more than six hundred miles. Evans believes Tertullian, in similarly distant Carthage, to have been heavily influenced by Justin.[187] Hippolytus can scarcely have been less so.
Richard further states that Hippolytus rejected the allegorical exegesis of the contemporary Alexandrine theologians, Origen and Clement. This observation is anachronistic. Richard confounds “allegory” with Philo’s dehistoricizing exegesis of the Hebrew scriptures, but no such dehistoricization can be attributed to Clement or to Origen. Both men upheld the Spirit Christology and the historical communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ. In that historical context, dominant in the third century, typology and allegory were never mutually exclusive, i.e., historical typology as opposed to nonhistorical allegory. Henri de Lubac’s Exégèse Médiévale entirely rejects the distinction which Richard places between historical typological exegesis and the allegorical exegesis initiated by Philo Judaeus. De Lubac defends Origen’s allegorical exegesis, however labeled, precisely as historical, and holds Origen to have taught that exegesis to the Middle Ages. Hippolytus’ use of language is always historical; he does not speculate. The distinction which Richard places between a nonhistorical Logos asarkos and a historical Logos ensarkos is mistaken, as will be shown.
Without putting in issue Hippolytus’ preference for typological exegesis, his Commentary on Daniel contains a passage which W. Jurgens has translated as follows:
And she said to her maids, “Bring me oil (1). Indeed, faith and love prepare oil and cleansing unguents for those who are washed. But what were these unguents, if not the commands of the Holy Word? And what the oil, if not the power of the Holy Spirit? It is with these, after the washing (2), that believers are anointed as with a sweet-smelling oil.
1. Dan. 13 :17 (or, in the Septuagint, Sus. 1:37). In the passage quoted, it is Susanna who is speaking.
2. I.e., Baptism.
Jurgens, Early Fathers,I, 163-64.
No doubt Hippolytus regards this exegesis as conforming to Melito’s and Justin’s typology, but its distinction from allegory then becomes elusive.
Richard quotes Photius’ praise of Hippolytus’s De Universo, of which only fragments remain, for naming the Word specifically “Christ,” and cites his mention of Hippolytus’ claim in it to have been a disciple of Irenaeus. Although M. Richard notes Hippolytus’ frequent references to the Adversus Haereses, he does not mention any influence of Irenaeus’ Christology in Hippolytus’ works; notably, he says nothing of Irenaeus’s frequent classic assertion in the Adversus Haereses that Jesus is “one and the same Son.”
Richard regards the Refutatio Omnium Heresium as a continuation of Hippolytus’ theology of creation, a theology which he has synthesized from the fragments of the De Universo and of the Commentary on the Hexaemeron. If so, there is reason to suppose that their subject is “creation in Christ,” for Hippolytus is familiar with Col. 1:15.[188]
Richard describes Hippolytus’ talent as narrative, even catechetical, rather than speculative. He notes his clearly personal antipathy to the speculation of the Greek philosophers. In his youth he had acquired that moderate familiarity with Greek speculation which appears in what is known of the De Universo and is resumed in the first chapter of its sequel, the Refutatio Omnium Haeresium. Hippolytus was sufficiently repelled by his exposure to Greek wisdom to prompt his negative reaction to speculation as such; this, in Richard’s view, is reflected in his refusal of allegorical exegesis in favor of typological.
Richard finds Hippolytus’ Commentary on the beginning of the Canticle of Canticles (more usually cited as the Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles) to be marked by a degree of immaturity in style and treatment not found in his other works; and concludes that this commentary is his earliest work, written about 200, shortly before Emperor Septimius Severus, a persecutor of the Church, forbade Jewish and Christian proselytism in an edict published about 202. Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles, and his treatise On Christ and the Antichrist were both written before his Commentary on Daniel, in which Hippolytus mentions the local envy aroused by his growing reputetion. Hippolytus wrote this work shortly after Septimius Severus published his edict. A decade later, in 212, Hippolytus’ reputation was sufficient to attract Origen to Rome, where Eusebius reports his hearing Hippolytus preach a homily .”On the Praise of our Lord and Savior.”[189]
Septimius Severus died in 209, to be succeeded by his son, Caracalla, who was assassinated in 217. After an internecine struggle, the throne was occupied by Elagabalus, who died in 222. Upon his death, Severus Alexander, then only thirteen, became the emperor of Rome. His mother, the Empress Julia Mammaea, who had become interested in Christianity, if not to the point of conversion, evidently sought instruction from Hippolytus, as a few years later she would she would seek instruction from Origen (Crouzel, Origen, 17). Hippolytus anticipated Origen’s instruction to the Empress with a Letter to the Empress Mamaea, containing a Treatise on the Resurrection, in which Hippolytus had drawn upon the pertinent texts in First and Second Corinthians. It is evident, as Richard observes, that he had a positive relation to the imperial throne. The Empress was intent upon raising her imperial son to become a cultivated, liberally educated adult, capable of recognizing and appreciating intelligence and learning wherever he found it, among Christians as elsewhere. During the thirteen years (222-235) in which Severus Alexander reigned as emperor, the persecution of Christians ceased, and Hippolytus entered upon the last and most productive period of his life. He was then in his early fifties. This final period of his life ended with the assassination of the young emperor and his mother by his soldiers in 235. Toward the end of that period Hippolytus wrote the Refutatio Omnium Heresium, whose ninth Chapter recites his dispute with Pope Callistus. who in that year vanished. Hippolytus was at peace with Urban, who in 230 succeeded Callistus as Bishop of Rome; .
Hippolytus had by then served under three Popes: Victor (189-98), Zephyrinus (199-217), Callistus (217-22,) and now Urban who would be succeeded by Pontian in 230. Upon the death of Severus Alexander in 235, his successor, Maximin, resumed Septimius Severus’ persecution of Christians. He sentenced Hippolytus and Pontian to effective death sentences of hard labor in the mines of Sardinia. There, probably within the year, they both died. In the year following, 236-37, Pontian’s successor, Anterus, had their remains recovered and returned to Rome, where they both were acclaimed as martyrs. Richard notes that there is no reason to suppose that Hippolytus’ feud with Callistus had any significant impact upon the unity of the Roman faithful, for it did not color his relations with Callistus’ successsors, Urban and Pontian. While Callistus had left behind him a group of Roman clergy loyal to his doctrine and policy, Hippolytus pays them scant attention in the Refutatio, which reports no quarrel with them, nor with Urban or Pontian. The close association of his own martyrdom with that of Pontian was more than temporal: Anterus, Pontian’s successor honored them equally as martyred for their faith.
Hippolytus’ early works dealt with the then current heresies, they do not mention the modalism which later he would so vigorously condemn in Zephyrinus and Callistus. That heresy is first mentioned in his Commentary upon the Blessings of Moses, written during a time when the Church was at peace, presumably after the death of Emperor Septimius Severus in 209.[190] Epigonus, a disciple of Noetus, introduced modalism in Rome, and converted Cleomenes, who became its enthusiastic advocate. Richard believes that for a time Cleomenes influenced Zephyrinus, perhaps by way of his deacon, Callistus, whom Hippolytus regarded as simply a modalist.[191]
With the death of Zephyrinus in 217 and the succession of Callistus to the See of Rome, i.e., to the papacy, Hippolytus’ focused his wrath upon Callistus; he had long suspected him of persuading an incompetent Zephyrinus not to condemn Cleomenes’ modalism. It is at this point of Callistus succession that he is accused of rejecting the legitimacy of Callistus election, and asserting his own authority, as the first anti-Pope.[192] The only source of contemporary information on this matter is Hippolytus’ Refutatio, which was discovered and recognized as his work only in 1851. While the Refutatio certainly maligns Callistus, Richard finds no basis in it for the accusation that Hippolytus beca,e an anti-pope. It is evident that Hippolytus’ frustration with Zephyrinus and Callistus prior to Callistus’ election led him to a detestation of Callistus, but rather on the basis of personal contempt than a doctrinal dissent for, once elected, Callistus in fact did what Hippolytus accuses him of persuading Zephyrinus not to do: he condemned Sabellius. However, Callistus’ condemnation of the prototypical modalism of Sabellius was not on the basis of having himself grasped an alternative to Monarchianism. He still viewed the divine monarchy as incapable of accommodating Hippolytus’ insistence that the divine Father and his erternal Son, the Word, must be objectively distinct from each other within the divine unity. Callistus read Hippolytus’ assertion of that distinction as ditheism, a placing a division within the Monarchian unity of One God.
The excuse has been made for Callistus that he considered Hippolytus’ Trinitarianism to be subordinationist, the positing of a substantial rather than Personal distinction between the Son and the Father. This is unwarranted; no third century theologian understood the divinity to be divisible. The subordinationist heresy began with Arius in Alexandria almost a century later, and the crisis it then raised lasted more than sixty years, ending only with the First Council of Constantinople in 381.
The terminology developed by Tertullian and Hippolytus, Persona-Substantia, prosōpon-ousia, to distinguish what is objectively three in the Trinity from what is objectively one, required a hundred and sixty years to reach a measure of clarity. Tertullian had simply asserted the distinction with no attempt to explain it, and Hippolytus’ detestation of metaphysics acquits him a priori of any temptation to trespass upon the mystery of the Trinity. Callistus was concerned to uphold the faith against a radical innovation. He had no sympathy for the Sabellian modalism, but neither had he any for the alternative Trinitarianism asserted by Tertullian and Hippolytus. Since they asserted it without any attempt to explain it, Callistus’ rejection of it was to an extent justified; he was evidently unfamiliar with the Trinitarian doctrine taught by the Athenagoras and Theophilus of Antioch fifty years earlier, upon which Tertullian and Hippolytus relied.
Hippolytus’ quarrel with Callistus was not simply Trinitarian. Like Tertullian, a moral rigorist, Hippolytus also condemned Callistus’ mitigation of a harsh penitential discipline which Hippolytus regarded as apostolic, not open to revision. Callistus had authorized absolution from the major sins committed after Baptism; As did Tertullian, Hippolytus looked upon such sins by baptized Christians as incapable of absolution. A few years later, Cyprian had the same difficulty, it prompted his an anticipation of the Donatist heresy.
Richard has pointed to expressions of Hippolytus’ personal distaste for speculation in the De Universo and their continuation in its sequel, the Refutatio Omnium Heresium.[193] It is then unlikely that Hippolytus’ Christology is a personal construct, for his expressions of it never attained a more than catechetical statement of the faith that in his time was taken for granted, i.e., the Christology proclaimed by the apostles, by the apostolic Fathers, and by the teaching Church: viz., faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, whose hallmark is the unity of the fullness of humanity and divinity in the one Son sent by the Father for the remission of our sins.
Hippolytus’ firm belief in the generation of the Word before all things has permitted him what Richard holds to be a very sound (saine) Christology. In fact, it begins with the origin of the world and is extended to the glorious Parousia of the Christ. No doubt, it is at the end of times that God has sent the Word, his Son, his well-beloved child, to take flesh in the womb of the Virgin to save a sinful humanity, but this central event of the divine economy and of the history of the world was already foreseen on the sixth day of the creation (see § 6) [194]
Richard finds the focus of Hippolytus’ Christology in his generation by the Father antecedent to the creation of the world:
The word has left the heart of the Father, first-born and only-begotten of God, Child or God, Wisdom of God, Christ, king and judge of the universe. He was manifested s such as well before as after the incarnation[195]
He finds justification for this assertion, as it bears upon the eternal Sonship of the Word, in a passage from the Commentary on Daniel:
“The Father, having thus submitted all to his own Son, that which is in the heavens and that which is on the earth and that which is under the earth, has shown everywhere that he was the first-born, in order that it be evident that he is second after the Father, Son of God, first-born before the angels, first-born of a Virgin, in order that he be seen recreating in himself the first-created Adam, first-born of the dead in order that he become the pledge of the resurrection. “[196]
Here is introduced the narrative mode that typifies Hippolytus’ Christology. It is of the first importance that its coherence be recognized to be doctrinal or, as Richard has put it, catechetical. The narrative, simply as narrative, has the coherence required for its intelligibility, but possesses no more systematic unity than, e.g., the Acts of the Apostles. Richard frequently refers to Hippolytus’ theology as systematic, but the unity of Hippolytus’ catechesis is rather doctrinal than theological. The derivation of doctrinal conclusions from a theological system postulated a priori cannot but risk imposing upon the Hippolytus catechetical narrative a distortion which, ignoring its doctrinal unity, places Hippolytus in a theological community of discourse that is not his and can only contribute to the existing anarchical criticism of his works which Richard has pointed out.
Hippolytus’ narrative recites his personal internalization of the apostolic tradition: viz., the good creation of humanity that is in Christ, the fall of the first man, Adam; the consequent corruption of the good creation, and its restoration, its recreation or remolding, by the incarnation of Jesus the Lord. In this doctrinal narrative Hippolytus distinguishes the eternal generation of the Son from his Incarnation. The doctrinal unity of the narrative is evident. In agreement with the tradition, Hippolytus affirms the Personal pre-existence of Jesus the Lord when he affirms him have been sent by the Father.[197] He affirms that Jesus was conceived by and born of the Virgin Mary,[198] and supposes without question that the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament. His surviving exegetical works show him intent on the vindication of that conviction.[199].
Hippolytus understands the Father’s eternal generation of the Son to be prior to all creation, and understands creation to be a single act by the Father which leaves him unchanged; sometimes he associates the Son with this one act.
One understands, however, that Hippolytus wished to affirm in the first place, against Gnosticism and Marcionism, his faith in one sole creator God. Therefore he chose to proceed by successive steps: ch. 32, God the sole creator; ch. 33, the Father as creator by the Word in one sole (act) “τὸ κατά ἕν”.
This arrangement shows that, in the thought of the author, the generation of the Word was linked in some fashion to the creation. It is necessary to note, however, that the text does not say this explicitly. It teaches us only that this generation was anterior to all created things.[200]
The successive stages of Hippolytus’ narrative recite the economy of salvation as it was preached in his time, by bishops loyal to the apostolic tradition, which knew no other Logos than Jesus the Lord. Their opponents were the Jews who rejected the Church’s proclamation that Jesus is the Lord, the Gnostics whose dualism denies the goodness of creation, and thus the divinity of the Creator, and the Marcionite anti-Semitic perversion of Christianity on quasi-gnostic grounds.
Richard has undertaken the reconstruction of Hippolytus’ lost Commentary on the Hexaemeron from the consonance of its dispersed fragments with Hippolytus’ later works, and from the Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea and from St. Jerome. Confident that he has grasped its Christology, he understands Hippolytus’ belief in the eternal generation of the Son to underwrite a concretely historical Christology which begins with the origin of the world and extends to the Parousia.
However, the hermeneutic M. Richard employs in this integration of Hippolytus’ Christology is the speculative Thomism of the Pars Tertia of the Summa Theologiae, in which St. Thomas takes for granted that the agent of our redemption is not Jesus the Christ, but the eternal Son, sensu negante. On this basis St. Thomas imposed an Aristotelian version of the Logos-sarx analysis upon the Spirit Christology of the first four Councils. It is in this light that Richard accepts Grillmeier’s “two-stage” analysis of Hippolytus’ Christology and with him supposes a passage from a pre-incarnate to an incarnate condition, which he labels as from the condition of “Verbe ἄσαρκος,” whose eternal generation Richard understands Hippolytus to have designated “κατά πνεῦμα,” as opposed to the Virgin’s conception of the Christ, the Incarnate Word, whose generation he understands Hippolytus to have termed κατά σάρκα:
“The Word was incarnate and became man and son of man in taking flesh of the Virgin Mary and of the Holy Spirit. Most often, Hippolytus is satisfied to mention the virginal conception. But some very clear texts show that he attributed a large role to the Holy Spirit in this conception. He specifies three times that the Christ was conceived by the Virgin “not by an insemιnation, but of the Holy Spirit.” (De Ant. viii; In ben., p. 151 et 270), and employs sometimes the expression “of the Virgin and of the Holy Spirit” (De Ant. xliv; In ben., p. 76, 5-6; 169, 2-3; In. Psalm. § 22; In Prov., frag. 55) In his typology of the weaving profession (De Ant. iv) the woof is the “holy flesh woven in the Spirit”; in that (typology) of the ark of the covenant, the body of the Christ is “plated with a pure gold in the interior by the Word, on the exterior by the Holy Spirit.” (In Dan. iv, 24, 3), or ornamented in the interior by the Word and protected on the exterior by the Holy Spirit.” (In Eleanam, Pseudo-Irenée, fg. viii).
This generation of the Word κατά σάρκα (according to the flesh) is sometimes opposed to his first generation before all things, called, in this case, κατα πνεῦμα (according to the spirit. (In ben., p. 76, 7-9; 110, 1-2). Σαρξ (Flesh) is by far the word most often used by Hippolytus to designate the humanity of Christ, but sometimes he uses τὸ σῶμα (the body).
Apart from one or two exceptions (In Dan. iv, 37, 2 ; In Balaam, fg. 37), he reserves this word (σῶμα) in part to his typology of the ark of the covenant. (In Dan. iv, 24, 3 et 5 ; In Eleanum, pseudo-Irénée, fg. viii ; Ad reginam, Symbolae osloenses, t. 38, p. 79), and in part to the body of Christ after his death (In duos latrones i-iii ; In magnam Odam iii ; In Samsonem I, vi-vii ; In Prov. fg. 52). When these words (σαρξ, τὸ σῶμα) do not suffice, he employs ἄνθρωπος (In Dan. ii, 27, 6 ; iv, 39, 5 ; In Cant. ii, 23 ; In ben., p. 38, 2 , etc.) The rest of the vocabulary used by Hippolytus to describe the incarnation of the Word is most varied, but also simple and concrete. The only “technical” terms encountered in his commentaries are the participle σαρκοθείς (In ben. p. 36 1, et 76, 6) and the substantive ἐνανθρῴπεσις (the Incarnation or, the Lord’s dwelling among us) (In Dan. iv, 39, 4 ; De distrib. talent.)”[201].
Here Richard displays a clear failure to grasp of the meaning of “σαρξ” in the context of the Spirit Christology proper to any third century theologian; it is simply that found in Jn. 1:14, where it designates the Incarnation of the primordial Jesus, the event in which he “became flesh,” i.e., in which he Personally took upon himself our fallen condition, our submission to death and to all that accompanies that fragmentation ‘unto dust.’ In Rom. 5, Paul contrasts existence according to the fallenness of flesh, κατᾲ σὰρκα, to existence according to the spirit, κατᾲ πνεῦμα: equivalently, existence in Christo. The Pauline anthropology affirms the riven character of our historical existence, as arising out of our twin personal solidarities, viz., with the dying “flesh” of the first Adam, and with the risen “one flesh” of the New Covenant, instituted by the One Sacrifice of the second Adam, the risen conqueror of death, the “life-giving Spirit” (I Cor. 15:45) who for freedom has made us free.
The contrast upon which Paul is intent is that between our unfree historical solidarity κατά σάρκα, i.e., our unfree submission to the dynamic disunity of “sarx,” “flesh,” and our free sacramental solidarity κατά πνεῦμα with the free unity, the Eucharistic celebration of the nuptial “one flesh” of the risen Lord with his bridal Church.
Richard’s failure to recognize Hippolytus’ loyalty to the apostolic tradition is further illustrated by his assertion that Hippolytus uses both “σαρξ” (flesh) and “τὸ σῶμα” (the body) abstractly to designate the “humanity” of Christ This amounts to reading into Hippolytus a rejection of the communication of idioms in the one and the same Son. “Logos sarx egeneto” is said of the primordial Jesus; it is he, not his “humanity,” who “became flesh” in such wise that he is Personally “flesh,” Personally mortal, Personally the subject of the kenōsis which in Phil. 2:6-7 Paul ascribes to the primordially pre-existent Jesus: i.e., his taking on of the form of a slave.
Richard observes that Hippolytus uses “σαρξ” and “τὸ σῶμα” alike impersonally, the former to designate Christ’s “humanity,” the latter to denote the dead body of Christ on the Cross or, typologically, his body as signed by the Ark of the Covenant. However, the flesh of the living Christ is his Person, not his “humanity;” nor, a fortiori, is the body of the dead Christ his “humanity.” Hippolytus did not deal with abstractions; his exegesis displays no speculative interest, as Richard has stressed: he is concerned for the concretely Personal historicity of his Lord. M. Richard’s conception of the κατά πνεῦμα, κατά σὰρκα polarity, in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, is a radical distortion of the apostolic Christology, which knows no non-human Christ, but only Jesus the Lord. Hippolytus affirms the Word’s Personal unity, sent by the Father, the primordially integral Jesus of the Prologue of the Gospel of John, and of Phil. 2:5-13, the Person, at once human and divine, who became flesh, who emptied himself of his primordial dignity to assume the form of a slave, the Son whom Mary conceived and bore, who at the Last Supper and on the Cross offered the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed, restoring the primordial integrity which was ours “in the Beginning.”.
The distinction Richard has placed between the historical Jesus and the eternal Son, whether as κατᾲ σαρξ versus κατᾲ πνεùμα or as the incarnate Word versus the Word ἄσαρκος, is inherent in Grillmeier’s “two-stage” distortion of Hippolytus’ apostolic Christology. Grillmeier’s separation of the historical polarity at once joining and distinguishing flesh and spirit in Paul’s anthropology abstracts them from history; thereby Christ’s Personal humanity, his human Person, becomes an abstract category, a “second substance,” viz., “humanity,” and his Personal divinity, equally dehistoricized, becomes the absolute eternal Word, incapable of incarnation, to whom the communication of idioms cannot apply.
But the concrete polarity of flesh and spirit in the Christ is their reciprocity, their irreducibility and their mutual causality, at once historical and anagogical. In our fallen history, this polarity is Eucharistically realized. It is: only by his institution of the Eucharistic Sacrifice at the Last Supper that Jesus’ death upon the Cross transcends history in such wise as to reveal him to be its Beginning and its End, and it is only his Eucharistic immanence in history that renders it a history of salvation whose historicity is the worship of the Church, the foundation of the apostolic tradition, itself radically Eucharistic, the continual celebration of the faith that Jesus is the Lord.
Nonetheless, Richard would read this dehistoricization into the text of Hippolytus:
The human name of the incarnate Word, Jesus, is rarely used by Hippolytus.
He employs it only in the New Testament expression “the name of Jesus” (In ben. p. 188, 3 ; In Dan. ii, 34, 3), in two allusions to the events of the Gospel (In ben., p. 64, 10 ; In Magnam Odam iii) and when his typology demands it (In ben, p. 322, 4 (Josué), In Dan, i, 11, 5 (10 jours), In Dan. ii, 27, 6 (18 ans). He joins it sometimes to Χριστός in solemn formulae or those inspired by the New Testament (De Ant. vi, lxi, lxiv; In Dan. i, 13, 9 ; iv, 34, 4 ; iv, 60, 3 ; In principium Isaiae). In return, he uses very frequently the divine names of the Word: the Logos, the Son of God, the Christ, the Lord, to which he occasionally joins the Saviour, which directly concerns the redemptive activity of the Incarnate Word. (citation needed, see following paragraph.
The standard English translation of Hippolytus’ very early treatise On Christ and the antiChrist (ca. 200) is easily available,[202] and permits an examination of Hippolytus’ use of Χριστός , whether “in solemn formulae or those inspired by the New Testament” in De Ant. vi, lxi, and lxiv.
Now, as our Lord Jesus Christ, who is also God, was prophesied of under the figure of a lion, on account of His royalty and glory, in the same way have the Scriptures also aforetime spoken of Antichrist as a lion on account of his tyranny and violence. For the deceiver seeks to liken himself in all things to the Son of God. Christ is a lion, so Antichrist is also a lion; Christ is a king, John 18:37 so Antichrist is also a king. The Savior was manifested as a lamb; John 1:29 so he too, in like manner will appear as a lamb, though within he is a wolf. The Savior came into the world in the circumcision, and he will come in the same manner.
De Ant. lxi; the Church, as presented in Apoc. 12;
And the Words, upon her head a crown of twelve stars, refer to the twelve apostles by whom the Church was founded. And those, she, being with child, cries, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered, mean that the Church will not cease to bear from her heart the Word that is persecuted by the unbelieving in the world. And she brought forth, he (John) says, a man-child, who is to rule all the nations, by which is meant that the Church, always bringing forth Christ, the perfect man-child of God, who is declared to be God and man, becomes the instructor of all the nations. And the words, her child was caught up into God and to His throne, signify that he who is always born of her is a heavenly king, and not an earthly, even as David also declared of old when he said, The liord said unto my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I make Your enemies Your footstool. And the dragon, he says, saw and persecuted the woman which brought forth the man-child. And to the woman were given two wings of the great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent. That refers to the one thousand two hundred and three-score days (the half of the week) during which the tyrant is to reign and persecute the Church, which flees from city to city, and seeks concealment in the wilderness among the mountains, possessed of no other defense than the two wings of the great eagle, that is to say, the faith of Jesus Christ, who, in stretching forth His holy hands on the holy tree, unfolded two wings, the right and the left, and called to him all who believed upon him, and covered them as a hen her chickens. For by the mouth of Malichi also He speaks thus: and unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in His wings. (emphasis added)
De Ant. lxvii:
These things, then, I have set shortly before you, O Theophilus, drawing them from Scripture itself, in order that, maintaining in faith what is written, and anticipating the things that are to be, you may keep yourself void of offence both toward God and man, looking for that blessed hope and appearing of our God and Savior, when, having raised the saints among us, He will rejoice with them, glorifying the Father. To him be the glory unto endless ages of the ages. Amen.
Ibid.
There can be no question that Hippolytus here has in view the historical Jesus the Lord
®® The Human Titles of Christ
Insofar as Richard is concerned, there are no human titles of Christ. He insists that the primary reference of these titles is to the Eternal Word, apart from Incarnation, i.e, the Word “ἄσαρκος:”, which is to say, the dehistoricized Christ of the Thomist theological tradition:
It is true that Hippolytus employes most often the New Testament expression “Child of God” (παῖς θεοῢ) à propos of the incarnate Word rather than of the Word “ἄσαρκος.”. Nonetheless this expression was for him a divine title of the Christ, a synonym of “Son of God.”[203]
In support of this assertion Richard invokes a passage from a commentary on Gen. 49 in which Hippolytus refers to “the holy first-born child of God:”
“But who was Jacob, and Israel other than the holy first-born child of God?” [204]
This excerpt from In ben., p. 66-67, does not support the desired attribution of “παῖς τοῦ θεοῦ” to the “Verbe ἄσαρκος“ There is no reason to suppose, as Richard does, that Hippolytus understands “the holy first-born child of God” other than as usual, i.e., “à propos of the incarnate Word rather than of the “Word ἄσαρκος.” M. Richard’s quick identification of “παῖς τοῦ θεοῦ” as a title of eternal Son, the Word “without flesh,” is an implicit denial of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ. There is no division in the Person of Christ which would permit distinguishing his titles between “ἄσαρκος,“ and as Incarnate. The apostolic Christology knows no such division in Jesus the Lord, and there is no reason to think Hippolytus to have abandoned that tradition.
As Richard has pointed out, Hippolytus is intent upon an exegesis of the Old Testament as prophetic of Jesus the Christ, as later Origen would be. To read Hippolytus as dissociating Jesus’ eternal and historical generations as κατά πνεῦμα (according to the spirit) from κατά σὰρκα (according to the flesh) is to dissociate his exegesis from its foundation, the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, which alone can support Hippolytus’ exegetical project, the Christological interpretation of the Old Testament proper to the free Personal unity of the Christ in the apostolic Christology.
Here as elsewhere Richard simply begs the question, invoking the Thomist Logos-sarx confusion which cannot be at peace with the Personal unity of the “one and the same Son.” Richard’s disinterest in Photius’ report of Hippolytus’ mention of his having been a disciple of Irenaeus is then comprehensable. His further dissociation of Hippolytus from the apostolic tradition is worth noting. It pivots on his putative reconstruction of the Commentary on the Hexaemeron from its six remaining fragments: (cc. 550-51). He begins this discussion with an account of Hippolytus presentation of the creation of man.
The book of Genesis contains two recitals of the creation of Adam. The first (Gen. 1, 26-27) presents the man created in the image and in the likeness of God. The second (Gen. 2, 7) presents this creation in a more concrete manner. For Hippolytus, the first recital was prophetic. It concerned in the first place the humanity of Christ and announced the adoption of saints as brothers by the Christ, as sons by God the Father. Only the second reports the historical fact of the creation of the first man Adam. He certainly amply developed this scheme in his Commentary on the Hexaemeron. In that which has survived of his work there remain only traces, sufficient however to define the major lines of his exegesis.[205]
It is also noteworthy that here at the outset of his reconstruction of Hippolytus’ doctrine of creation, which would have been presented in the lost De Universo and Commentary on the Hexaemeron, of which only fragments remain, Richard drops his customary practice of citing excerpts from Hippolytus’s works in support of his misinterpretation of his theology. In consequence, the validity of Richard’s summary of Hippolytus’ creation doctrine stands à plein air, without historical foundation. It can only be regarded as a the imposition a speculative synthesis upon a theologian whom he admits to be nonspeculative. Further on in his discussion of the creation of man, Richard accounts for this omission:
The commentaries of Hippolytus are very sober on the creation of man, and In Dan. ii, 7, 8, is without doubt the most explicit text. His Refutatio delays little longer on this subject. It says only that God created man πασῶν σύνθετον οὐσιῶν (x, 33, 7), which is to say, combining in him the four elements (x, 32, 2), and that this man was neither a failed god nor a failed angel, but a man exactly such as God had wished to create. (Photius [Bibli., cod. 48] quotes a more precise text from the De Universo). [206] (emphasis added).
This quotation from Photius offers a more detailed account of Hippolytus’ view of the composition of man from fire, earth, water and spirit but offers nothing of further doctrinal or theological interest.[207] It is important here to note Hippolytus’ assertion that the divine creation is a single act, for from this it must follow that he recognizes man to have been created not as fallen, but as free, as “in Christ,“ with the freedom to fall. With the apostolic tradition, Hippolytus understands the Incarnation to be redemptive of the catastrophe consequent upon the first Adam’s refusal to be free.
Like Justin, Hippolytus identifies the Mission of the Son with the Incarnation, which he sees as Jesus’ reconstitution of fallen humanity, and as the central event of fallen history. He owes to Justin his recognition of the sweep of that history as economic; we have seen that Daniélou considers Justin to have laid the foundations of theology of history. Dropping that metaphor, he looks upon Irenaeus and his successors as following in Justin’s wake. Hippolytus is obviously among them.
The fragility of Richard’s confident reconstruction of the “main lines” of Hippolytus’ exegesis in the Commentary on the Hexaemeron appears in the concluding sentence of the following excerpt.
The fragment iii of the Commentary on the Hexaemeron comments on Gen. 2, 7: “God formed man from the dust of the earth. What does that mean? May we say, according to the supposition of some, that three men were produced, un spiritual, one psychic, one terrestrial? That is not possible, for the entire recital concerns one man. In fact the (word) “we will make” (RSV: “Let us make) concerns the future.” The last phrase resolutely excludes Gen. 1, 26 from the discussion of the creation of Adam, and gives us the reason; that verse concerns the future.[208] (emphasis added).
Richard’s finding of a dissociation in Hippolytus theology of the creation account in Gen. 1 from the parallel creation account in Gen. 2 rests on the single statement by Hippolytus that the creation account of Gen. 1:26 refers to the future; which Richard umderstands to be the Parousia, “the final realization of the prophecy of Gen. 1, 26-27:[209]
According to St Paul, if one excepts I Cor. 1:7, the formation of man to the image of Christ, the Word and the Son of God, is a soteriological and eschatological theme (Eltester, op. cit., p. 156-166)
The conclusion of the Refutatio (x, 34, 5) exploits this theme in correlation with Gen. 1, 26-27. “For the Christ is God above all things, he who has determined to purify all men of sin in order to transform into the new the old man, he who has named the latter “image” from the beginning, manifesting perfectly (διᾲ τúπου) his affection for you. If you hear his holy commandments and if, in imitating him who is good, yourself becoming good, you would become similar to him, filled with honors by him,. In sum, God is not poor, and he will make you to be divine for his glory.” This teaches us how Hippolytus understands the final realization of the prophesy of Gen. 1, 26-27.
I Cor. I:7 reads: ”so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This verse clearly asserts a historical reception of the grace of Christ, and so a historical expression of the imaging of God.
This inference of a distinction drawn by Hippolytus between the creation narratives in Gen. 1 and Gen. 2, as prophetic and thus eschatological in the former, and achieved in the latter, must be reconciled with Hippolytus’ description of the original creation as a single act (τò κατᾲ ἕν).[210] We shall return to this theme.
Here, in order to quote a paragraph found toward the end of Richard’s exposition of the creation of man, we interrupt Richard’s development of his proposed recovery of Hippolytus’ theology of creation of man by way of his speculative reconstitution of the Commentary on the Hexaemeron. This excerpt concerns the role of the Incarnation in that creation of man which Hippolytus understands to have been prophesied in Gen. 1:26-27, in contrast to the actual event of creation which he understands to be recited in Gen.2:7. In sum, it bears upon Hippolytus’ exegesis of Gen. 1:26 as simply prophetic, as concerning only the future, in contrast to the focus of Gen. 2:7 upon the immediate objectivity of God’s creative moulding of man from the dust of the earth.
By his incarnation, the Word has recreated, remodeled, the first man, Adam. This theme is particularly well developed in the fragment In Magnam Odam. It is mentioned several times elsewhere. The Word “is king and judge of terrestrial things because he was engendered man among men, remodeling (καινην ἀνᾴπλασιν) Adam by himself. De Ant. xxvi). He had to be “first-born of the Virgin, in order to appear remodeling the first-man, Adam in himself. (In Dan. iv, 11, 5). “He has passed through the womb of the Virgin, realizing a new remodeling of Adam.” (In Prov. fg. 22).[211]
Clearly, the phrase “concerns the future,” refers to the event of the Incarnation as distinct from the original creation of man “tel que Dieu avait voulu le crée:” as God wished him to create him” (cf. endnote 213, supra). We now resume that development of “the main lines” of Justin’s exegesis of the Creation narratives. Richard’s commentary upon Hippolytus’ exegesis of Gen. 1:26, viz., “In fact the (clause) “we will make” concerns the future” pins Hippolytus’ Christology to the summary statement that Gen. 1:26 “concerns the future,” i.e. the Incarnation, which Hippolytus perceives as the “remodelling” of the original creation of man. We have seen Richard’s inference:
The last phrase resolutely excludes Gen. 1:26 from the discussion of the creation of Adam, and gives us the reason; that verse concerns the future.
He proceeds to seek support for this inference;
In order to see this more clearly, it is necessary to consider the doctrine of image. He expounds this (In Dan. ii, 27, 6-8) apropos of the statue of gold raised by Nabuchodonosor in the eighteenth year of his reign and whose dimensions were sixty cubits in height and six in breadth.
These numbers have inspired in him the following commentary. ―6. By the eighteen years, he has imitated Jesus the Son of God who, during his sojourn on the earth, has brought to life again his very image and has shown it, pure and stainless as gold, to his disciples―7. By the height of sixty cubits he has imitated the sixty patriarchs by whom, according to the flesh, the image of God, the Word, was prefigured and pre-modeled, then elevated above all the patriarchs―8. By the breadth of six he has indicated the Hexaemeron. It is actually on the sixth day that the man, shaped from the dust, has appeared. [212]
Theology of the image to be extracted from this text is manifestly inspired by Saint Paul. It is evident as to the expression “the image of God, the Word” of § 7. (see II Cor. 4, 4 ; Col. 1,15 ; Fr. W. Eltester, Εἰκών im Neuen Testament , Berlin, 1968, p. 130-152). Theme of § 6. according to which the man (the humanity) of Christ is “la propre image” of the Son of God confirms that which has be said above on the typographic exegesis of Gen. I, 26-27, and evokes Rom. 8, 29. Finally it is very remarkable that the § 8, which mentions the creation of the first man, avoids the word εἰκών and refers clearly to Gen. 2, 7.[213]
Hippolytus avoids the language of Gen. 1:26-27:
26: Then God said, “let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. 27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
This tactic is consistent with his supposition the factual creation of the first man, Adam is the subject of Gen. 2:7;
7 then the Lord God formed man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.
Thus this passage confirms Richard’s reading of his text. However, it is further remarkable that in this passage Richard finds it necessary to reduce “l’homme” to the abstraction, “l’humanité;” which he then proceeds to identify as the image of the Son. This device conforms to the concretization by the Thomist Christology of the abstract ‘second substance,’ that is “human nature,” It is evident that an abstraction cannot be an image, still less “the proper image,” of the Son of God,
Not to ignore the “theme of § 6.”, i.e., the section in which Richard’s treats of Hippolytus’ theology of the creation of man, we present here its first paragraph, which introduces that “theme:”
§ 6° The creation of man. The book of Genesis contains two recitals of the creation of man. The first (Gen. 1, 26-27) presents man as created in the image and likeness of God. The second (Gen. 2:7) presents this creation in a more concrete manner. For Hippolyte, the first recital was prophetic. It concerned in the first place the humanity of Christ and announced the adoption of the saints as brothers by the Christ, as sons by God the Father. Only the second reported the historical fact of the creation of the first man Adam. He has certainly developed this schema extensively in his Commentary on the Hexaemeron. In that which survives of his work, there remain only some traces, sufficient however to define the main lines of his exegesis.[214]
Once again, we find Richard referring to the “humanity of Christ” as the object of the prophecy of Gen. I:26-27.
Richard is convinced that Hippolytus understands Gen. 2: 7 to recite the original, i.e., primordially integral, i.e., pre-fallen, creation of man and, with the fall, the prospect of the redemptive Incarnation, the restoration of fallen man to integrity (i.e., Gen. 1:26-27 and 3:15, the Proto-evangelium). The Word became incarnate to save sinful humanity. Hippolytus presents this work of the divine mercy as a quasi-repetition of the creation of man. Its principal stages are the incarnation, the death upon the Cross, the descent into hell, the resurrection, the Church, and the glorious Parousia.[215]
The problem of the unity of the primordially good creation and that “remodeling” by the Incarnate Word is evident. Its scriptural resolution is the Pauline doctrine of creation “in the “Beginning, which is to say, in the Mission of the primordial Christ, apart from whose Mission the good creation and its fall are alike unintelligible.
Hippolytus has no doubt that it is “at the end of time” that God has sent his Word, his Son, his “well-beloved,” to take flesh in the womb of the Virgin in order to save a sinful humanity. The term “at the end of time” corresponds to the common apostolic conviction that the Incarnation introduces the last stage of history, the end of times, i.e., the economy of salvation introduced by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Lord. It is not to be identified, as it is by Richard, with the Parousia, for its “principal stages,” including the Parousia, are historical events within the economy of salvation. It is the Incarnation which Hippolytus supposes to be prophesied by Gen. 1:26-37, not the Parousia simply: Jesus, the Lord of history, is the Alpha as well as the Omega. .
Hippolytus’ recognition that the object of the Father’s mission of the Son is the Incarnation whose subject is Jesus the Christ is sufficient of f itself to warrant the attribution to Hippolytus of the apostolic Spirit Christology, with its emphasis upon the full humanity and full divinity of the Christ . His further recognition. that Jesus’ taking flesh from the Virgin is the central event of the divine economy and of history, corroborates that attribution.
Hippolytus’ insistence that the Incarnation was foreseen in the sixth day of creation rests upon his reading of Gen. 2 as a prophecy of Christ. In this he is followed nemine dissentiente by the patristic tradition which uniformly linked Gen. 2:21-24 to its fulfillment in Jn. 19:34. However, in supposing the Old Testament accounts of the appearance of the Word in the form of a man to be partial manifestations of the Christ, looking forward to his total manifestation in the Incarnation, Hippolytus presupposes the fall of the good creation, and its reconstitution, in short, its redemption, by the Incarnate Christ. Richard reads a metaphysical priority of the pre-incarnate «Verbe ἄσαρκος» to the Word Incarnate, enfleshed (ἐνσαρκος).into the temporal priority to the Incarnation of these Old Testament manifestations of the Christ. However, the apostolic tradition knows creation to be in Christ, in a single act, τó κατᾲ ἕν, as Hippolytus also acknowledges.
We have already discussed Richard’s misuse of the Pauline κατᾲ πνεῡμα, κατᾲ σαρξ polarity to distinguish the eternal from the historical generation of the Son. It imposes the Thomist dehistoricization of the Incarnation, its refusal of the Personal humanity of the Son, upon the entirely historical Spirit Christology of Hippolytus, which is very firm on the communication of idioms in Christ, whether in reliance upon the Christology of Irenaeus or of Justin.
However, whatever may be his debt to Irenaeus, Hippolytus’ Christology owes more to Justin With Justin, Hippolytus supposes the generation of the Son to be subsequent to his impersonal immanence in the Father prior to his generation as the Personal Son of God. He certainly is of the opinion that, before creation, the Word can only remain in the heart of his Father, an existence which must be impersonal.[216]
Consequently he can speak of the “Father” only in a cosmological sense, the absolute One, the Monad. Uder this aegis, Hippolytus does not understand the Father as generating the eternal Son ab aeterno. “Father” is consequently no longer a relative name, but has become cosmological, a designation of the unchangeable absolute, who cannot be named. However, as do Justin and Tertullian, Hippolytus ignores this contretemps:
Thus he has departed from the heart of God before this creation, and this “departure” is his first generation. However it causes no change in God, for God is absolutely unchangeable (In Dan, ii, 27, 4). However, the Father and the Son are two Persons (In ben., p. 26, 2); the Son is the second after the Father.[217]
Hippolytus’ understanding of the generation of the Son as his sortie (departure) from immanence in the similarly cosmological Father, is only nominally eternal, but is so linked to the Father’s decision to create as to be dependent upon it. Justin’s confusion over the generation of the Son, as eternal on the one hand on the other hand in some manner subordinate to the cosmologically-conceived Father’s decision to create, induced Justin to identify the generation of the Son with his Mission, understanding that Mission to pervade and transcend all history as its beginning and its end, i.e., as the history of salvation, the economy that is Jesus the Lord’s accomplishing the redemption of the universe; Hippolytus echoes this confusion in so linking the eternal generation of the Son to a prophecy of the Incarnation as to make the latter the implication of the former. This melds the generation of the Son with his Mission by the Father, i.e., with his Incarnation. Richard would avoid this by the stressing the distinction which Hippolytus places between the two creation accounts, as prophetic with respect to Gen. 1:26-27, and as achieved with respect to Gen. 2:7, but again, with the fall presupposed, apart from which there could be nothing to prophesy.
However, the presupposition of the fall of the good creation is the hallmark of the apostolic Spirit Christology. The Thomist Christology, on the other hand, rests upon its notion of creation as ungraced, incapable of sin or virtue. Every attempt to reconcile this notion of an ungraced creation iwht the Incarnation must entail such contradictions in terms as the “obediential potency” and its successor, the “supernatural existential,” neither of which can be given historical foundation without undercutting the Thomist insistence that grace is accidental rather than substantial, the corollary of the Thomist refusal of the creation in Christ which Paul celebrated in Col. 1:15-23.
Once creation in Christ, the Head, has been ignored, and with it the Pauline-Johannine tradition, no foundation for a Catholic Christology remains. This becomes all too evident with Marcel Richard’s insertion, into Hippolytus’ primitive exposition of the apostolic Spirit Christology, of his own Thomist failure to accept the primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Lord, as clearly taught by John and Paul, and as implicit in the Synoptic use of “Logos.” With St. Thomas, he supposes the pre-existence of the Eternal Son («le Verbe ἀσαρκος») to be eternal sensu negante, with the consequence of reading into Hippolytus’ text a denial of the humanity of the Christ of the Old Testament epiphanies.[218]
Left to its own devices, Hippolytus’ Christology is simply that of the apostolic tradition defined at Nicaea and thereafter, over and again. He asserts a single act of the creation of man, which is the creation of the universe of man in its primordial perfection, and therefore as free. As Henri de Lubac pointed out long ago, freedom cannot be imposed; it can only be accepted by those to whom it is offered in the moment of creation. Freedom may be refused: this refusal was the sin of Adam, the “one man” by whom sin entered into the world. Once fallen, the remodeling, the refashioning of the universe requires a renewal of the gift of the Spirit of freedom, a renewal which is a new creation, the final achievement of the Mission of the Son, the primordial, pre-fallen Jesus the Lord who, as the human head of humanity, the source of its free unity, entered into its fallenness to take upon himself the task of which only he was capable, the remodeling, in himself, of a restored humanity.
It is curious that Hippolytus should insist that he does this alone, by himself; here perhaps is a latent recognition of Jesus’ headship of all creation. M. Richard, as we have seen, would project this restoration into the eschaton, and would enlist Paul in this reading of Hippolytus. In proceeding thus he accepts that Thomist exegesis of Paul which denies the historicity of the Logos, of the Mission of the Son, and would reduce the Sacrifice of the Mass to a “Real Presence” indistinguishable from its Lutheran surrogate in that it not historical, not the Event by which the Jesus is the Lord of history, transcending it from within as its Beginning and its End. The dehistoricization of the Sacrifice of the Mass is the consequence, as Cyril saw, of the Nestorian dehistoricization of the Son, inspired by Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Aristotelianizing of the liturgical tradition.
®® The Divine Titles of the Christ
Richard opens this topic by a summary statement of this central thesis: The Word, the first-born, only-begotten Son of God, the Child of God, the Wisdom of God, the Christ, king and judge of the universe, has left the heart of the Father. He is manifest as such well before rather than after the Incarnation. Richard finds it is proper to insist on this point, for it has been contested, at least in part.
The current opinion─and it is one of the crimes of the Contra Noetum─is that, according to Hippolytus, the Word became Son or, at least, perfect Son, only by the Incarnation. Everything that has survived of the authentic work of Hippolytus protests against this accusation.[219]
Richard proceeds to defend Hippolytus against this misunderstanding of the Sonship of the Word, insisting that from eternity the Word is the Son. He remarks that “The clearest text, perhaps, is In Dan. iv, II, 5, inspired by Col. I, 15-18; he quotes it in full:
“The Father, having thus submitted all to his own Son, that which is in the heavens and that which is on earth and that which is under the earth, has yet shown that he was the first-born in all ways, the first-born of God, in order that it be evident that he is the second after the Father, the Son of God, first-born before the angels, in order that he appear lord of the angels; first-born of a virgin, in order that he be seen recreating in himself the first created Adam, first-born of the dead, in order that he become the first-fruits of our resurrection.”[220]
The corresponding verses in Col. 1:15-18 are familiar:
He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation;16 for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. (RSV)
16. Every created thing had its origin in him and exists for him. Thrones . . .authorities refer to various ranks of angels (Eph. 6:12).
There can be no doubt that in the foregoing excerpt from Col. 1, Paul is speaking of the historical Christ, nor can there be any doubt that in the Commentary in Daniel Hippolytus is doing the same, viz., linking the prophecy of Daniel to its fulfillment by the historical Christ. His exegesis had no other goal than this. M. Richard rejects Nautin’s attribution of the Contra Noetum to Hippolytus mainly on grounds of the flawed Greek of that document, from which it does not follow that its attribution to Hippolytus of a concern for the identity of the eternal with the historical Son is in error, although Richard labels it a méfait (misdeed, crime). It is past discussion that the Christ was named “one and the Same Son” contemporaneously with Hippolytus’ earliest writings, and that Hippolytus was familiar with Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses in which that assertion continually appears.
It is further evident that Hippolytus did suppose the Son to achieve his headship of humanity only in the Incarnation, for it is then that Hippolytus understood the Son to have not only reconstituted the original creation of man as without sin, which fell with the disobedience of the first Adam, but refashioned, “remodeled,” that creation in the image of God as prophesied in Gen. 1:26-27. Richard would throw that imaging into the eschaton, the Parousia, citing II Cor. 4, 4 and Col 1:15 as though in support. But Paul never separates the eschaton from the salvation history of which Christ is the Beginning and the End. His salvation history is Eucharistically ordered, and entails that affirmation of Eucharistic realism and efficacy which we read in I Cor. 11.
Here it is appropriate to recall Photius’ praise of Hippolytus for his insistent Naming the Logos “Christ,” a historical Name for ‘the Anointed’ which can apply to the Son only as incarnate. It is therefore clearly not the case that, in praising Hippolytus’ Christology, Photius understood it in the context of the Logos-sarx analysis Richard imposes upon it.
There can be no doubt that Hippolytus understands the Son to be eternally the Son. M. Richard has insisted:
It was the central theme of theological system of Hippolytus[221].
Richard frequently refers to “theological system of Hippolytus,” using that expression loosely to designate themes which Hippolytus underwrote. Hippolytus was in no sense a systematic thinker, as Richard has several times remarked.
However, Richard confuses that “central theme” in supposing that the actions of the Son in history before the Incarnation, e.g., those narrated in the Old Testament, are not actions of the “one and the same Son,” Jesus the Christ, but of \the nonhistorical eternal Son, prior to his incarnation,. In short, Richard has Hippolytus denying the primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Lord. The consequence would be that the Mission of the Son is understood as nonhistorical, independent of the economy of salvation in Christo, perhaps in the Thomist sense of the “invisible missions of the Son and the Spirit,”[222] echoing theology routinely taught in Catholic diocesan seminaries prior to Vatican II.
In any event, the denial of the primordial pre-existence of the incarnate Jesus the Lord dissociates Hippolytus from the clearly apostolic Spirit Christology (Jn. 1:14, 17:8; Phil. 2:5-13; I Cor. 15:45) which was universal in the late second and third centuries and was witnessed well into the fourth. It is the Christology of the Apostolic Fathers, of Tertullian in De Carne Christi, of Origen in Peri Archon, as it was of the Eustathians, of Marcellus and of Athanasius in the latter half of the fourth century. It is implicit in the Nicene definition of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father, for that Personal unity of the Son is also human, and cannot but be consubstantial with ours, for we are created in him, the Head who is our source.
This implication of the Nicene decree was affirmed explicitly in the Formula of Union, the summary doctrinal statement of the Council of Ephesus, which taught the consubstantiality of Jesus with us and, upon on that affirmation of his Personal humanity, affirmed the apostolic tradition that his mother, Mary, is the Mother of God. (Mt. 2:16, 18-25 12:46,; Mk. 3:31, Lk. 1:35, 2:23, 48-51; Jn. 2:1, 12; 25-27; Acts 2:14)
The Symbol of Chalcedon confirmed the doctrine of the Formula of Union, and, affirming eight times that Jesus is “one and the same Son,” links the entire doctrinal tradition to Irenaeus’ radical insight into the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, his consubstantiality with the Father and with those for whom he died. If, as Photius reports (Codex 121), Hippolytus was a disciple of Irenaeus, his Christology would have been that of his mentor; if not, he could not but have been familiar with it. Finally, in close association with Tertullian, we do not find him contesting Tertullian’s De Carne Christi, whose affirmation of the full humanity and full divinity of Christ the Lord is as clear as that of Irenaeus and, like his, has entered into the Symbol of Chalcedon.
®® Doctrine
Under this heading Richard firsr points out the particular characteristics of Hippolytus’ talent. He is primarily a narrator and a catechist, lacking systematic interest and ability. His hostility to the Greek philosophical tradition arises out of a personal antipathy to speculation as such; it is not simply a resistance to the underlying paganism of the classic tradition. He rarely uses abstract terms. The historical-typological exegesis that constitutes the greater part of his work is better adapted to his talent than is apologetics. His biblical commentaries reveal his natural thought; the same doctrine appears in his apologetic works, which imitate those of the second century.
®® Biblical exegesis
Hippolytus is the first to have commented in a connected fashion upon important parts of the Old Testament; Origen would soon imitate him. Both worked to provide its Christian interpretation, which had become a necessity for the Church whose faith in Jesus understood him to be the fulfillment of the OT prophecies. This required investigation and elaboration, which Hippolytus and Origen both sought to provide.
Origen proceeded in a methodological fashion, while Hippolytus’ exegesis used a more traditional, if less original, liturgical and pastoral approach. The literary genres of his commentaries found their models in Judaism, and in the Jewish-Christian and Christian preaching of the second century, as Richard praises Daniélou for having shown.[223]. For Hippolytus, the Bible is the unique source of all truth, and never deceives us. M. Richard understands Hippolytus’ typological exegesis to reflect that conviction; in that he never seeks an allegorical explanation of the literal text. Had Richard not ignored Daniélou’s brilliant exposition of Justin’s theology in this same work (pp. 147-53), he could not have missed Justin’s influence upon Hippolytus, which is particularly evident in his notion of God the Father, of the generation of the Word, and the relation of that generation to the divine creation,
Hippolytus’ doctrine of the generation of the Word is set out in two works which we have seen to have been lost apart from fragments: these are his Commentary on the Hexaemeron and his De Universo. Photius, who. as has been seen, read the De Universo, had high praise for it:
On the subject of Christ our true God, he teaches using ideas of a rigorous exactness; he attributes to him formally the very name of Christ and gives an impeccable explanation of his ineffable procession from the Father.” (citation!!)
In short, Photius asserts that in this work Hippolytus speaks historically of the Word, identifying him with the Christ, Jesus the Lord. The only surviving theological treatment of these problems in what remains of Hippolytus’ writings is a brief resumé in Refutatio x, 32, 1-33, 8, which Richard considers to merit “une étude minutieuse.” In what follows we summarize his étude.
The doctrinal resumé of the Refutratio begins with an uncompromising affirmation of monotheism: one God is the creator of all things; Hippolytus details the reality of that creation. He then proceeds to treat of the generation of the Word, the executor of the Father’s wishes. He uses the vocabulary of profane psychology, as his predecessors had, but with a certain clumsiness. Intent in the first place to counter the Gnostic and Marcionite rejection of the Christian faith in the one creator God, he proceeds to affirm that the one God is the creator; and then that he creates by the Word alone in a single act; Richard observes that in this he links the generation of the Word to creation, although the text does not say this explicitly. Hippolytus teaches us only that this generation of the Word precedes all creation, for the Father’s creative act is executed by the Word, whose generation is the a priori principle of creation. This is very similar to the Christology of Justin. When the Father is not distinguished from the divine substance, it is not possible to affirm the eternal generation of the Son. Hippolytus’ exegetical commentaries reveal the same doctrinal themes, but in rather different terms. Monotheism, the generation of the Word before all creation, the Word’s execution of the wishes of the Father, are all present in the commentaries. However Richard notes that in the commentaries allusions to creation are rare. Sometimes creation is attributed to God alone, sometimes to God by the Word.
On the generation of the Word, Hippolytus’ habitual formula is that the Word departs from or is engendered from the heart of the Father. Sometimes the “heart” of the Father is replaced by his “mouth. As engendered, he Son is king and judge of heavenly beings (êtres célestes).
Hippolytus has spent little time scrutinizing the interior life of God before all creation, apart from affirming the eternity of the Word. Hippolytus holds that before creation there is only God alone and, in his heart, the Word. From the first instant of creation, the Word leaves the heart of the Father to act as executor of the Father’s wishes. Thus his departure from the heart of the Father antecedes creation, and this “sortie” from the heart of the Father is his first generation, which is eternal. It causes no change in the Father, who is unchanging. However, the Father and the Son are two Persons (In ben., p. 26, 2). The Son is second after the Father. (In Dan. IV, II, 5)[224]
Richard proceeds to ask what is to be made of this doctrine. He recalls that Hippolytus thinks concretely, with small talent in metaphysics. His theology is resolutely Christocentric. It reverts easily to the origin of the world, but only timidly ventures beyond that point. He has the merit of recognizing that the Word, God from God, pre-exists not only his Incarnation but pre-exists also the creation of the universe, that his generation in the womb of Mary had been preceded by a strictly divine generation, which took place before all things (πρὸ πάντων, πρὸ ἐωσφόρυ). Richard remarks that Hippolytus’ overly positivist mentality does not permit a notion of the pre-existence of the Word beyond πρὸ πάντων αἰώνων, i.e. before all ages. He certainly thinks that before creation the Word could only remain in the heart of the Father.
Richard considers Hippolytus’ comparison of the Word hidden in the heart of the Father to a sealed vessel of perfume to provide a better insight into his doctrine than does his laborious exposition and rejection, in the Refutatio x, 33, 1, of the pagan wisdom. Supposing the unsealing of the vessel to be the generation of the Word as eternal Son, the diffusion of the perfume does provides a graphic image of his benefactions upon creation. Well and good; however, this insight is profoundly flawed:
Before the creation, there was only God alone and, in his heart, the Word.[225]
This can hardly be the case. Thus conceived, God the Father is not eternally the Father, nor the Son eterrnally the Son. Were its logic pushed, the identification of God the Father with the divine substance would proceed to a subordinationism, which Richard has shown Hippolytus to reject. Further, he nowhere states that the Word is inferior to the Father, and he often affirms, without the slightest reservation, the divinity of the Christ..[226]
Inasmuch as Richard vigorously protests, in fact incriminates (c. 548), the view that the Word becomes Son only at the Incarnation, he can hardly approve Hippolytus’ view that the Father’s begetting of the eternal Son can somehow be in abeyance prior to the Father’s creation of the universe. Hippolytus, disinterested in speculative matters, accepted as his own Justin’s naïve supposition of a divine duré antecedent to the generation of the Son and the prolation of the Spirit. This notion survived his feud with Callistus, whose quasi-Monarchianism relied upon much the same cosmological understanding of the transcendence of the one God as did the Trinitarianism of Hippolytus. Well into the third century, Tertullian, similarly influenced by Justin, continued to maintain a cosmological notion of God whose reality is antecedent to his generation of the Son and production of the Spirit.[227]:
It is not less evident that the subject of the quarrel was the first generation of the Word anterior to all things. This was the central thesis of Hippolytus’ theological system, and Callistus would have no part of it.[228]
“The quarrel” to which Richard here refers was quite as much between Callistus and Tertullian as between Callistus and Hippolytus. Both men supposed the Father to be the cause of the Trinity, and Tertullian’s Trinitas certainly includes him, but almost twenty years after proposing it, Tertullian could still speak cosmologically of the Father, quite evidently influenced by Justin.
Certain people affirm that in Hebrew Genesis begins, In the beginning God made for himself a son. Against the ratification of this I am persuaded by other arguments from God’s ordinance in which he was before the foundation of the world until the generation of the Son. For before all things God was alone, himself his own world and location and everything—alone however because there was nothing eternal beside him. Yet not even then was he alone: for he had with him that Reason which he had in himself—his own, of course. For God is rational, and reason is primarily in him, and thus from him are all things; and that Reason is his consciousness. [229]
Within this cosmological context, it is clearly absurd to speak of God as the source of the Trinitas, as Tertullian certainly understands him to be. Theology must wait upon Origen’s Peri Archon for an explicit recognition that the Eternal Father is so Named by reason of his eternal generation of the Son. Tertullian simply takes it for granted.
But, to proceed: M. Richard points out that, for Hippolytus, the departure of the Word from ‘the heart of the Father,’ i.e., the Father’s generation of the Son, requires a reason, some other reality on the part of the Father to account for his generation of the Son. He finds it in the Fathers will (volunté) to create, a finding which so links the generation of the Word to creation as to explain Hippolytus’ stress upon his eternal generation and consequent equality with the Father, simply as a necessary doctrinal corrective to the evident implications of the Word’s conditioned generation. Beyond that, Richard observes, Hippolytus does not venture. He finds in this first generation of the Word “the mystery of mysteries and the marvel of marvels.”
M. Richard has written an introduction to Hippolytus’ treatment of this subject which merits quotation here:
The Holy Spirit is one of the most mysterious points of the doctrine of Hippolytus,. It is everywhere in his work, as much in his apologetic works as in his commentaries. However, the sole statement of his system of theology that has survived, Refut. X, 32-34, ignores it entirely. It assures us that only the Word has been engendered of God. Only the Word has proceeded from the Being and this is why he is God and substance of God (33, 1 and 8). To the Word, Hippolytus opposes the creation, whose entirety has emerged from nothing, at first the four elements, fire and spirit (pneuma) water and earth, then the angels (fire), the stars (fire and spirit), the fishes and the birds (water), the reptiles and the quadrupeds (earth), finally the man (the four elements) (33, 4-7). On the other hand, according to the treatise De Universo (Photius, Bibl. Codex 48) God has made the soul of man with the most noble part of the spirit. Where to place the Holy Spirit in this system? And everywhere, from the beginning of the Refutatio (Pref. 6), Hippolytus announces to his readers his intention of communicating to them generously “those gifts of the Holy Spirit: ”ὃσα παρέχει τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμα.[230]
Hippolytus has no developed theology of the Holy Spirit; his affirmations of the Holy Spirit are consequently doctrinal and catechetical. This puts in clear issue Richard’s supposition that Hippolytus understands the Holy Spirit to have a role in the Incarnation, i.e., that the Person of the Holy Spirit is intended by the “πνεῦμα ἅγιον:” of Lk. 1:35. This would have been a speculative innovation unexampled elsewhere in his work. We have seen Richard’s emphasis upon this eisegesis of Lk. 1:35.[231] It is worth noting that in a strategic passage, Richard finds no role of the Holy Spirit in the remodeling of man that is at one with the Incarnation of the Word:
The Word became incarnate to save sinful humanity. Hippolytus presents this work of the divine mercy as a quasi-repetition of the creation of man. Its principal stages are the incarnation, the death upon the Cross, the descent into hell, the resurrection, the Church, and the glorious Parousia.[232]
This reveals the confusion of Marcel Richard’s understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation, which he attributes to Hippolytus/ However, Hippolytus understands the Incarnation in terms of the Spirit Christology of Lk. 1:35, which refers to Jesus’ presence to Mary as that of πνεῦμα ἅγιον (i.e., Spirit, without the article. Despite the mistranslations of the Constantinopolitan Creed, which afflict even the celebration of the Mass of the Immaculate Conception, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, and cannot be understood to have a role in the Incarnation, upon which his Mission as the Spiritus Creator depends.
There follows an extensive development of these themes, in which the Holy Spirit is not mentioned, despite what Richard has described as “very clear texts showing that he attributes a large role to the Holy Spirit in this conception (by the Virgin)l.[233] The third Person of the Trinity is not active in the renouvellement which Jesus alone effects by his Incarnation.
By his incarnation, the Word has recreated, remodeled, the first man Adam. This theme is particularly well developed in the fg 1 In magnam Odam. It is mentioned several times elsewhere. The Word “is king and judge of terrestrial things because he was engendered man among men, remodeling (ἀναπλᾴσσων) Adam by himself “ (De Ant. xxvi). He had to be “first-born of the Virgin, in order that he might appear remodeling in himself the first-man Adam.” (In Dan. iv, 11, 5). “He traversed the womb of the Virgin, realizing a new remodeling (καινὴν ἀνᾴπλασιν) of Adam” (In Prov. fg. 22).[234] (Emphases added).
This dissociation of the Holy Spirit from that refashioning of man which Hippolytus imputes to the Incarnation, i.e., to the Virgin’s conception of the Christ, requires the inference that Richard has read Lk. 1:35 in a manner which Hippolytus would not have recognized. Hippolytus’ assertion of the Word’s remodeling “by himself” of the fallen first Adam is conclusive of this point.
®®.An Assessment of Hippolytus’ Spirit Christology
We thus limit Hippolytus’ theology to his Christology─simply because he has no theology of the Holy Spirit. Richard has observed that in the work that has survived, Hippolytus never mentions the Trinity. This does not put his orthodoxy in doubt, for he assigns the usual offices to the Holy Spirit, but he has no clear understanding of the modality of the Spirit’s origin from the Father: there was none in the third century, nor would there be until well into the fourth. The divinity of the Holy Spirit was liturgically underwritten, specifically in Baptism, but Lucifer of Cagliari was the first to affirm his consubstantiality with the Father, probably shortly before his friend Athanasius said as much in his Letters to Serapion, ca. 359; see endnotes 422 and 587.
Consequently this assessment of Hippolytus theology can only be Christological. The major flaw of his Christology is its incongruous identification of God the Father with the cosmological absolute, which he undoubtedly owes to Justin Martyr. Two centuries later, this theme troubled Greek theology, by way of the powerful influence of Eusebius of Caesarea, until its final dismissal by the First Council of Constantinople. The source in Justin of the cosmological latencies in Hippolytus’ theology are unmistakable. They remain latencies; Hippolytus, like Justin, ignores them. Nonetheless, they should be recognized as typical of the earliest theological entries into the faith that Jesus is the Lord, for the identification of God as the Absolute still lingers; M. Richard echoes it speaking of Hippolytus’ lack of a theology of the Spirit as entailed in his restriction of “sortie de Dieu” to the eternal generation of the Word, he remarks of the Word that:
He alone has departed from the Being, and this is why he is God and substance of God.[235] (emphasis added).
This same inability to account for the divinity of the Holy Spirit led the left-wing homoiousians, notably Eustathius of Sebaste, to deny his hypostatic reality: thus the binitarian latency in the homoiousian “homoios kat’ousian” which became explicit with Hilary of Poitiers.
The same supposition that the divine is the Absolute is more commonly encountered in the quasi-Nestorian assumption that God cannot die, that Christ as God dies only in his humanity. Its first and most obvious flaw is that then God, as absolute, cannot be a member of the Trinity, still less its immanent Head, as Tertullian and Hippolytus certainly suppose him to be. It has the further implication that the divine cannot be immanent in history because as absolute, God is “immobile;” as Absolute, he cannot change; he cannot move. Further, as Absolute, nothing relative can refer to the Father. He is therefore ineffable, he cannot be Named. This carries the implication that whatever is named is recognized as limited, as less than Absolute. Daniélou observes that Justin supposes that the absolute Father’s Naming of Jesus places a limit upon Jesus’ divinity[236]. Hippolytus, like Justin, like Tertullian, ignores this consequence, for it is clearly overridden by the liturgical-doxological Naming of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, inseparable in their ordered unity.
Tertullian and Hippolytus take the indicated further step: the liturgical Naming of the members of the Trinity connotes in each case a concretely unique divine Person (Persona, Πρόσωπον) inseparable from the other two. Thus, despite their common inability to understand the manner of the Father’s “production” of the Holy Spirit, the second and third century theologians, under the authority of the apostolic tradition, i.e., the Church’s liturgy, converted the Absolute Father from cosmological to liturgical, i.e., historical intelligibility. No longer understood as Absolute, as a divine Monad locked into cosmological necessities, the Father is freed to become the unquestioned Personal Source of the Trinity, by reason of his generation of the Son, Jesus the Lord, the object of the historical worship of the historical Church. Inasmuch as the liturgical tradition forbade any diminution of the Holy Spirit or any separation of the Naming of the Holy Spirit from the Naming of the Father and the Son, it is only in union with Holy Spirit that the Father and the Son can be worshiped.
There remains a certain cosmological confusion among the first exponents of the doctrine of the Trinity. Hippolytus understands the Father to be a Person; he is Named the Father by his generation of the Son, but the Son is second to him. There are not sufficient remnants of Hippolytus’ theology to know whether he understood this secondary position as Tertullian had, as the Church does, i.e., as a relation of order rather than of inferiority, but M. Richard denies any indication of subordinationism in Hippolytus’ Christology. He understands the Naming of the Son to be his divinization by the Father, who sends the Son into the creation and into history as the executor of his will. Justin understands this Naming of the Son as the grant to Jesus of that power by which he orders the economy of salvation: here Hippolytus echoes Justin’s Christology. Richard has found no reference by Hippolytus to “Power of God“ (δúναμις θεοῦ) although he freely refers to Christ as the Wisdom of God (σοφία θεοῦ) [237]. However, the Father’s grant to the Son’s of executive authority over the whole of creation cannot but connote a corresponding power, as Justin had seen. Simply as generated, as sent, Jesus is the power of God the Father who, as absolute, cannot act in history. For Justin, this connoted a subordination, which he ignores thereafter; for Hippolytus it does not. Justin says nothing of the Holy Spirit in his Apologies, and therefore may have had no notion of the Trinity. He was martyred a decade or two before Theophilus wrote his Ad Autolycum, in which he asserted that God is a Trias, and also before Athenagoras, who understood the trias to be an order, a τάξις (taxis), inherent in the Church’s worship of Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.
This is well before Irenaeus became a bishop and, ca. 182, began to develop his Christology during the period of peace following the death of Marcus Aurelius and the end of his persecution of the Church. It is summed up in his doctrine that Jesus the Lord is the one and the same Son. This axiom presupposed the Mission of Jesus by the Father, and thus invoked the doctrine of the Trinity. Irenaeus’ insight into that mission as one of recapitulation by one and the same Son arriaved too late for Justin; his Christology could not profit from Irenaeus’ exposition of this crucial Pauline doctrine, although his recognition of the universal authority of Jesus over the whole of creation corresponds to it. Hippolytus, writing three or four decades after Justin’s martyrdom and probably taught by Irenaeus, is quite clearly familiar with our salvation as the Christ’s recapitulation of all things.
®®®. Hippolytus’ Christological Narrative
Hippolytus’ theology, like Justin’s, rests upon the apostolic catechesis; it has the unity of that catechesis, simply that of the Spirit Christology, which is the subject of a narrative rather than a systematic treatment. It begins with the good creation of the first Adam, who stands for the whole of humanity and in a more than representative sense. The first Adam, as God willed him to be, was free, and sinned; his fall is the fall of humanity. Here there the doctrine of headship is clearly in mind, for the fall of the first Adam would not otherwise be the fall of humanity.
The primordial Jesus is sent, to become incarnate in “traversing” the womb of the Virgin, in order to restore humanity to its pre-fallen sinless condition, in historical stages whose culmination is the Parousia. Like Justin, Hippolytus clearly distinguishes the salvific deeds of Jesus, i.e., the economy of salvation, from the final salvation, the Parousia which, as a culmination, is anagogic and therefore historical.
It is important to note that for Hippolytus, it is Jesus who is sent by the Father. As with the patristic tradition generally, following Phil. 2:6-7, Hippolytus identified Jesus’ Mission with his Incarnation, but with Phil. 2:6-7, he understands the subject of the Mission to be the pre-existent or primordial Jesus of the Spirit Christology. In light of the confusion induced by M. Richard’s attempted systematization of Hippolytus’ narrative, it should be stressed here that it is Jesus who, as the Lord of history, is the subject of the Old Testament theophanies, which Hippolytus understands, with all of the patristic tradition, to be prophetic of the Christ: M. Richard has seen that this is the subject of his exegesis: Jesus is incarnate as the head of humanity, in so strict an association with the fallen first Adam as resume his headship in what amounts to a narrative of Irenaeus’ recapitulation theme. By his “remodeling” of the first Adam, Jesus redeems the humanity which is created in him.
®®®Hippolytus ecclesiology
M. Richard’s presentation of Hippolytus’ ecclesiology is curiously deficient. He understands the Church to be composed of the “saints,” to whom the Holy Spirit has been given by baptism, and whose conduct has shown the reality of their conversion. There is a single mention of the Eucharist, whose bread and wine are among the delights of heaven. Its sacrificial institution, by Christ the High Priest, is ignored. Baptism and the faith consequent upon it are the criterion of membership in the Church.
The criterion by which it has been proposed that Hippolytus is to be understood, viz., his Spirit Christology, is incompatible with M. Richard’s presentation of Hippolytus’ ecclesiology. Hippolytus, a priest for nearly forty years, would not have ignored the sacramental foundation of the Church, nor the sacramental nourishment of the faith. Granted his rigorist moral doctrine, which accounted some sins unforgivable and therefore held such sinners to be expelled from the Church, he would the more have stressed the necessity of Eucharistic communion and of penance in the lives of its members. This was the doctrine of Justin Martyr, the Apologist upon whose theology Hippolytus relied.
In sum, Hippolytus, like Justin, like Tertullian, was a man of the Church, as his death witnesses.
Clement’s Christology is that of the Apostolic Fathers. He reads the πνεῦμα ἅγιον of Lk. 1:35 as a reference to the primordial Christ.[238] We have seen this to be the usual exegesis of that passage well into the fourth century; it is at one with the apostolic identification of the Logos with Jesus the Lord. On both counts, Clement upholds the communication of idioms in Jesus. This commitment to the historical faith of the Church in the historical Name, Jesus the Lord, is in parallel with an early version of that musing upon the mystery of the faith which Crouzel has aptly designated “a moment (or moments) of reason.” These are focused upon the concretely historical reality that is Jesus the Lord, faith in whom prompts a quaerens intellectum largely crippled by a cosmologized imagination, a habit of thought which spontaneously dehistoricizes Jesus the Lord without any intent to deny the historical faith that Jesus is Lord, which prompted his speculation. We will find instances of these “moments of reason”, this musing upon the Mysterium fidei, in Tertullian and especially in Origen, both of whom make that mystery, the communication of idioms, or of Names in Jesus the Lord, the foundation of their theology.
In his version of these “moments of reason,” Clement is sufficiently influenced by Middle Platonism to understand the Christ’s sinlessness in terms of the Stoic apatheia: i.e., virtue as exemption from all desires. He understands the Logos to be the ruling principle in Jesus, in such wise that the Logos may seem to take over the role of his soul. Jesus’ human soul is probably real enough in Clement’s thought, but he gives it no real function. Having reduced virtue to in apatheia, i.e., human indifference to the irrational historical circumstances against which Clement, with the Stoics, believed human striving to be futile, the practice of virtue is left without valid historical expression, since virtue consists in the abdication of all personal responsibility for the future.
Clement’s quietist tendency is an aspect of the dualism of the time. Were it not subordinated to the radical historicity of his Spirit Christology, it would evoke a profoundly pessimistic flight from our supposedly futile reactions to the vagaries of physical existence and so of material events, whose causes are implacable, immanently necessary. (See endnote Clement is no Gnostic, but his theological speculation is tainted by the Stoic variant of the dehistoricizing dualism of Platonism.
Under this aegis, Jesus’ humanity would become rather an obstacle to salvation than, as Irenaeus and the generally the Western tradition generally saw it, the indispensable condition of our recapitulation in Christ. However, in the way of this too easy inference stands Clement’s clear commitment to the communication of idioms in Christ, which cannot be abstract, for its sole ground is the Church’s faith that Jesus Christ is Lord. Beyond this, Clement’s contribution to Christology is minor. In any case, after his dropping of the oversight of the Catechetical School and flight from Alexandria around the thirties of the third century, the East belonged to Origen. He succeeded Clement as the de facto third director of the School when he was less than twenty years of age, and led it until Bishop Demetrius of Alexandria, angered at his irregular ordination by the bishop of Caesarea, exiled him from Alexandria in 231.
This examination of theology of Origen’s Peri Archon, as set out in its translation by Rufinus, the Peri Archon, and in such fragments as remain of the Greek original, relies primarily upon the now standard edition of the Peri Archon by Henri Crouzel and Manlio Simonetti, Origène: Traité des Principes.[239] and upon Crouzel’s Origen.[240] English translations of excerpts from Origen’s works are by W. A. Jurgens, Early Fathers I, unless otherwise indicated.
The focus of this present inquiry into Origen’s Christological-Trinitarian synthesis is systematic,[241] in that it rests upon, examines, and provides a hypothetical integration of the implications of Origen’s foundation of his theology upon the communication of divine and human idioms in the Christ.[242] This foundation is alone consistent with his summary statement of the doctrinal tradition in the Preface of the Peri Archon.[243]
In reliance upon the free coherence intrinsic to that free foundation, the product of his faith commit-ment to the free intelligibility of the Revelation who is Christ, this inquiry will propose resolutions of most of the difficulties in his thought which arise out of the cosmological confusion to which orthodox Christian speculation is always liable. Granted the justice of the admonitions of two of the greatest scholars of Origen’s works during the past century, Henri Crouzel and Henri de Lubac, against imposing an inadequately informed extrapolation of coherence upon a theology steeped in paradox, it remains possible to ask whether it may be that the ‘paradoxes’ are alien to the coherence his theology intends, whether they be introduced by Origen himself, in apparent reversions to the Platonic dualism radically incompatible with his postulate of the unity of the fullness of divinity and the fullness of humanity in Jesus the Lord, or by his critics, themselves influenced by the same incongruous cosmological temptations which, in numerous places, may appear to distract Origen from his doctrinal commitment to the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord[244].
Cosmological rationality, from its earliest articulations, has been committed to dehistoricizing reality in order that it may be intelligible within the context of immanently necessary determinist postulates. It immediately contradicts the free rationality of the Catholic tradition, for that tradition is historical with the historicity of the Church’s Eucharistic worship. The submission of the Church’s worship in truth of Truth, of the Mysterium fidei who is Jesus the Lord, to deterministic postulates is inevitably a rejection of that Mystery as though it were irrational, in favor of a non-historical or ideal Absolute, however designated.
It is only from that cosmological stance that, the Catholic faith can be found to be ”paradoxical,” viz., in flat contradiction of the confident “common sense’ which cannot accept the faith that Jesus Christ is God.[245]. If the term is to be used theologically, it should be used accurately: “paradox” denotes apparent, not actual, contradiction.[246] If Origen’s theology be deemed paradoxical, it is so only in its confident assertion of full humanity and full divinity of Jesus Christ the Lord. Paradox, thus understood, does not connote incoherence; its “paradox” is simply its rejection of the value of cosmological rationality, and its confidence in the truth and reality of the Mysterium fidei which has no prior possibility.
It can hardly be proposed that Origen did not understand his “connected body of doctrine” to be coherent.[247] He describes its purpose as the enabling of learned Catholics to defend and support their Catholic faith in the highly controversial ambience of the third century. The difficulty in understanding Origen arises out of what is in fact paradoxical, the intrinsically free, i.e., historical, coherence of the Catholic faith in the Mysterium fidei, with the consequence that no comprehensive synthesis of it is possible. Because the mystery of Jesus the Lord is inexhaustible, such hypotheses as systematic theology proceeds to frame must remain conjectural, as they do in Origen’s Peri Archon. His theology rests upon a radically free conversion from the rationality we have labeled “sarkic,” in the sense of a fallen and consequently at once fragmented and fragmenting rationality. In sum, Origen’s theology rests upon a conversion from the nihilistic rationalism of the cosmological mindset which presupposes the irrationality of history as such and seeks to transcend it in pursuit of a timeless empyrean whose vacuity annuls those who pursue it.
Paul understood the fall to be consequent upon the first Adam’s primordial refusal of the free unity proffered him as the prospective head of the good creation, whose goodness, as taught in Gen. 1: 25-31, is its free nuptial unity.[248] The consequence of the first Adam’s rejection of the headship offered him as the source of the free unity, is simply the alternative: a necessary disunity which cannot be static, for our fallenness is entropic per se, a passage to an ever-accelerating disorder: symbolically the ‘dust’ of death.
The necessary disunity of the “flesh,” finally the disunity of the fallen universe, cannot but be a process of dynamic disintegration. Our “sarkic” solidarity with the fallen Adam entails our unfree, unreflective, uncritical, simply spontaneous subscription to this disintegration of reason into an analytical disintegration of unity wherever and however encountered. Thus our fallen reason is committed to the immanently necessary reasons constitutive of cosmological rationality. The unreflective subscription to its immanent necessities has prevented the bulk of contemporary Catholic theologians from accepting the faith of Nicaea, let alone that of Chalcedon. Conversion from this entrapment in cosmic necessity is given only by the grace of Christ; of ourselves, we remain locked in immanence, with no exit from that sarkic solidarity and unaware of our imprisonment within it.
The Catholic faith is precisely an intellectual conversion from this personal immersion in cosmological necessity to the historical freedom of the Incarnate Truth who is Jesus the Lord, the plenary object of the Catholic faith. This conversion is more drastic than is commonly admitted or realized. It is a conversion to the freedom of truth simply as historical, i.e., as transcending all inquiry into its concrete presentation as the condition of its possibility, and consequently incapable of enclosure in the hypotheses which such inquiry produces.
It is perhaps worth noting that, apart from the dehistoricization of quantum mechanics by the Copenhagen School under Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the experimental mode of the physical sciences is an implicit recognition that the function of theory in physics is the hypothetical integration of historical data in such wise that physics, insofar as experimental, is a learning process as a matter of definition. Contemporary failures to recognize the consequent inadequacy of theories in possession must come to terms with Kurt Gödel’s “incompleteness theorems:” his lucid exposition of the inability of the human mind to construct a history-transcending comprehension of any non-trivial physical reality. After more than eighty years, the “incompleteness theorems” remain unrefuted, even unchallenged, but they state no more than what Plato knew, the immunity of history to rationalization.
Theologians who give way to the temptation to rationalize the historical subject of their inquiry thereby to cease to do theology; for in their hands it ceases to be a fides quaerens intellectum, and cannot but become a politics, a quaerens potestatem incompatible with the apostolic faith that Jesus is the Lord. Traveling as systematic theologians, their imposition of necessity upon the freedom of the faith is properly rejected by Catholic theologians such as de Lubac and Crouzel. The faith that Jesus is the Lord cannot be transcended by pseudo-theological insights, whether the aberrant feminism proposed by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, or its counterpart, the aberrant subordination of women to men inherent in the rationalization of the headship of the husband. .
Nothing less than conversion to the free historicity of truth permits an unfettered acceptance of the free intelligibility of the faith of the Church that Jesus Christ is Lord. The Catholic faith cannot but be a fides quaerens intellectum, a continual effort to understand yet more fully the inexhaustible truth of Christ, the Mysterium fidei which, by his grace, will fascinate us forever. Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega. Apart from a recognition of his headship physics must accept the radical meaninglessness of the asymptomatic expansion of the universe whose radius is expanding at a velocity over twice the speed of light, a rate of expansion that has been increasing steadily for some fifteen billion years.[249] The labeling of its presumed cause as “dark energy” is no more capable of explaining this acceleration than of nullifying it.
Physical scientists are those scholars fascinated by the unfailing intelligibility of every particle of the concrete universe. That intelligibility acould not fascinate were it not free: no one can be fascinated by, e.g., the multiplication table or the principle of contradiction. Many such scholars, perhaps most of them, have been persuaded without much reflection, that methodological agnosticism is the price, even the corollary, of their freedom of inquiry. It is a notion deserving of further examination.
St. Paul long ago described the universal fall of the good ceation as a process consequent upon a sinful refusal to accept its free unity. This refusal deprived the good creation, i.e., the universe, of intrinsic unity and significance, leaving it intrinsically driven dynamic disintegration proceeding to the utter dissolution of death. While there can be no experimental verification of that disunity and insignificance, physicists need only to recognize that this annihilation is inherent in the laws of thermodynamics governing the disintegration of the physical universe which, lacking all intrinsic unity, cannot account for the intrinsic unity and intelligibility of living things. It is these, rather than the expansion of the universe, that require explanation. But that way lurks “intelligent design, condemned by a British physicist as ”creeping creationism” Contemporary physicists prefer asymptotic quests, whether to determine the instant of the “heat death” of the universe or the instant of its beginning, the “big bang.” The second law of thermodynamics renders both inquiries futile. The detonating physical universe has no intrinsic unity and therefore can have no intrinsic significance. However, a justifiably famous British astronomer, an atheist with an aversion to the “creeping creationism” he had discerned in the “big bang” theory of the origin of the universe, was moved nonetheless to write as follows:
Would you not say to yourself, "Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."
Sir Alfred Hoyle, “The Universe Past and Present: Reflections,” Engineering and Science, November, 1981, pp. 1-12.
Origen was born in Alexandria about 185 and died in 254 as a result of tortures suffered during the Decian persecution. His father, Leonides, probably a Roman citizen with a sizeable estate,[250] had been martyred during Septimius Severus’ persecution, ca. 202, when Origen was not yet seventeen. Eusebius relates that he was prevented from joining his father in martyrdom only by his mother’s hiding of his clothing.[251] Septimius Severus’ persecution of the Church was aimed at proselytism; Leonides’ martyrdom was most likely due to his having been recognized as teaching Christianity to catechumens and doubtless gaining converts. This is the more likely when one considers the quality of the education he gave his son: the full secondary school training preparatory for the study of philosophy, along with a religious training based upon his own assiduous biblical study. Crouzel observes that he was certainly an intellectual, perhaps a teacher of grammar, and an important man. His was beheaded, a mode of execution proper to Roman citizens, an unusual eminence in Alexandria at the time.
Leonides’ death was followed by the expropriation of his property, leaving his family without support. Origen, the eldest of Leonides’ seven sons,[252] undertook to supply this by teaching grammar, the additional training for this required of him a level of personal discipline and asceticism difficult to imagine in a youth of barely seventeen, who also found himself, faute de mieux, in charge of the Catechetical School of Alexandria.
Clement, who had succeeded its founder, Pantaenus, [253] as the second director of the School, had been forced to flee Alexandria by the same persecution that martyred Leonides, leaving the School without direction. Origen simply inherited Clement’s office, quite informally, and continued to fill it.[254] He could have done this only by having received a considerable classical and religious formation from his father, as also from Clement, during the latter’s administration of the School while Origen was a student there under his tutelage.
After his father’s execution, a wealthy and generous laywoman financed Origen’s further education to a level which qualified him to teach professionally as a grammarian. His first academic responsibili-ty, assigned him by Bishop Demetrius, was that of teaching grammar in the catechetical School.[255] During this time, he was in possession of a number of philosophical works, quite possibly relicts of his father’s library which, impetuously, he decided were inappropriate to his role in the direction of the School, that of teaching the supreme wisdom that is the Christian faith. He sold them for a pittance, barely sufficient to live upon. Crouzel notes that by this time, his younger brothers were presumably able to support the family. Soon thereafter, Origen came to recognize the wisdom of Clement’s view of the works of the pagan philosophers as ‘spoils of the Egyptians,’ and so resumed his study of them.
At the end of two years as the de facto director of the School, while still eighteen, his performance at once as the director of the School and a teacher in it induced Bishop Demetrius of Alexandria to confirm him in that office,[256] which he held for the next twenty-eight years, from his original appointment by Demetrius until 232, when Demetrius exiled him from Alexandria, and Heraclas, already a professional philosopher, took over the direction of the School.
Dionysius the Great, Origen’s student and disciple, succeeded Heraclas as the director of the Catechetical School upon the latter’s succession to the See of Alexandria ca. 233.[257] In 248, Dionysius succeeded Heraclas as Bishop of Alexandria, governing the diocese as well as continuing to direct the Catechetical School for nearly twenty years, until his death ca. 266. Throughout the reign of the great bishops of Alexandria of the following-century, Alexander and Athanasius, Origen continued to be the normative voice of Alexandrine theology.
Several years after his appointment as director of the Catechetical School, Origen began a formal study of philosophy under the tutelage of Ammonius Saccus,[258] a renowned Alexandrine teacher of philosophy, who may have been a Christian. He further developed the rationalization of Platonism initiated by Philo in the first century, and became famous as the tutor of Plotinus, whose doctrine, edited and published as The Enneads by his disciple Porphyry, is the classic statement of Neoplatonism.
When Origen, probably in his middle thirties, [259] began to write the Peri Archon, he had acquired a competent grasp of the Greek philosophical tradition, Aristotelian and Stoic as well as Platonic. It reinforced his early conviction that the uniquely true philosophy, in the classic sense of the love and unremitting pursuit of the reality of wisdom, is the Christian faith.
Thus Origen was well acquainted with Middle Platonism and its Neoplatonic extrapolation when he developed, in the Peri Archon, the basis for, and the implications of his very early rejection of the Platonic vision of man in his world. He been taught by his martyred father that the only true wisdom is simply the faith of the Church, mediated to the faithful in her liturgical preaching of the historical revelation given by the Christ to his apostles. In the Preface of the Peri Archon he committed himself to its third-century tradition. Origen had found in the Church’s faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, a truth at once absolute and concretely historical, incapable of reduction to the abstractions of the pagan philosophical traditions. Insofar as Origen’s later philosophical training has a positive influence upon his theology, in the main, as will be seen, it does so by deploying concepts and categories open to theological conversion.
However, his studies under Ammonius Saccus had a Platonizing impact upon what may be termed his theological imagination and so upon his theology, apparent in unnoticed lapses into the Platonic dualism, and in his recourse to Platonic insights where, with greater consistency, he might more profitably have explored Christian themes already familiar to him, notably, that of the headship of Jesus the Lord In brief, there is no reason to regard Origen’s theology as an attempt to convert Platonism to Christian purposes. He had from his youth recognized the pagan wisdom as not a wisdom at all. Gregory Thaumaturgus, who studied under him for seven years in Caesarea, describes Origen’s warning his students of the dangers inherent in a confusion of theology with philosophy. Origen certainly levied upon Platonism. Crouzel believes that Origen’s recognition of Jesus as the Bridegroom of the Church has parallels in the Neoplatonic Triad,[260] but such parallels do not indicate derivation. The nuptial symbolism of the Church’s Eucharistic liturgy is the far more likely source. The Platonic parallel not only fails, but its evocation by Crouzel evidences in him a confusion which, leaving intact the foundation of Origen’s Christology, viz., his persistent commitment to the communication of Names in Jesus the Lord, entails nonetheless a reading of Origen which, if valid, would dehistoricize Jesus, denying his Personal humanity.
Origen was well aware that the office of headship is that described by Paul, the provision of the free unity and significance of the substance in which the head is immanent, and that therefore Jesus the Christ is the principle (Αρχή) and source (Πηγή) of the free intelligibility of the created universe.[261] He never abandoned this foundation, viz., the primordial Event of the free union (Henōsis -Ένωσις): of the eternal Son of the Father and the human Person who is Jesus the Lord.[262] This foundational free Event, equivalently “the Beginning,” clearly Jesus’ Mission from the Father, is continually present and for the most part clarifies and guides the development of Origen’s theology.
Nonetheless, Origen’s identification of the eternal, i.e., the Trinity-immanent, nonhistorical Logos as the source of the intelligibility of the created universe impedes his recognition of that office in Jesus the Lord, who is the eternal Logos: the Churches tradition knows no other. In the end however, Origen did not submit his faith to philosophy, but rather persevered in the conversion of philosophy to the freedom of the faith. His recognition of the redeemer of the fallen Good Creation in Jesus the Lord, whose redemption of the fallen Church is precisely his restoration of her free unity and intelligibility by his sacrificial institution of the One Flesh, is also Origen’s radical rejection of the cosmological wisdom of the pagan world, and his persistence in upholding the truth of the apostolic tradition as normative for wisdom as such, and so for \his theology.
Origen intends his theology to be coherent, a “body of doctrine,” as Rufinus will name it, an “exercise theology,” gymnastikos, and a “research theology, as Crouzel will dub it. The “exercise” is equivalently the fides quaerens intellectum of St. Anselm, which Origen had arrived at it a millennium earlier. As with St. Anselm, Origen seeks answers to the questions which his personal appropriation of the Mysterium fidei mediated by the apostolic tradition leaves open and in that sense unanswered. Theological expression of the quaerens intelllectum,which is proper to the faith as such, is the tentative integration of theologian’s personal quaerens intellectum into a provisionally coherent theological hypothesis which integrates his faith with the questioning which proceeds from it, and is inseparable from it. This is the intellectual dimension of personal participation in the Church’s worship in truth of him who is Truth. The theologian’s worship of the mystery of faith is ever incomplete: so also must be every expression of his personal quaerens intellectum.
As intending a coherent questioning of the faith of the Church, Origen’s theology cannot but intend a systematic construct, but the coherence he intends is free because it is historical with the historicity of its object, the mystery of Christ. It is evident that Origen anticipates Anselm’s definition of theology as “fides quaerens intellectum,” for his theology, like Anselm’s, is a personal quaerens intellectum, a search for understanding inspired, as is Anselm’s, by the faith of the Church in Jesus the Lord. Both rest upon the same liturgical foundation, the historically immanent, history-transcending revelation of Jesus the Christ’s Lordship of fallen history, his Eucharistic immanence in it as its Alpha and its Omega, its head, the source of our fallen history’s free salvific unity.
The Christian quaerens intellectum is not that deterministic flight from history to a timeless absolute, forced by the historical pessimism which holds truth, along with unity, goodness and beauty, to be incapable of historical mediation. The coherence of Origen’s “connected body of doctrine” rests upon the historical optimism grounded in the Catholic tradition of the faith that Jesus is the Lord. This foundation opens his speculation to the infinite mystery, the historical revelation who is Jesus Christ, whose Truth is mediated by the historical worship of the historical Church. Origen’s theology is his free response to the universally distributed grace of Christ who “for freedom has made us free,” and which two centuries later Augustine would name the “trahi a Deo,” the unlimited attraction of the coincidence of truth and freedom that is Beauty Personified, the “ancient beauty who is forever new,” Jesus Christ, the Light of the World.
Only in this free historical and radically sacramental sense is Origen’s theology systematic. Further, by reason of its sacramental historicity, it cannot but be metaphysical, for the objectivity of that historicity is free because it is liturgical and its realism is finally sacramental. Origen accepts as valid the unique free integration of truth and reality that is revealed in Christ, the head of the Church and of all creation. As the head of the Church and, through her, of all creation, Christ is the source of the free unity, the free truth, the free reality of the redeemed creation. Immanent in that creation, he is the Personal revelation of its free significance to those whose head he is. .
Truth is given us in Jesus the Christ, and in him alone, who is Truth in Person: there is no other Truth than Christ the Lord. Origen therefore does not seek an extrinsic validation of the faith which founds his “exercise” of theology. He knows no history-transcending intellect, no Absolute Monas whose transcendence of history is simply his absence from it. Origen’s radically liturgical appropriation of the apostolic tradition of the Truth of Christ is a commitment to historical transcendence of Jesus the Lord, which can only be his Eucharistic immanence within it, i.e., his Eucharistic headship. History knows no other historical unity, and no other freedom, than that which is liturgically mediated through personal participation in the worship of the Church. Understood ecumenically as it must be, this remains a hard saying, but its alternative is personal subscription to the despair of history that characterizes every pagan and neo-pagan philosophy.
The mystery of Christ transcends the theological quaerens as at once responsive to it and sustaining it. Every quaerens intellectum arising from the Christian faith, whether Origen’s, Anselm’s, or ours, is wise only in its affirmation of the mystery upon whose Truth it feeds. In short, Origen affirmed the mystery of the faith, the Event “in the Beginning” (Jn. 1:1: Ἐν ἁρχῆ) that is Jesus the Lord, the foundation of wisdom as such, and so of his theology.[263] Having affirmed the mystery as the Truth upon which his quaerens intellectum is focused and depends, Origen cannot but seek it continually: only thus does his theology exist, as a continual quaerens intellectum which, founded on the faith that Jesus is the Lord, .seeks to formulate an ever more inclusive statement of his worship of the Truth who is Christ our Lord.
ŸŸŸ
Origen established himself in Alexandria, as later he would in Caesarea, as an extraordinarily talented theologian, exegete, and teacher. Ambrosius, a wealthy man whom the youthful Origen had converted from Gnosticism, early recognized his talent and provided him with the stimulus and facilities which together at once prompted and enabled his truly prodigious theologycal publication. We have an eloquent report of his spiritual and intellectual impact upon his students at Caesarea by him who is perhaps the most illustrious of them, Gregory Thaumaturgus, later the Bishop of Neo-Caesarea.[264]
Inasmuch as the interest of this study is doctrinal and systematic, its first concern is Origen’s development of the implications of his faith that Jesus Christ is Lord. This development is the subject of his Peri Archon, which is generally recognized to be the most intellectual of all of his works.[265] For reasons now difficult to discern apart from the novelty of his theological vision, and the boldness of his publication of it, within fifty years of his death Origen was accused of a subordinationism entirely incompatible with the Trinitarian doctrine of the Peri Archon. He was also accused of denying the identity of the risen body and the “terrestrial” body by placing an irreducible distinction between them, although neither heresy is found in Peri Archon. his basic theological statement. Nonetheless, within a few decades of its publication his theology had prompted enough resistance to warrant Pamphilus’ publication of a five-volume defense of its orthodoxy in the first decade of the fourth century. As Crouzel has shown, these early criticisms, notably by Peter, the martyred bishop of Alexandria, and Methodius, the martyred bishop of Olympus, were largely due to simple incomprehension, abetted perhaps by the affront to ‘common sense’ of Origen’s rather unceremonious dismissal of long-standing theories of the “origin of the soul” which he saw to be so inadequate as to merit no refutation.[266].
Both of these accusations, i.e., of subordinationism and of so distorting the doctrine of the resurrection as in effect to deny it, were made by Peter Martyr, who is thought to have directed the Catechetical School in Alexandria, probably with the assistance of Achillas, after Pierius’ departure for Rome in 282. During this period, according to a well-established Alexandrine custom, Peter had been chosen by his bishop, Theonas, to succeed him as bishop of Alexandria. Accordingly, Peter succeeded to the See of Alexandria upon Theonas’ death at the turn of the fourth century, ca. 301.
The outbreak of the Diocletian persecution in 303 soon forced Peter to flee the city. For the next decade, with occasional brief intermissions enabling him to visit Alexandria, Peter governed the Church of Alexandria from exile, living in refuges outside the metropolis, until his arrest and execution under Maximin, the nephew of Galerius, in 311. A recent study has summarized Peter Martyr’s criticism of Origen’s doctrine as an orthodox reaction in Alexandria to what he regarded as a heretical distortion of the faith.[267] St. Peter’s appointed successor, Achillas, died within a year and was succeeded in 313 by Alexander, whose Trinitarian doctrine and Christology, expressed in his condemnation of Arius and in his long Letter to Alexander of Thessalonica, show him to be a disciple of Origen.[268] A subsequent section of this study is devoted to the doctrine and, inseparably, the episcopate of Alexander’s great successor, Athanasius of Alexandria, which covers a near half-century, 328-373, during all of which he upheld the foundational doctrine of Nicaea. Crouzel has pointed out that Origen’s doctrine of the substantial unity of the Trinity, anticipated the Nicene doctrine of the substantial unity of the Trinity. The defenders of this doctrine, especially Eustathius of Antioch and Athanasius of Alexandria, confronted and defeated the Eusebian version of the subordinationist Arian heresy, as well as thwating the Roman emperors who, having found it convenient to impose Arianism universally, came to regard Athanasius’ unflinching proclamation of the faith of Nicaea as treason to themselves and the Roman empire, a capital offense.
With Alexander’s accession to the See of Alexandria, Origen became the normative theological authority in Alexandria and would continue so to be until the turn of the fifth century, when the erratic Bishop Theophilus began to oppose what he misunderstood to be Origen’s theology, and wrote a letter to Pope Anastasius condemning it.[269]
In 553, three centuries after Origen’s death, and a hundred and eighty after the death of Athanasius, the Christian Emperor Justinian had succeeded in subordinating the Church to his imperial authority on the same basis as earlier had Constantine, i.e., the assimilation of the liturgical, doctrinal and moral unity of the Church to the political unity of the empire. As a result, Justinian was confronted by the easily predictable consequence of his submission of the doctrinal tradition to political control. Any doctrinal dissent too extensive to be suppressed by coercion had to be negotiated. The Monophysite dissent to the Symbol of Chalcedon was of this sort. It threatened the unity of the Empire because too large to confront with force majeure. The Monophysite rejection of the Chalcedonian affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus because, as the monophysites percieve it, imbued with the Nestorian heresy, required a negotiated solution. As a Christian, Justinian could not concede the doctrinal point; unable to dissent to the Symbol of Chalcedon, some other device must be found. The widely accepted “Origenist” rationalization of Origen’s Christology into an adoptionism provided this device, for Justinian could condemn that error without condemning the Chalcedonian Symbol. Justinian’s condemnation of what he supposed to be Origen’s Christology was an acceptable sop to the Monophysites. The price to be paid was Origen’s reputation as an orthodox theologian, for his condemnation by the Emperor was public and notorious. Induced one way or another by Justinian, the eleventh canon of the Second Council of Constantinople includes Origen by name among a list of heretics. This misinformed quasi-Conciliar condemnation contributed to the further destruction of such works of Origen as had not been destroyed during the Diocletian persecution, when their possession was punishable as treason.
Despite the enormity of this loss, Origen is reckoned the greatest of all the Eastern theologians prior to the Council of Nicaea; Crouzel considers Origen to have anticipated the Nicene definition of the substantial unity of the Trinity, and the Personal consubstantiality of the divine Son with the Father.[270] Origen’s influence upon the Alexandrine Church, by way of Dionysius, Alexander, Athanasius and Didymus, is paramount. He is without doubt the greatest speculative genius the Oriental Church has known.
Origen died as a martyr. Arrested during the renewal of the Decian persecution by the emperor Valerius because of his conspicuous Christianity, he was subjected to extreme torments to induce his apostasy, but he did not give way[271]. He was released from prison by his persecutors, lest he die in their hands, to the scandal of many. Shortly afterward, in 254, aged sixty-nine, he died from his injuries inflicted on him in vain, by the persecutors.
Origen possessed an extraordinary theological talent; there can be no doubt of his genius; the Church has known none greater. He has had a powerful influence on all subsequent theological development, not only upon the Alexandrine tradition, but also on the rest of the Orient. His doctrine was mediated, albeit ambiguously, by the Cappadocian brothers, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, and with fidelity by Gregory of Nazianzen and his cousin, Amphilocius of Iconium,[272] In the latter half of the fourth century it entered the Latin West by way of Hilary of Poitiers and, more accurately, by way of Ambrose, one of the few Romans then sufficiently literate in Greek to read and appreciate Origen’s work. Hilary of Poitiers’ familiarity with Origen’s exegesis and spirituality found expression in his later works. After Ambrose and dependent upon him, Augustine also came under the influence of Origen.[273] The Latin Church became acquainted with Origen’s spirituality, set out for the most part in his exegetical development of the four senses of Scripture. largely through John Cassian, who founded a monastery near Marseilles, whence it was passed on to the Benedictines. Origen’s allegorical influence upon Western exegesis was also mediated by Jerome, whose breach with Origen did not prevent his admiration for and dependence upon his exegetical genius. Pope Damasus admired the spirituality of Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs. Further, Pope Damasus’ recognition and support of Athanasius’ Nicene orthodoxy despite the efforts of Basil of Caesarea to persuade him to confirm Meletius as the Bishop of Antioch amount to his approval of Athanasius’ “mia hypostasis,” and his rejection of the Eusebian deformation of Origen’s Trinitarian theology.
These influences of the Greek texts of Origen’s theology via Hilary and Ambrose upon the Latin West were important, but in comparison to the impact upon the Western world of Rufinus’ translations of Origen’s Greek works into the Latin of the Western world, they are of lesser moment. Rufinus’ translations were not limited to his rendition of the Peri Archon into the Peri Archon. He also translated the first book of Pamphilus’ Defense of Origen, and part of Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs. He also he provided an abbreviated translation of the first Book of Origen’s Commentary on Romans, as well as translations of many of Origen’s homilies. These translations were the means by which most of the Western scholars became familiar with Origen’s theology, exegesis and spirituality. It is by way of Rufinus that Origen’s authority among the Latin Fathers came to be second only to that of Augustine, as de Lubac has observed.
Particularly important is Origen’s analysis of the four senses of Scripture, which found its way into the medieval quatrain which de Lubac quotes on the first page of the first volume of his Medieval Exegesis and develops thereafter.[274] It has earlier been noted that this exegesis is inherent in the twelfth century analysis of sacramental causality as sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, in which the double effect (res gemina) of the Eucharistic signing of the One Sacrifice res et sacramentum has a double significance, at once doctrinal and moral. Origen’s exegetical insight was radically sacramental; otherwise that “medieval quatrain” encapsulating it could not have been written. Augustine’s distinction between the infallible and the fallible effects of sacramental signing is doubtless its proximate inspiration, but between him and Anselm of Laon lie nearly seven centuries of monastic and scholastic meditation on the scriptures and on their four senses, taught by Origen and mediated by Abbot Cassian to Latin monasticism, the Benedictine tradition which taught Europe during the centuries which in which Catholicism informed and formed Western civilization.
Origen is the first theologian formally to base his theology upon the doctrinal tradition, which is identically the liturgical mediation of the Eucharistic immanence of Jesus the Christ in history. It is on that oral liturgical tradition that Origen founded his speculative integration of the implications of the Church’s faith that Jesus Christ is Lord. Origen’s free faith-commitment to the Lordship of Jesus, i.e., to what will come to be known as the communication of idioms in the mystery of his Person, controls his theology. The free coherence of its free inquiry is the corollary of its foundation, the free coherence of Personal humanity and Personal divinity in the one and the same Son, Jesus the Lord.[275]
Apart from this foundation in the historical Lordship of Jesus the Christ, the Peri Archon would be only another venture in speculative cosmology, an abstract quaerens intellectum grounded not in historical truth but in the immanent necessities of the fallen mind. From its beginnings in the sixth century B.C., this “dialectic” has had to face the insoluble problem of rationally integrating the multiplicity and variability of historical existence, whose insolubility transforms the quest for rational unity into a rational rejection of and flight from history.
Origen’s theology is novel simply by being historical, sustained by his personal participation in the Church’s historical worship of Jesus the Christ rather than by the determinist cosmological rationality of the dualist philosophical traditions of the Mediterranean world. His theology is a fides quaerens intellectum, and consequently a rejection of the culturally normative cosmological ratio quaerens intellectum, which is always a flight from the irrationalities of history. By his participation in the freedom intrinsic to the Church’s historical worship in truth of the Truth who is Christ, Origen was drawn to an ever more comprehensive inquiry into free and therefore the radically inexhaustible mystery, Jesus the Lord. As a result, a critical examination of his theology can proceed on no other basis than his foundational affirmation that Jesus is the Lord, and its corollary, the communication in him, in his “hypostasis,” his Person, of divine and human Names.
In the first third of the third century the Church’s doctrinal tradition knew no formal and universally binding definitions. The imperial persecutions of the Church throughout the second and third centuries, and during the first decade of the fourth, prevented conciliar assemblies of bishops[276] and thereby inhibited such expressions of dogmatic clarity as first appeared in the next century in the Nicene Creed, which simply rejected the cosmological rationality whose quest for necessary reasons had, for many, obscured the witness of the apostolic tradition.
Until the Council of Nicaea, the defense of the faith against the challenges to its freedom and its historicity by Marcion, the Gnostics, and the Middle Platonists such as Celsus and Porphyry, was the responsibility of the individual bishops in the Orient. As J. N. D. Kelly has noted, it was primarily by their extraordinary pastoral diligence that the Gnostic threat to the Church‘s faith was defeated. Over the next two centuries, the bishops’ exercise of their preaching office produced, against Marcion, the canon of the New Testament [277] and, against the dualism characterizing Middle Platonism as well as Gnosticism, a resolute commitment to the Church’s liturgical affirmation of the unity of God and the divinity of the Son and Spirit. The final and extraordinarily subtle expression of this magisterial consensus is the Creed of Nicaea, whose doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father owes more to Origen than most Church historians find easy to admit, de Lubac and Crouzel being the major exceptions.
There can be no doubt of the contributions of Justin, Tertullian, Irenaeus and Origen to the defeat the Gnostic and quasi-Gnostic threats to the faith of the Church but, in the final analysis, that contribution was their learned support of the liturgical responsibility and authority of the bishops to preach the faith. During the early third century when Origen wrote the Peri Archon, the ‘rule of faith’ relied upon the preaching of the apostles and of the bishops whose standing as successors to the liturgical authority and responsibility which the apostles had received from Christ at the Last Supper was universally recognized. The doctrinal tradition rested, then as now, upon the unquestioned authority of the bishops’ mediation of the liturgical tradition, historically concrete in the Church’s Eucharistic worship in truth of the Truth incarnate, Jesus Christ the Lord.
It is too much to expect of Origen, or of any theologian whether pre- or post-Nicene, that the focus of his inquiry upon the mystery of Christ should never blur, and that his theology should have fully realized the coherence which that mystery offers to theological quaerens founded upon it. At the same time, it is indisputable that Origen’s goal from first to last was to develop the free coherence proper to a “connected body of doctrine” based upon the faith of the Church. This commitment did not insulate him from the confusion which marks our fallenness, our twin solidarities, with the first Adam, and with the Last, but it does enable a critical distinction between its elements, as either consistent with the faith of the Church that Jesus Christ is Lord, or inconsistent with that faith.
The systematic thrust of the present investigation of Origen’s theology cannot ignore the occasional cosmologically-inspired departures from the free coherence of doctrine upon which the Peri Archon is intent.[278] The notice given them and their excision as aberrant does not deny their reality, only their relevance to his “connected body of doctrine” which, given its free coherence, is incompatible with the cosmology underlying those departures from the communication of idioms that is foundational for the coherence he seeks. E.g., he is occasionally under the cosmological persuasion that the eternal Son does not die, although he stresses the reality of the death of Jesus the Lord, and, for example, in his Commentary on John, 7, 11, 16, 37, 40, repeatedly insists on the redemption worked by that death. We do not have a dialectic here, but a confusion. He knows the communication of idioms in Jesus to be a communication of historical Names.[279] The tradition knows no abstract Name, for “Name” denotes a uniquely irreducible subsistence.
This “connected body of doctrine” which the Peri Archon intends is the speculative and consequently hypothetical product of the free, historical theological exploration of the mystery of Christ, the “fides quaerens intellecttum,” which finds expression in the Peri Archon, and there owes its organization, its free intellectual unity, to the apostolic rule of faith which Origen set out in the Preface to the Peri Archon, and which he affirms to be foundational for his theology. In the last analysis, this foundation is the communication of idioms in Jesus Christ the Lord. In sum, Origen was a man of the Church, not of the academy. His faith frees his theology from submission to the immanent logic of the cosmological mindset that would characterize Eusebius of Caesarea and the other followers of Arius during most of the next century. Origen’s theology is historical because it is radically Christian, rooted in the faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord, which no cosmology can permit.
Prior to Origen, and for long after him, rationality and cosmology were to each other as cause and effect. No alternative to this correlation was conceivable. However, having recognized that the cosmological rationality of the finest minds in Alexandria was inapplicable to his exploration of the implication of his faith in Christ, Origen could not proceed without substantiating the intrinsically free rationality of his faith. To that end, he could not avoid the task of constructing its adequate hermeneutic, which is to say, could not avoid the construction of a coherent mode of inquiry into the radical mystery of the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord. Origen is the first to perceive that this task is inherent in the freedom of that faith, which cannot but seek a fuller grasp of a Truth it can never transcend, never comprehend. He undertook this task about ten years before his exile from Alexandria in 332, and by that time had completed his Peri Archon, perhaps the most important theological work ever written, and certainly the most discussed. Its historicity is its loyalty to the historical faith of the historical Church, and simply on that basis it has known no obsolescence.
The pre-Nicene Alexandrine theological tradition relied simply upon Origen. It included Pantaneus and Clement before him, and after him, Dionysius the Great, and Alexander of Alexandria. After Alexander, his chosen successor Athanasius defended Origen’s doctrine of the absolute unity of the Trinity against bitterly sustained opposition throughout the forty-five years of his episcopate.
The Alexandrine tradition is thus more than Origen, but it is not less. On Origen depends, quite simply, the free rational coherence, which is to say, the historicity, of the Alexandrine theological tradition, and particularly its express loyalty to the historical faith of the historical Church that Jesus is the Lord. Origen was the first theologian clearly to recognize the indispensability of what would come to be called the communication of idioms, i.e. the unity, in the Name, the Person of Christ, of the fullness of humanity and of divinity, a fullness which in neither could not be less than Personal, for it is Named: Jesus the Lord.
Origen’s theology therefore rests upon a single continually challenged postulate, viz., that Jesus’ Personal unity is the union, the Henōsis, in him of Personal divinity and Personal humanity. This postulate would be confirmed more than two centuries later by the Council of Chalcedon, whose brief Symbol affirmed eight times that Jesus is “one and the same Son” of the Father and of the Theotokos, further developing that ancient tradition in the assertion that Jesus subsists at once in the substantial Trinity and in substantial humanity, whereby he is consubstantial with the Father, and with us.
Irenaeus’ use of “one and the same ” at the end of the second century summarized his own perception of the historical unity of Personal humanity and Personal divinity in Jesus the Christ, the “second Adam” of I Cor. 15, Rom. 5 and 8, and the Lord Jesus Christ of Phil. 2:13. His insight into it as “recapitulation” was primitive in comparison with Origen’s hypothesis of the Henōsis of Jesus the Christ, but that development merely fulfills Irenaeus’ preliminary insight into the unqualified unity of Christ and his transcendence of history as its Lord
The early criticism of Origen’s Peri Archon by Peter Martyr, the bishop of Alexandria at the turn of the fourth century, and Methodius, the bishop of Olympus, is understandable, for Origen’s speculative “exercise” of theology was at once entirely novel and its conclusions were consequently heard as radical. His theology could scarcely avoid raising some alarm among the defenders of orthodoxy at a time when theological speculation was otherwise in its infancy. Peter Martyr and Methodius were both theologians of repute before becoming bishops. Both died as martyrs, probably in the same year, 311. Thereafter they were honored as saints, and their distrust of Origen carried great weight.[280] Nonetheless, both misunderstood theology of the Peri Archon; Crouzel has noted that they found its novelties alien to their grasp of the Church’s tradition. Thus they accused Origen of denying the resurrection of the dead by reason of the necessary qualitative distinction he drew between the fallen and the risen body.[281] They further accused him of having taught the eternity of the material creation, this by reason of the eternal “production” of the epinoiai (ἐπίνοιαι), i.e., the ideas constituting the intelligible order of the created universe, which Origen identified with the eternal Son, under his epinoia of “Logos.”
Origen’s doctrine of the Logos as the unity of the epinoiai constituting the intelligibility of the material creation is open to the criticism developed further on, but not on the grounds of implying an eternal creation. Origen understands the eternal Son, as eternal, to have a quasi-mediatorial role in the creation of the universe; Justin Martyr had written to much the same effect under the influence of the cosmological rationality of the time. He attempted a Christological mediation between the absolute divinity, the Father who as absolute is incapable of relation, and all that is created and relative: the universe. Under the same influence, Origen requires the epinoiai to be integral with the eternal Son, whom he understands to be the Father’s Wisdom and Logos. Thus for Origen the Son’s epinoiai are at one with his divine Sonship, at one with his eternal begetting by the Father, which has no beginning. It is further clear that in Origen’s theology the epinoiai do not constitute an eternal creation of the universe, for he clearly associates that ex nihilo creation of all that is not the Trinity, i.e., all that is not “substantial,” with the Father’s “accidental,” i.e., “production” of finite, changeable, material and temporal beings, all of whom have their “Beginning” in the primordial Henōsis that is Jesus the Lord.
The eternal Son’s epinoiai have their origin in the Father’s eternal generation of the Son, a “substantial” and therefore divine production (ktisis-κτίσις) which is entirely distinct from the “accidental” ktisis whose product is the primordial (not eternal) Henōsis of the Personal Name of the Son with the Personal Name of Jesus.
Origen terms the Father’s eternal generation of the Son a “ktisis” without prejudice to the Son’s eternity. However, he uses the same term to describe the Father’s creation of the temporal universe. Crouzel prefers to translate ktisis as “production,” a more general term to match Origen’s more general use of ktisis.[282] Furthermore, the distinction Origen places between the Father’s eternal or “substantial” production (ktisis) of the Trinity, and the Father’s “accidental” production (again, ktisis), of the finite, material, temporal universe of the Intelligences, commonly referred to by the koine plural of “nous,” or mind, “noes,” (a term which Crouzel has shown Origen never to have used, although that usage has become usual and is followed here[283]) makes it clear that Peter Martyr and Methodius simply failed to understand his doctrine. In any case, their criticism, arising as it did out of incomprehension, had no lasting influence. We know, from Pamphilus’ defense of Origen in the first decade of the fourth century, that there were other contemporaneous ripples of discontent with his teaching. However Crouzel has shown that, like the criticisms made by Peter Martyr and Methodius, these others also were rooted in misunderstanding.[284] Origen’s flat rejection of the immanent necessities of cosmological rationality baffled his readers then, and continues so to do today.
Here it should be noted that the references to Origen in the first two volumes of this work reflect the influence of the Eusebian misreading of Origen’s theology, and the consequent scholarly attribution to him of a global heresy. The present exposition of Origen’s theology may serve as an apology for the present author’s earlier less than critical acceptance of its “Origenist” travesty as authentic.
The present inquiry into what remains of Origen’s signal contribution to our understanding of the Catholic tradition is limited to the Trinitarian and Christological theology set out in the Peri Archon, a work of genius that survives in its entirety only in the Latin translation, the Peri Archon, published by Rufinus of Aquilaea in the last years of the fourth century[285]. Rufinus was well aware of the storm his translation would provoke among those deceived by the widespread misinterpretation of Origen’s radical insight into the historical unity of Jesus Christ the Lord.[286]
Over the two and a half centuries after Origen’s death, the identification of his theology with its subordinationist corruption by Eusebius of Caesarea, and its further cosmological distortions by “Origenists” such as Evagrius Ponticus, carried the day.[287] Resistance to this imperially approved distortion of the Catholic tradition was persecuted and consequently is scant.[288] Within a dozen years after the condemnation of Arius by the Council of Nicaea, there remained, of the Oriental bishops who had attended the Council and approved its verdict, only Marcellus of Ancyra and Athanasius of Alexandria. Macarius of Jerusalem was dead, while Eustathius of Antioch had been condemned, deposed and exiled ca. 330 for the “Sabellian“ upholding of the Nicene mia ousia ; thereafter he was heard from no more, dying in exile, probably in 337. The pro-Nicene Christians, dubbed Eustathians by reason of their loyalty to the last legitimate bishop of Antioch, remained loyal to his memory and consequently to the faith of Nicaea, but they had no bishop until 362, when Lucifer of Cagliari ordained, their leader, Paulinus, whom Athanasius, a year later, recognized as the legitimate bishop of Antioch. A decade later, in 373 Pope Damasus did the same. The schism between the Eustathians and the homoiousians was finally resolved in 414, when the homoiousian party had long lost the necessary imperial support, and a Nicene bishop reconciled them. For more than forty years, from the deposition of Eustathius to the confirmation of the Nicene faith by I Constantinople, they had refused to recognize the Arian successors of Eustathius to the See of Antioch, and they saw in the Conciliar selection of Diodore’s old homoiousian friend, Flavian, to succeed Meletius to the See of Antioch in place of Paulinus, only more of the same.
Apart from Athanasius of Alexandria’s increasingly effective governance of the vast diocese of Egypt, the Eusebian subordinationism and its accompanying corruption of Origen’s Christology dominated the Orient until the First Council of Constantinople in 381. Only then, when imperial support of Arianism definitively ceased, did Arianism itself cease to trouble the Orient. Arianism survived only in North Africa and Spain, where it had been brought by Gothic and Vandal migration. Ulfilas, the missionary who taught Arianism to the Gothic tribes, was a Cappodocian of Gothic antecedents, who had been consecrated about 336 by Arius’ close associate, Eusebius of Nicomedia, the bishop of Constantinople who would baptize Constantine on his deathbed[289]. Ambrose’s succession, in 374, to the See of Milan, which had been held by the Arian Auxentius since 355, similarly disestablished the Arianism which, twenty years earlier, Emperor Constantius had attempted to i.mpose upon the Latin West. Auxentius, also a native of Cappadocia, was the foster-son of Ulfilas.[290]
The Visigoths in Spain remained Arian until the conversion of their king, Reccared, two centuries later. Thereafter Arianism ceased to trouble the Church.
The theology of the Peri Archon is grounded upon and controlled entirely by the concretely historical communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, the Christ.[291] Its “body of doctrine”[292] is the product of a “research theology,” i.e., a coherent hypothetical resolution of questions left open by the Trinitarian and Christological content of the rule of faith as it existed in his time. Origen has detailed this content in his Preface to the Peri Archon. The Preface is his recital of the apostolic tradition as mediated in the early third century by the ordinary teaching of the Church’s bishops. This tradition, as apostolic, is radically Eucharistic, centered upon the apostolic celebration, the liturgical memorial, of the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Christ. It follows that, as Crouzel has stressed, Christology is the center of Origen’s theology.[293] However, that Christological center is also Trinitarian. Because of its foundation in the historical faith of the historical Church that Jesus is the Lord, the theology of the Peri Archon is historical from the outset. Particularly, by reason of the historicity of his inquiry, Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine and his Christology are inseparable, integral to the same mystery, the Lordship of Jesus the Christ.
The unity of Origen’s “body of doctrine” is therefore not “systematic” in the usual sense which Crouzel’s denial that Origen’s theology is “systematic” would appear to take for granted.[294] His assumption is not without precedent: e.g., von Balthasar’s rejection of systematic theology in favor of a theological aesthetics also presumes that systematic theology is the product of an extrinsic, methodologically imposed rational unity which cannot deal with the free truth, i.e., the beauty, of the Revelation in Christ. When “system” is thus understood, Crouzel is certainly correct. There is nothing in Origen’s “research theology,” nothing in his “connected body of doctrine,” whose coherence is the product of an imposed, methodically necessary integration, which is to say, Origen’s theology is not a cosmology.
However, it is on such deterministic bases that Origen’s Peri Archon has been systematically misconstrued, and upon which the “Origenism” which Eusebius of Caesarea and, later, Evagrius Ponticus, taught is constructed. These artifacts, confected by minds far inferior to his, are commonly thought to be implicit in one or another element of Origen’s theology. Such inference rests always upon the supposition that the coherence of his theology is cosmological rather than historical, controlled by the extrinsic criterion of necessary reasons rather than by the intrinsic historical truth of the Church’s tradition. Invariably they suppose the subject of the Incarnation, the Logos who became flesh, to be the non-historical eternal Son. This cosmological postulate rejects a priori theological postulate which Origen established in the Preface of the Peri Archon, the foundation of his theology in the Church’s proclamation of the free historical truth of the Personal unity of the Christ, summed up in Phil 2:12: “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Thus grounded, his program of “research theology” is freed a priori from what would destroy it, i.e., enlistment in the cosmological quest for necessary reasons.
The free coherence of his theology is then integral with its foundation, the free liturgical assertion of the communication of idioms, i.e., of divine and human Names in Jesus the Christ. Origen’s subscription to this hermeneutic of the historical faith that Jesus is the Lord entails his flat rejection of that metaphysical monism and its autonomous, viz., abstract rationality, whether that of Plato, of Aristotle, of the Stoics, of Middle Platonism, of Neoplatonism, or of their several pseudo-theological adaptations, whose common dehistoricizing thrust cannot accept the double consubstantiality of Jesus taught definitively at Chalcedon, and more than two centuries earlier by Origen’s “research theology.”
It is thus that his theology is the clear anticipation of Anselm’s “Fides quaerens intellectum;” it is the same committed inquiry, the expression of the same continuing personal need to transcend the obscurity of the faith by liturgical participation in the Church’s mediation of light of Christ, her worship in truth of him who is Truth incarnate. The free unity of the Church’s faith in Jesus the Lord continually tests the intellectual unity, the free coherence, of theological understanding, which is free only insofar as committed to the sole criterion of historical truth, the free unity of the liturgical-historical tradition of the faith of the Church. Jesus’ Lordship is liturgical and therefore historical; it is by his Eucharistic immanence in history that he is precisely the Lord of history, its Beginning and its End.
Consequently it must always be kept in view that the communication of idioms in Jesus is historical, in that it refers to the historical unity that is Jesus the Lord, and presupposes that coincidence in him of the human and the divine Names, the “Henōsis” which, as Named, as Jesus the Christ, can only be Personal. The primitive Church identified this explicit historicity, the Personal unity of Jesus encountered by the apostles, with his Name.[295] Nothing could be more concrete, for only historical persons are recognized and, in that recognition, are personally named. The Apostles encountered Jesus as at once human and divine, as the man Jesus and as God, and so Named him: Jesus the Lord. The apostolic “Naming” of Jesus as the Lord is historical only as liturgically, i.e., Eucharistically, mediated. Thus mediated, the “Naming” of Jesus the Lord proclaims the historical faith of the historical Church in the historical Jesus the Lord. She knows no other Lord.
Origen’s Christology is that of the Synoptics, of John the Evangelist and Peter and Paul, Apostolic Fathers and Justin Martyr, . As confidently as had they, Origen took for granted the unfallen primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Head, the Bridegroom; he therefore also presupposes the unfallen pre-existence of his bridal Church.[296] He integrated this doctrine with the doctrines of the good creation, of a primordial sin[297] and the consequent kenōsis of the Lord, which he understood with Paul and John to be the fall of the Bridegroom, the head of the Church. Jesus is the head of the Church, the second Eve, in the primordial freedom of their unity in One Flesh in the Beginning, and remains so in the fallen servitude: μορφή δούλου (morphē doulou) the ‘form of a slave’ that is proper to his existence in the flesh (sarx). In that servitude, as “flesh,” precisely as the Bridegroom, the head of the fallen Church, he redeemed her by his One Sacrifice, the Gift of the Spirit to his Bride whereby her members may be restored to their graced condition, pneumatikos, and thereby to the freedom which St. Paul named eleutheria (ἐλευθερία) [298] the freedom freely to be free[299]. This is the reality of freedom, whose order can only be nuptial, the One Flesh, the concretely historical covenantal fidelity of the restored good creation, the Church whose goodness is her primordial creation in Christ, the renewal of her primordially free nuptial union in One Flesh with the head, her Lord, her Bridegroom, which rests, as Origen saw, upon Jesus’ kenotic immersion in the fall and, correlatively, upon her immersion in it as well, for they as they are primordially joined in the eleutheria of their One Flesh, so they are joined in the its redemption.[300]
Tertullian’s Christological use of Persona to denote the Name of Jesus in the Apologeticus and, in the Adversus Praxean, the Trinitarian Names as well, was accompanied by a Christological use of “substantia” to denote the Christ’s possession of the fullness of humanity and the fullness of divinity, while his Trinitarian doctrine used “substantia” to denote the unity of the Trinity. There is no reason to suppose that Origen had any acquaintance with Tertullian’s writings; certainly he was ignorant of the Greek equivalent of Persona, πρόσωπον, which appears only in his later works.
At the same time, there is a clear equivalence in their Christological use of substantia - ὑπόστασις (substance - hypostasis). For both theologians, two irreducible “substances” divine and human, are at one in the primordial unity of Jesus the Lord. Origen has no adequate term to denote that unity, and must prescribe a term to fill that need. He used Έν or Ένωσις and appears to have preferred the latter, perhaps because Έν has an abstract numerical connotation lacking in the concrete meaning of Ένωσις, i.e., an historical Event of union or unity resulting from an action, which can only be the Father’s Mission of Jesus the Lord, one and the same Son.
Tertullian uses substantiae to designate the concrete, irreducibly distinct, full and therefore Personal humanity, and the full and therefore Personal divinity, of Jesus the Lord, a duality which in his Christology is transcended by the unity of Jesus’ Persona. He uses the same term, substantia, in his Trinitarian doctrine to denote the unqualified unity of the Trinity, whose substantial unity transcends the irreducible Personal distinctions of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit whom the Trinity comprises. Origen is not troubled by this semantic complexity, for he has in view a trans-hypostatic, hence trans-substantial level of unity which he will denote by a word, οὐσία (ousia ) which before him had no such usage in Greek, and which has no Latin equivalent. It would become famous in the next century, when the Council of Nicaea would use it, along with hypostasis (μια ουσια, μια υποστασις (mia ousia, mia hypostasis), to denote the unqualified unity of the Trinity, and would stress that unity as ousia , in defining the homo-ousios of the Son with the Father, which the Latin West would know as his Personal consubstantiality, not with the Trinity, but with the Father’s fullness of divinity.
Catholic theological speculation still exhibits a long-standing cosmological confusion traceable in some part to Rufinus’ translation of the Peri Archon into the De Principiis. There Rufinus substituted “natura” for Origen’s designation of the human subsistence of Jesus as “hypostasis.” [301] Thereby “natura,” whose Greek equivalent is neither ousia nor hypostasis, but physis, an abstract term, came to designate the full humanity and the full divinity which, in Origen’s Christology, would be distinct “hypostases, i.e., “subsistences” within the Personal unity, the hypostatic Henōsis, of Jesus, had not Origen identified their primordial Henōsis with the single hypostasis, i.e., the single subsistence, of Jesus the Lord.[302] This Personal unity, the single subsistence of Jesus the Lord, at once the Son of Man and of God, obviously lacks all prior possibility, and its inexplicability has been thought to invalidate it. However, as this cosmologically-induced dilemma did not trouble the Apostles, so it did not trouble Origen. The subsequent rejection by the Symbol of Chalcedon of the “two persons” dilemma by the affirmation of the single subsistence of Jesus at once in the substantial Trinity and in substantial humanity nonetheless continues to trouble Catholic theologians.
Within the Aristotelian world-view of St. Thomas’ youthful resolution of the problem of the material one and many in De ente et essentia, “natura” becomes an abstraction, equivalently a species, distinct from the concrete particularity of substantial being or “ens,” So read, natura cannot translate the concrete term, hypostasis, which Origen used to designate the primordial humanity of Christ, the human nous of Jesus who, from the Beginning, is in Henōsis with the eternal Son. Origen used “hypostasis,” equivalently “subsistence, to designate each of the distinct Personal realities, viz., the eternal Son and the historical humanity of the pre-existent Christ, whose hypostatic union is the subsistent Henōsis who, from the Beginning, is Christ the Lord. Rufinus’ substitution of “nature” for “hypostasis,” inept in itself, was perhaps motivated by a desire to preserve Origen from the suspicion of adoptionism. However this may be, “physis” implied a conversion of Origen’s historical ecclesiology to cosmology, in that it immediately invokes the cosmological dilemma dominating Christological analyses throughout the fourth century and the first half of the fifth, i.e., the a priori impossibility of the incarnation of the dehistoricized Logos, whether in the Logos-sarx analysis, which cannot accept the full humanity of the Christ, or in its opposite number, the Logos-anthrōpos analysis, which insists upon the humanity of Jesus, but is as unable as its alternative to satisfy the communication of idioms in Jesus.
These failed Christological analyses, mere cosmological confections, interpret the Johannine “logos sarx egeneto” in conformity to the Stoic and Middle Platonic mindsets prevalent among the Oriental theologians in the third and fourth centuries. By the middle of the fifth century, they had divided the Church.
Their exponents assumed that the “Logos” of Jn. 1:1 and Jn. 1:14 is not a title of Jesus the Lord, but rather a title simply of his nonhistorical Personal divinity, abstracted from his incarnation. “Logos,” thus read as naming the eternal Son, but not historical Jesus the Lord, the Son of Mary, immediately poses an insoluble problem. In that cosmological context, the Evangelist is understood to have made the eternal, timeless Logos the subject of the Incarnation, i.e., who “became flesh.” This exegesis lacks all foundation: the Johannine Prologue knows no “immanent Son.” Nonetheless the prevalence of this dehistoricization of the “Logos sarx egeneto” is such as to have led Church historians to suppose that in Jn. 1:14 the Evangelist set the permanent problem of Christology. Particularly, in order that this dehistoricized reading of Jn. 1:14 be intelligible, Catholic theologians are charged with arranging for the prior possibility of the Incarnation of the abstract Logos, his “becoming flesh.” This is of course impossible, for the dehistoricized Son is by that dehistoricization no longer referred to the historical revelation of the Trinity, but is simply the monarchian God who, possessing the fullness of divinity, cannot “become” anything at all. The eternal Son, so understood, simply is, but as ab aeterno, not as historical. Thereby the Incarnation of the Word, as taught in the Prologue (Jn. 1:1 and 1:14), and the kenōsis of Jesus which Paul asserts in Phil. 2:6-7, cease to affirm the mystery of faith, for they have become simply incomprehensible.
The impossible Logos-sarx Christological analysis, which dominated theological speculation into the second half of the fifth century, was first suggested early in the third century by Tertullian in the Adversus Praxean 27, a suggestion which he immediately dropped. Its literal reading is clearly incompatible with his previous vigorous affirmation of the Spirit Christology in the Apologeticus, the De Prescriptione, and the De Carne Christi. This literalism has been dealt with in the section devoted to Tertullian’s Christological and Trinitarian doctrine.
The historical substantiation of the Apologeticus requires no further warrant than its affirmation of the communication of idioms in Christ. Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology of una substantia, tres personae, relies totally upon its revelation in Christ; this is evident in the very vocabulary he uses: persona and substantia are never for him abstract terms; their meaning relies upon the hermeneutic of his Spirit Christology, that of the apostolic tradition. The systematic dehistoricization of the Christ and therefore Trinity which Eusebius of Caesarea began to teach the anti-Nicene Orient a century later flatly contradicted the Latin doctrinal tradition whose foundation is the Apologeticus. For Tertullian, as for John the Evangelist, “Logos” (or “Sermo,” Tertullian’s term of preference) Names Jesus Christ the Lord. He never dropped the presupposition inherent in the una persona, duae substantiae Christology of the Apologeticus, i.e., the concrete historicity of Jesus the Lord, and its corollary, Jesus’ Personal unity, which requires that he, Jesus the Lord, be the subject of the Incarnation. This requires the primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Lord. His pre-existence cannot be eternal, simply by definition: because his Person is human as well as divine, Jesus, the one and the same Son of the Father and the Theotokos, cannot but be created. However, he is so as “the Beginning,” as transcending the creation of the universe, of which he is the Head, the source, the Beginnin and the End, the Creator. It is evident that, being fully human as well as fully divine, the Personal pre-existence of Jesus the Lord is his Mission by the Father to give the Holy Spirit, the Spiritus Creator. Thus the Father’s Mission of the Son terminates in the Good Creation, whose goodness is primordial, in its “Beginning,” who is Jesus the Lord.
Origen would call this “Beginning” the Henōsis. The Henōsis is a free concrete reality, thus an Event, and therefore is historical: the Event of “the Beginning.” Inescapably, this Event is primordial, Jesus’ Mission from his Father. Had his Mission not terminated in the Henōsis, the primordial source of the created universe of which he is the Head by his Gift of the Spirit, Jesus could not have “become flesh;” see endnote 310.
Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology, following the apostolic tradition, distinguished the eternal pre-existence of the Trinitarian Persons, including the divine Son, from the primordial pre-existence of the Sermo, the Christ, by recognizing the freedom of his revelation of the Trinity, his reverence for his Father who sent him. He took for granted that Jesus, as the “Sermo,” i.e., the Logos, the Word, is the primordial subject of the Incarnation and the Kenōsis. In the De Carne Christ, 5, 4, Tertullian revels in the paradoxes attending the Kenōsis of the Christ, e.g., his virginal birth, the attendant humiliations of infancy and childhood, his death, his resurrection.[303] These are absurd only because their human subject is the Son of God, Jesus the Lord. His resurrection is impossible because he is a man. Apart from faith in the radical paradox, the union in his Person of the fullness of divinity and humanity, the paradoxes cease to be paradoxical; i.e., if the subject of the Incarnation and of the Kenōsis is not the human Jesus, but the only the divine Son, there is no paradox, for the monarchian divine Son, the Son sensu negante, cannot become historical, cannot suffer and die.
The apostolic Christology is that of Jesus’ encounter with the Apostles, who met him as an extraordinary man, and learned from him that he is the eternal Son of the eternal Father, the Messiah, the Εγο ειμι (Ego eimi): “I am.” Particularly, they knew him to be the cause of his own Incarnation, of his conception by our Lady. As Evans and J. N. D. Kelly have noted, this was the standard exegesis of the Annunciation narrative of Lk. 1:35 well into the fourth century. As will be seen, Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine is the historical reflex of this historical and apostolic Christology, the Spirit Christology whose labeling reflects the Jesus, risen as the “life-giving Spirit,” who is not only the subject of the Incarnation-Kenōsis, but is also its agent. He is present to our Lady in her conception of him as he is present to the Church by his Personal Eucharistic immanence in her as her Bridegroom. Having made the Personal unity of Jesus Christ the foundation of his Christology, that Henōsis also founded Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine. In this, Tertullian anticipated him, simply by having affirmed the same Spirit Christology as foundational for his own historical Trinitarian doctrine.
The dehistoricizing of the Logos sarx egeneto, of the economy of salvation, whether in an Aristotelian, Stoic or Middle-Platonic format, inevitably produced the inherent cosmological dilemma of the one and the many, for their mutual exclusion is a cosmological necessity. Its Logos-sarx expression, given its full rationalization by Apollinarius, upheld the unity of the Logos at the expense at once of his divinity and his humanity, neither of which survived the implications of the Logos-sarx rationale. Apollinarius’ refusal of the full humanity and divinity of the Christ produced the Antiochene riposte, the Logos-anthrōpos analysis, which upheld both the humanity and the divinity of Jesus the Lord, but at the expense of his Personal unity.
The Antiochene stress upon the full, i.e., ensouled, humanity of Christ, as the dehistoricized “sarx” of the Logos-sarx analysis could not; however in the next century its failure to uphold the unity of Christ to a theological stasis between the Antiochene Nestorius, who could not accept the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, and the Alexandrine Eutyches, who could not accept Jesus’ Personal humanity. The Council of Ephesus, driven by Cyril of Alexandria’s insight into the destructive impact of Nestorianism upon the Eucharist Presence of the Christ, finally produced, in defining Mary as the Theotokos, an affirmation, Alexandrine as well as Antiochene, of the full humanity and full divinity of Christ, the Head of the human substance who as Head is consubstantial with each of its members. .
This concession by Cyril the Bishop of Alexandria, the dominant figure at the Council of Ephesus, to the Antiochene insistence upon the full Personal humanity of Jesus, was set out in the Formula of Union two years later: it is the doctrinal statement of the Council of Ephesus. Insofar as Alexandrine, the affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus died with Cyril in 444. Four years later, his successor, Dioscorus, disavowed the Ephesian Formula of Union, summoned and dominated a counter-Council which refused to accept the Tome proffered it by Pope Leo by reason of its affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus, and affirmed instead the radical Monophyism of the aged archimandrite, Eutyches.
The Council of Chalcedon, summoned by the Nicene Emperor Marcian to resolve the crisis, did so by refusing the cosmological dehistoricization of the Logos common to both errors, viz., the non-historicity of the subject of the Incarnation. The Symbol of Chalcedon taught what been first grasped by Irenaeus and, a generation later, by Origen, viz., that Jesus, the one and the same Son, is the subject of the Incarnation, that he subsists, Personally, at once in the Tri-Personal divine substance, and in the multi-personal substance of humanity, whereby his Personal unity is that of the Son of the Father and the Son of Mary, “one and the same Son, consubstantial with the Father and with us.
This Conciliar rejection of the Christological analyses constructed by the competing Alexandrine and Antiochene schools was acceptable neither to the Eutychians, whose Monophysite persuasion still characterizes much of the Oriental Christology, nor to the Nestorians who, after their condemnation at Ephesus, retreated to Assyria and thence into central Asia via the silk route. Some of the erstwhile Nestorians are now seriously considering reunion with the Catholic Church.[304] Unfortunately, so much cannot be said of the Monophysites, whose rejection of the authority of Chalcedon has produced a Christology which rejects as heretical both the Monophysism of Eutyches and Symbol of Chalcedon.[305]
It is evident that the immediate implication of the historicity of the communication of idioms is the exclusion of those Christologies which suppose that the subject at once of the Incarnation and the kenōsis, the Son of God who is agent of our historical redemption, is the non-historical absolute Son whose relation to historical humanity, whether viewed as sarx or as anthropos, is impossible by definition; the absolute is precisely the unrelated. The subject of the faith that Jesus is the Lord is the subject of the communication in him of those Names, Jesus and Lord, whose Personal unity, Henōsis, is historical and indivisible. The Church’s faith has no other object, and Catholic Christology no other subject.
The Trinitarian theology set out by Origen in the Peri Archon, like that of Tertullian in the Apologeticus, does not dissociate the Trinity from its revelation in the Christ. The emphasis in the Peri Archon upon the historically productive dynamism of the Trinity bars any concern for the cosmological construction whether of an abstract “immanent Trinity” or an “immanent Logos ” dissociated from the concrete order of the creation and fall of the universe. As Crouzel has observed, the center of Origen’s theology is the Christ, Jesus the Lord, whose Names reveal in him the communication of idioms.
At the first or substantial level of the Trinitarian dynamism, the Father eternally begets the Son, and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father through the Son. The Father’s productive dynamism is his as the Head of the Trinity, as the Source of its free unity. The Trinity is therefore ab aeterno, but this is known only by its revelation in Jesus the Christ. We have seen that Origen uses ousia, substance, to distinguish the unity of the Trinity from that of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As thus substantial, the Trinity comprises, ‘contains,’ so to speak, the hypostases of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. These distinct hypostases, in their free unity, constitute the free substantial unity of the immaterial Trinity.
At this time, in the first half of the third century, the distinction between “person” (persona, prosōpon) and substance (substantia, hypostasis, ousia ), which the conventional cosmological tradition had not found necessary, would not be much discussed until well into the latter half of the fourth century. The Nicene Fathers used both ‘ousia ’ and ‘hypostasis’ to designnate the absolute unity of God. A century earlier, when Origen was composing the Peri Archon, the selection of a term designating what is one in God as opposed to what is three in God had not been worked out. In fact, it was rather a matter for decision than for debate, since “hypostasis” and “ousia ” could each serve either purpose. “Prosōpon” had perhaps been tainted with a modalist connotation by Paul of Samosata, but in the latter fourth century it was commonly used to designate what is three in the Trinity (see endnote 145). At the end of the second century Tertullian had distinguished between the two “substances” by possession of which Jesus is at once fully human and fully divine, and had affirmed their unqualified unity in the uniqueness of his “Persona.” Tertullian used the same terms, i.e., “substantia”-“persona,” to distinguish the substantial unity that is the Trinitas, from the “tres Personae,” the Names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who constitute it.
Tertullian had used this language to defend the rationality of the faith in Jesus the Lord, and in the unity of the Trinitas, rather than to provide the faith with a metaphysics. While Evans believes the enormous Latin influence of Tertullian to have extended also into Greek theology, the Greek theological interest was far more speculative and systematic than that of Tertullian. The doctrinal distinction which he drew so clearly between substance and person did not translate well: more than a century later, the Council of Nicaea used ousia and hypostasis indifferently to designate the substantial unity of God in the condemnation of Arius. Eustathius of Antioch’s emphatic endorsement of the Nicene mia ousia did not denote or ental the Sabellian collapse of the Son into the Father, as Eusebius of Caesarea supposed, but only repeated the Conciliar stress upon the substantial unity of the One God of the Christian faith, the Trinity.[306]
Tertullian’s use of “persona” to distinguish the three members of the Trinitas from the single Trinitarian substance was taken up early in the next century by Hippolytus, who used the Greek prosōpon to translate Tertullian’s “persona,” and thus may have introduced prosōpon into the Greek theological vocabulary. However, before Origen’s Peri Archon, the clarity of the treis hypostaseis–mia ousia (three subsistences, one substance) distinction was not available. After him, its recognition, long delayed by the subordinationist influence of Eusebius of Caesarea, would wait upon Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes. Although at times Origen used these terms interchangeably, as the Fathers at Nicaea still did seventy-six years after Origen’s death, he tended to use hypostasis to designate the concretely distinct realities of the Father, of the Son and the of Spirit, as distinct from but within the substantial unity, mia ousia, of the Triune God, to which however he seldom referred as a Trias.[307] Henri Crouzel maintains that Origen anticipated the definition by the Council of Nicaea of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, even the dynamic character of that Personal consubstantiality and thus of the Trinity as a free perichōresis, but the apostolic orthodoxy of Origen’s Trinitarian theology had by then been so deformed by the cosmological subordinationism of Arius and the parallel “Origenism” of the “two Eusebii,” as to raise the suspicion that Origen had in fact anticipated Arius: see endnote 390, infra. That this is nonsense is easily established; Arius was a convinced subordinationist, which error Origen ruled out a priori by founding his theology on the communication of idioms, or Names, in Jesus the Lord. He accepted the full implication of the Church‘s faith that Jesus is the Lord, and adapted the meaning of ousia and hypostasis to serve this implication.
In consequence of their free constitution of the Trinitarian substance, Origen held the Son, and the Spirit each to be consubstantial, not as individually identical with the divine ousia , but as eternally proceeding from their Source, the Father who, like them, is an immanent member of the Trinity, therefore consubstantial with them. Thus, the Personally consubstantial divine hypostases who constitute the divine substance, the Trinity, are irreducibly distinct at once from each other and from the Trinitarian ousia . The Trinity is their free Community, the perichōresis in which each subsists and with which therefore none of them, including the Father, can be identified.
In this constitution of the Trinity, Origen understands the begetting of the Son to be free, which is to say that the Father is freely the Father, freely constituting himself the by his free begetting of the Son and his free production of the Spirit. It is this freedom which marks him as the immanent Head of the Trinity for, were he not thus free, he would be subject to cosmological necessity in the manner of the Neoplatonic One, who is, perforce, diffusivum sui. For the first time, the Father is presented in the relational terms indispensable to the further development of Trinitarian doctrine, i.e., as eternally the Father by his eternally free begetting of the Son. By that begetting, in a manner which the doctrinal tradition had not yet specified, Origen recognizes the Father to be the Source of the Spirit through the only-begotten Son.
The Son, as begotten, receives the fullness of the Father’s substance, and is distinct from the Father by possessing it as begotten, as the Only-Begotten of the apostolic tradition. In particular, Origen understands the Son to be the locus of all the forms by which the created universe is intelligible and real. The role of the Spirit is less clear to Origen, who nonetheless does not hesitate to affirm the Spirit‘s distinct divine hypostasis for, like the Son, he receives from the Father the fullness of the Father’s substance, while possessing it uniquely, perhaps also as in some way begotten, or as “poured out,” by a production in any case distinct from the unique Begetting of the Son.[308]
The Father, the source of the Only-Begotten Son and, by him, of the Spirit, does not transcend them, for he also is a member of the Trinity, even as its Head, its immanent source. Within the coherent unity of Origen’s Trinitarian theology, it is impossible to identify the hypostasis of the Father with the substantial Trinity. Origen has excluded a priori the Gnostic, Platonic and Eusebian versions of subordinationism. Equally a priori, he excludes all modalism and the Christological adoptionism that is its corollary. As Crouzel has pointed out, Origen anticipated the doctrine of Nicaea.
Having understood the Son to be without a beginning, to be eternally begotten by the Father who is eternally his Father; as his eternal begetting is without beginning, so it is without end, for what is divine is unchanging. The Father eternally begets the Son, the Son is eternally begotten, the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father. This, for Origen is the ‘first creation,’ so designated because the Son, as Wisdom, is himself “the Intelligible World,” possessing in himself its full significance and intelligibility, and this from and throughout eternity, for his Sonship, like the Father’s Paternity, is “substantial,” without beginning and therefore immune to change. Origen’s stress upon the Son’s co-eternity with the Father, his repeated affirmation, against the Gnostic, Stoic and Middle Platonic emanationism, that “there was not when he was not,” long antedates Arius’ insistence upon the Son’s “beginning,” and his consequent creaturely standing. Origen begins his theological speculation with a dynamic account of the Trinity as eternally caused by the Father.[309] The apostolic tradition, whose expression is always liturgical, consequently free and historical, offers no basis for theological application of the subordinationism inherent in the monadism of the eclectic Middle Platonism or its Neoplatonic rationalization. Origen affirmed the Trinitarian ταχίς, the order intrinsic to the Trinity, but as an order of Names warranted by the liturgy, i.e., by the apostolic tradition, and therefore an order of procession, not of subordination, for the Names are divine.[310] He affirmed at the outset the substantiality of the Trinity, and thereby as well the consubstantiality of the Father, of the only-begotten Son and of the Holy Spirit as the Gift of the Son, from the Father, the Head, the source, of the Trinity. He knew that the Father’s divinity is not greater than that of the Son or of the Spirit who proceed from him, for the full divinity of each is taught by the apostolic-liturgical tradition. This co-equality of the Father, the Son and the Spirit is in flat contradiction to the subordinationism implicit in the cosmological necessity that a cause transcend its product.
Knowing this inference to be false as measured by the apostolic tradition, Origen’s first task was to provide an intellectually coherent account of the full divinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, while at the same time upholding the unqualified monotheism of the apostolic tradition. This monotheism demanded the substantial unity of God, which Origen recognized as Trinitarian, and thus as distinct from the hypostatic unity he assigned to the Father as a member of the Trinity, who is therefore immanent within it. This project required a speculative, inevitably metaphysical vocabulary adequate to stating the free historicity of the hypothetical integration in view. Quite simply, Origen’s “resource theology,” his “connected body of doctrine, required a freely coherent integration of the Catholic faith in Jesus the Lord, which no existing linguistic convention could supply, for uniformly these conventions were cosmological, resting upon a deterministic criterion of truth. The coherence of Origen’s hypotheses could only be free, framing a question directed to a mystery of the Lordship of Jesus, thus an inquiry incapable of a comprehensive understanding of its object. Origen’s solution was an entirely original conversion of cosmological metaphysics to the free historicity of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, which in turn required a novel hermeneutic.
In short, Origen had to develop a free hermeneutical resolution of the cosmologically insoluble problem of the rational integration of “the one and the many” which his faith has rejected out of hand by asserting the historical transcendence of that dilemma by the revelation of the Person of Jesus the Lord. Origen’s application of this transcendence to the apostolic tradition of faith in Trinity and in the Christ presupposed what the cosmological statement of the problem, since Parmenides, had never imagined, the free unity of truth. He knew that the speculative integration of a “body of doctrine” loyal to the Church’s tradition had to be free for, as doctrine, it is a gift historically revealed in Christ, freely to be appropriated and freely to be affirmed.
In his time, as would still be the case at Nicaea, “ousia” and “hypostasis” were commonly used as equivalents, each signifying objective unity of being, although the Greek origin of the former and the Stoic origin of the latter barred their attaining a precise identity of meaning.[311] This imprecision, comparable to that of substantia and persona in the Latin West, opened these terms to a more precise application, whose precision was a product of Origen’s fides quaerens intellectum, his scientific theology. Thus his theological speculation is not presented as doctrine but, because intent upon entry into doctrinal truth, it looked to the development of an ordered body of hypotheses, of coherent theological questions addressed to the ultimately incomprehensible mystery of Christ.
In the event, Origen’s insight into theological potentiality of the Middle Platonic ousia-hypostasis idiom was a stroke of genius comparable to Tertullian’s inspired Trinitarian and Christological exploitation of the analogous Stoic substantia-persona distinction, an idiom whose cultural use he saw to be sufficiently flexible to permit a theological application which finally found its way into the Symbol of Chalcedon. Although Origen was not influenced by Tertullian, like him he perceived, in the imprecision of the indiscriminate Greek philosophical use of ousia and hypostasis alike to designate concrete realities, their capacity for deployment in a theological account of the Catholic faith in the Trinity, whose free transcendence of cosmological dualism Tertullian had earlier perceived with respect to persona and substantia.
For both Tertullian and Origen, the semantic obscurity relied upon was perceptible only from the stance of the Christian faith. Therefore it was for both a free discovery, made from the free perspective afforded by the freedom of the Church’s historical faith. The Christian faith forced a rejection of the cosmological certitudes of the Greek philosophical tradition and thereby offered Origen, as it had offered Tertullian, the opportunity clearly to distinguish the absolute reality of the Trinity, which Origen labeled “ousia,” from the disparate concrete realities of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, whose Names Origen was the first to understand to be as relational, an insight that will much later be seen to identify the Trinitarian relations with the Trinitarian Persons. This insight begins with Origen’s recognition that the “Father” is thus Named in relation to his eternal begetting of the Son: as contrasted with the cosmological use of “Father” to name the head of the pantheon, i.e., Zeus-Pater, “Jupiter.” Christianity knows no pantheon, as paganism knows no Trinity.
The apostolic tradition affirmed the absolute unity of God, and knew the One God to comprise God the Father, his divine Son and the divine Holy Spirit, whose Names were continually invoked in the worship of the Church. This unity was unqualified and consequently “substantial,” although that term is not apostolic. Theophilus, the Bishop of Antioch in the last quarter of the second century, the earliest of the Greek Apologists after Justin, accordingly named the absolute God a Trinity, a Trias, and was the first to do so. His recognition and affirmation of the compatibility of the Church’s worship of the One God with her liturgical invocation of the Father, the Son and the Spirit is the product of his Christian conversion to the free historical rationality which contradicts the cosmological rationality whose monism had been the single criterion of the one, the good and the true for the pagan cultures of the Mediterranean world.
A decade or two later Tertullian would use the Latin equivalent, Trinitas, to designate the divine Substance, thus understanding Theophilus’ “Trias” as a substantial Trinitas. Ernest Evans’ supposition that Tertullian developed his Trinitarian doctrine in a methodological dissociation from its revelation in the Christ is without foundation: the Apologeticus 21, 6, refutes it out of hand., as Jurgens has shown: see Early Fathers I, at 114. Origen’s designation of the Trinity as “ousia ,” the equivalent of Tertullian’s “substantia,” introduced a comparably historical Trinitarian doctrine, in an equally strict association with his own Christology.[312]
Origen’s use of “ousia” (substantia, substance), to designate the concrete unity of the Trinity gave to a word open to it an absolute significance, that of the unqualified unity of God. By the end of the fourth century, Origen’s use of “mia ousia” to designate the unity of the Trinity was universally understood to designate the absolutely unique divinity, the one God, imamterial, indivisible and unchanging. Eusebius of Caesarea, rejecting the Nicene affirmation of the substantial unity of the Trinity, would return to the pagan usage of one divine substance, “mia ousia ,” to designate the Father, rather than as Origen had used it, to designate the Trinity. Eusebius thus invoked a quasi-pantheon of a Monas lumped with subordinated divinities rather than the Trinity. Athanasius of Alexandria, following the Council of Nicaea, whose doctrine Crouzel shows Origen to have anticipated, would use its Nicene alternative, “mia hypostasis,” to defend the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father and its corollary, the Trinity.
Origen’s use of “hypostasis” to designate the unity of the divine Names did not became a common usage until more than sixty years after his death, when Athanasius, long since insistent upon the “mia hypostasis” as the proper riposte to the Eusebian subordinationism that had engulfed the rest of the Orient, had learned by the time of his summoning of the Council of Alexandria in 362. together with his composition of the Tome to the Antiochenes, that “mia ousia ” could serve as well as “mia hypostasis” to designate the divine unity. “Mia hypostasis” had been the rallying-cry of the Antiochene Eustathians, whom Athanasius had first encountered and approved in 346. By 362 the Eustathians had chosen Paulinus, then a priest, as their spokesman. Athanasius welcomed Paulinus’ two delegates to the Council of Alexandria, and a year later (363) would confirm Paulinus’ ordination by Lucifer of Cagliari. In his Tome to the Antiochenes, Athanasius finally recognized that the Eustathian emphasis upon the “mia ousia ” rather than his own stress upon the “mia hypostasis” of the Trinity did not invoke the Eusebian denial of the Nicene faith―an implication which he had taken for granted for the nearly forty years since confronting the “two Eusebii” at the Council of Nicaea. In his Tome Athanasius recognized that his long insistence upon the “mia hypostasis” of the Trinity was the equivalent of the Eustathian “mia ousia :” the Nicene condemnation of Arius had used both terms.
However, the Tome to the Antiochenes failed to wean its addressees from their loyalty to Meletius nor from their own homoiousian subordinationism. Their opposition to the Nicene faith, which a year later would become explicit in Meletius’ merger of the anti-Nicene doctrine of the homoiousion of the Son with the Nicene definition of the Son’s Personal homoousion with the Father, rendered moot Athanasius’ concession, in the Tome, to the legitimacy of “mia ousia ” to label the substantial unity of the Trinitarian Names. His long insistence upon the ”mia hypostasis” had well served the pro-Nicene cause, and the deliberate confusion, at Meletius’ Council of Antioch (363) of the Nicene affirmation of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father, with the homoiousian refusal of that indispensable Nicene doctrine, wrote ‘finis’ to the prospect of a conversion of the Antiochene homoiousians to the Nicene Creed which Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes had envisioned. Their subordinationist reading of the “homoiousios” of the Son, viz., as substantial rather than Personal, contradicted the substantial unity of the Trinity, whether designated mia hypostasis or mia ousia, whose members were consubstantial with each other. Athanasius was correct in recognizing that “mia ousia ” was consistent with Nicene orthodoxy, but that concession had no effect. The Eustathian use of that term would once again be indicted as Sabellian by Basil of Caesarea, who never understood the Nicene “homoousios” as other than substantial, and only in that impersonal sense was he willing to apply it to the Holy Spirit in his De Spiritu Sancto. He could not accept the Personal standing of the Holy Spirit.
Doubtless the precision of Origen’s application of “ousia ” and “hypostasis” to the dynamic interrelation of the Trinity to the Names it comprises represents a departure from the original philosoph-ical meaning of those terms, as Crouzel has noted. However, that departure is a conversion rather than a distortion or rejection of their original meaning. By the application of “ousia ” and “hypostasis” to the free historical object of the Church’s historical faith these terms attained a novel metaphysical import: they now expressed a free truth, loyal to the apostolic tradition. Unfortunately, their conversion to the historicity of the Trinitarian faith was not understood. We see in Eusebius of Caesarea’s cosmological rejection of Origen’s historical terminology the source of that subordinationism which would plague the Oriental Church down to the reaffirmation of the Nicene Creed by the First Council of Constantinople. During the preceding half century the Creed proclaimed at Nicaea had been decried as Sabellian by the disciples of the “two Eusebii,” of Caesarea and Nicomedia. Their high personal authority, academic on the one hand, political on the other, ensured that their personal recognition of universal authority in the Arianizing emperors would write into the law of the land the imperial homoian Arianism and criminalize resistance to it. Thus during the half-century between their suborning of Constantine and the summoning of I Constantinople. the imperial homoeanism politicized the Oriental Church apart from Alexandria, whose great bishop Athanasius refused to negotiate the substantial unity, “mia hypostasis,” “mia ousia ,” of the Triune God; see A. Martin, Athanse, 557/
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A certain contrast of Origen’s Trinitarian theology with that of Tertullian’s has been proposed. It has been argued that Tertullian, in affirming the indivisibility of the divine substantia, under Stoic influence, may have inferred the materiality of the Trinitarian substantia from its concrete unity, and thus have taught a subordinationism. This lacks all foundation. The notion of an indivisible materiality is scarcely distinguishable from an indivisible immateriality. Stoicism is a dualism, and therefore cannot avoid materialism, but Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine is not dualist. For him, the Father, Son and Spirit are not material members of a category, a species, whether abstract or material. As Personae, they transcend categorical labeling, and so are Named, not labeled. His use if substantia to designate the unity of the Trinity on the one hand, and the concrete humanity and divinity of Jesus the Lord on the other, while using persona to designate the unity of his Name, so links his Trinitarian doctrine to his Christology as to render them inseparable.
Origen was evidently unaware of Hippolytus’ translation, or perhaps his re-translation, as Prestige would have it, of Tertullian’s “personae” into “πρόσωπα.” Tertullian had used “persona” to distinguish concretely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; we have seen his strict association of “person” with “name” but at the time of his writing of the Peri Archon (231 A. D), Origen, and the Oriental theological tradition generally, was unfamiliar with its Greek equivalent, πρσόωπον. Origen used “hypostasis” in that sense, thus giving it the meaning of “subsistence.” He understood each Trinitarian hypostasis to “subsist” in the one divine substance, which consequently comprises three “subsistences” or hypostases within its indivisible immaterial unity, the substantial Trinity of divine hypostases, the Father, Son and Spirit, whose divinity is their subsistence in the Trinitarian substance, which Origen uses ousia to designate. It follows that Trinitarian substance is not exhausted by any of the divine hypostases; rather it at once comprises and is constituted by their consubstantial community.
Origen’s application of “hypostasis” to the Trinitarian Names of Father Son, and Spirit further permitted him clearly to distinguish the hypostatic humanity and hypostatic divinity of the primordial Jesus Christ the Lord from their indivisible unity Henōsis (Ένωσις) in his Person, i.e., in his hypostasis[313]. This unity permits, even requires, the recognition that the Henōsis is concretely the hypostasis, the single Personal subsistence, of Christ in whom are comprised the Personal fullness of humanity and of divinity. It is by this hypostatic union in Jesus of the Person of the Word and the Person of the human noes who is Jesus the Christ that Origen provides for the communication of idioms in the “one and the same Son.”
As has been seen, the cosmological incongruity the Personal subsistence of Jesus in two distinct substances bars most contemporary theologians from “receiving” the Symbol of Chalcedon. Even Crouzel wavers here, as noted in Volume III, finding a latent Nestorianism in Origen’s hypothesis of the Henōsis of two hypostases in the Personal unity of Christ, although Chalcedon is quite clear that Jesus, “one and the same Son” subsists in the substance of the Trinity and in the substance of humanity.[314]
In fact. Origen’s theology rests upon a single insight into the historically concrete unity of Jesus Christ the Lord. It has been labeled “Henōsis,” (Ένωσις, unity) although it appears that Origen seldom uses that term, preferring (Έν - Hen.),[315] In order to have a univocal term to Name that Event, “Henōsis” is used in this study of the Peri Archon uniquely to designate the primordial union of the hypostasis of the eternal Word and the hypostasis who is the primordial Christ. For this purpose, “Hen” (Ἑν) is less adequate, since it may designate an abstract numerical unity, whereas the free unity of the Henōsis (ἕνωσις) in Origen’s theology can be only that of the primordial Event, the Beginning, i.e., the Mission of the Son to give the Spiritus Creator. .In Origen’s theology, Ένωσις (hereafter, Ηenōsis) designates the free foundational Εvent of the primordial union, i.e., “in the Beginning” (Gen. 1:1; Jn. 1:1; Col. 1:17) of the eternal Son of the eternal Father with the Personal humanity of Jesus who, in that union, which knows no antecedent cause or possibility and is therefore incapable of explanation, possesses the “form of God” and is Jesus Christ the Lord, consubstantial, as Son, with the Father who eternally begets him. The Henōsis is then the Origen’s speculative integration of the primordial Event, the instant of creation ex nihilo which, following the apostolic tradition, Origen knows to be unflawed and sinless, pneuma rather than sarx.
This theological postulate of the unity in Jesus the Christ of the fullness of divinity and humanity presupposes the free historical truth of the apostolic faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, a faith celebrated and preached by the Apostles from the first Pentecost, and by their successors, the college of bishops, from their apostolic appointment in the first century. Origen accepts the revelation given in Christ, and its inseparable ecclesial mediation, without qualification, simply as normative for his theological speculation which, as conjectural and hypothetical, is limited to those matters concerning which the tradition either has not spoken, or has not spoken with clarity. The Preface of the Peri Archon contains the doctrinal tradition which the Henōsis affirms as foundational, integral with the faith that Jesus is the Lord.
The faith of the Church is expressed discursively, e.g., in her affirmation that Jesus Christ is Lord. However, its content, its object, is the Mysterium fidei, the Truth whose Personal unity transcends the fragmentation of discursive statement, inherent in the fallen fragmentation of our reflex rationality, whose expression can only be discursive. However, no faith-affirmation is open to discursive analysis; to suppose otherwise is to refuse the free historical unity, the Mysterium fidei of Jesus Christ the Lord in favor of a set of abstract propositions which can have no bearing upon the historical truth of the Church’s faith. The Church affirms her faith liturgically, which is to say, historically, as inherent in, because integral with, her daily “ordinary” worship of the Truth in truth. Her formal doctrinal affirmations, whether in Council, or by a pope teaching ex cathedra, or in the daily preaching by the bishops of the faith that Jesus is the Lord, are integral to that worship, and can only be liturgical. To read them otherwise, as discursive theological statements, is to misunderstand them in toto.
The object of the faith of the Church, Jesus the Lord, the Mysterium fidei, cannot be known discursively, and therefore is known by the intellectual intuition that is the direct, immediate perception of the free intelligibility of the Person who is Jesus the Lord. This perception is apostolic; it is mediated liturgically, not abstractly, by the Church’s worship of her Lord, under the liturgical authority of the successors of the Apostles.[316]
Origen’s theological hypothesis of the Henōsis is consistent with the historicity of the Christ, the Mysterium fidei, the object of the Church‘s faith, and therefore is loyal also to her intellectual intuition of Jesus’ Lordship: i.e.,, her faith in his transcendence of the fragmentation of the flesh, apart from which he would not be the Lord. Consequently the Henōsis must be understood as it is, i.e., the Event, the Beginning of creation, the first moment of the dynamic Personal unity of God and Man in Christ, and therefore as the foundational, utterly free primordial Event upon faith in whom Origen proceeds to construct the Christology and Trinitarian theology which anticipate the defined doctrine of the Church.
This primordial Event, the Henōsis, cannot be approached seriatim, as though the product of a process of development whose progress might be retraced by inference, by reflexive rationality. Rather, Origen’s hypothesis of the Henōsis is an induction, a direct and comprehensive insight which, as personal, is conjectural, and can only be an inquiry into the Mysterium fidei, into the concrete liturgical unity of the multiplicity of the historical Catholic tradition, moral as well as doctrinal. This free principle of organization, the rule, the analogy, of faith (ĸατὰ τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως),bars any interpretation of his theology which would suppose its inquiry to be governed by the abstract, reductionist postulates of formal logic; this is simply because a quaerens intellectum so grounded cannot be historical, cannot be free, and therefore is incapable of that loyalty to the apostolic tradition, to the historical communication of idioms in Christ, that is Origen’s first and foremost concern.[317]
Theological appreciation of that intellectual intuition cannot but be pedestrian by comparison, and even the comparison must limp, for while systematic theology is always an explanation in need of further development, the explanation must return, over and again, to the intuitively clear insight into the Henōsis, the Event that never ceases to be its starting point, with which theology as historical must begin and which it must not cease to address. Otherwise theological appreciation must become a depreciation, a discursive dismissal of the indissoluble unity of the insight, which, while indeed inexhaustibly rich in implication, is not so in analysis. The Henōsis can be grasped only in its intuitive unity, i.e., as an induction, a intuitive insight into the unity of elements of the apostolic tradition of the Mysterium fidei, Christ the Lord. It is only from this insight, this intellectual intuition, that theological explanation proceeds: it does so as did Origen’s theology, resting upon a hypothetical affirmation of that unity as Henōsis.
Origen’s hypothetical statement of the Mysterium fidei, his postulate of the Henōsis, simply as hypothetical, cannot be identified with his faith that Jesus is the Lord, for it is a theological affirmation, not an element of his worship in the Church. It proceeded from his worship, his participation in the Church’s liturgy from which his faith is derived, his direct insight into the foundational unity of Jesus the Lord, and his desire to enter into that mystery ever more deeply. He can do so only by that worship of the mind which Anselm, a millennium later, would term “fides quaerens intellectum:” faith seeking understanding. From that faith there ineluctably proceeds the questioning, which began with his conjectural or hypothetical affirmation, his theological postulate of the unity of the mystery of Christ, the Henōsis, which can respect the Mysterium fidei only by foregoing all analysis of it. Theology can proceed from that theological affirmation of the faith’s intuition of the Mysterium, the unity of the object of the Church’s worship, only by inquiry into its inexhaustible implications, but not into its antecedents, for it is a mystery ex nihilo sui et subjecti, and has none.
Thus theology, when focused upon the Henōsis, the radical theological affirmation of the unqualified unity of Jesus the Lord, has implications open to indefinite development but, when theology reverses that inquiry, turning its quaerens intellectum upon that searching out the cosmological possibility of that free unity, the Henōsis of the fullness of divinity and of humanity in Jesus the Lord, it has abandoned its object, the Mystery of Christ, and turned in upon itself, upon immanent rational necessities of the fallen mind, to enter upon the flight from history that is native to its fallenness. Origen knew better, but the temptation to substitute the cosmological Absolute for the Father threatens his theology with that momentary confusion which marks Peri Archon II, 6, 3,. to which we shall return,
Nonetheless, Origen is the first theologian deliberately to rest his theology upon the intuition, the direct and therefore indisputable awareness, of the unity of Jesus the Lord, and so of the unity of the Church’s liturgical tradition which celebrates his victory over sin and death. Insights analogous if not equivalent to Origen’s Henōsis pervade Augustine’s theology; e.g., his vision of Jesus as “the ancient beauty that is forever new,” the ‘intus magister” whose presence, “intimius intimo meo,” directly illumines the mind, and restores its freedom freely to affirm the Truth of Christ which, as free, is beautiful. This language bespeaks a graced intuition of the intrinsic intelligibility of that “concrete singular,” the Mysterium fidei, the unity of the Person of Jesus the Lord, which discursive reason can never grasp, and knowledge of whom, as immediate, as intuitive, can only be a gift, for it is ex nihilo by definition.
Duns Scotus considered the Augustinian notion of illumination “unnecessary,” and on that Aristotelian basis categorized the unique intelligibility of the ‘concrete singular;’ which he affirmed to be intrinsic to every physical entity as its haecceitas, its “thisness.” His dismissal of illumination dismissed also the Augustinian-Franciscan identification of truth, as free, with beauty, which bars all categorization. Among the disciples of Scotus, Gerard Manley Hopkins was the first to recognize and to reaffirm the freedom of the truth, intrinsic to everything God has made, the beauty that pervades a world illumined by its Lord, the “ancient beauty, forever new,” faith in whom had nourished his poetic genius.
Because speculative theology must proceed discursively, it cannot avoid the problem faced by Newman in his Grammar of Assent, viz., whether to explain repetitively in an effort to establish the convergent probability of that which is a priori inexplicable, the free unity of the Christ, or to affirm a priori the indispensability of the inductive percept of the free unity in Jesus the Lord of the one and the many, as the point d’appui of discursive rationality insofar as historical, i.e., insofar as freely responsive to our historical existence in the world redeemed by Christ, a world whose history is intrinsically salvific and consequently sacramental, free and therefore graced..
The question can have only an existential answer: the free unity of reality is presupposed by its discussion, and that unity must be historical; for there exists neither an ideal nor an empirical unity in the fallen universe. Insofar as theology is concerned, the affirmative assertion of the free, historical unity of the one and the many, the Henōsis of humanity and divinity in Jesus the Lord, must ground all theological quaerens into his reality. The speculative assertions of theology which constitute its quaerens intellectum have no unity and no legitimacy other than their presupposition of the intrinsic free unity and truth of the Mysterium fidei to whom its questioning is directed. This presupposition requires hypothetical, i.e., theological statement; otherwise theologians begin confuse their affirmations with doctrinal formulations, transforming the theological quaerens into an inveniens, a independent discovery and possession of the truth of the faith rather than a free inquiry into its revelation in Christ, and therefore a failure to recognize the Mysterium fidei. .
Origen’s theological postulate of the Henōsis of Personal humanity and Personal divinity in Jesus the Lord is the unique instance of that indispensable theological affirmation of the communication of divine and human idioms in Jesus the Lord. Only Origen’s hypothesis of this direct intuition of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord is loyal to the apostolic affirmation of his Name, from which Naming proceeds the apostolic liturgical tradition. Appeal to it must light the way of Christian theology, for in affirming the Name of Jesus the Lord, we assert what Origen’s theology termed the Henōsis, the historical Event of the union of the fullness of divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ the Lord, which is his Mission from the Father. This, the Beginning, is the object of the historical worship of the historical Church; any entry into Origen’s theology must return to it over and again.
Clearly, speculative theology must rest upon its a priori. For Catholic theology, that a priori must be historical, a speculative affirmation of the foundational Event. Origen’s theology begins with his speculative statement of the Event of the Beginning, the Henōsis, and here it must be remembered that the Beginning, the primordial Event, is also the Revelation who is Jesus the Lord, faith in whom is also Trinitarian. Theology must begin with the revelation of the foundational mystery of the Trinity. For Origen, this is the Henōsis. The theological priority of the revelation of the Trinity is indispensable: we know of the Trinity only through its revelation in Christ. Otherwise, we cannot begin the fides quaerens intellectum without dehistoricizing the Trinity, without dissociating the Trinity from its revelation in Jesus the Christ. That dissociation is now a commonplace, at once Arian, homoiousian, nominalist, and Calvinist.
The prime example of the cosmological misinterpretation of Origen’s Peri Archon is the effectively universal understanding of its fire-iron imagery as an explanation rather than as it is, an image, a speaking description, of the primordial Event of the Father’s Mission of the Son.[318] This Mission of Jesus the Lord, the Henōsis of the divine and human Names of Jesus the Lord, the Christ, is the objectively historical mystery of faith, the Revelation that is the Incarnation of Jesus Christ the Lord. Its Truth transcends all explanation, and in doing so provides the foundation for understanding reality as at once one, free and beautiful, as revealed in and created by this Event, this Revelation, this Mysterium fidei, by faith in which we are freed for freedom, for access to the Kingdom of God. [319]
When this imagery is read as a justification of faith in the Incarnation, i.e., as an explanation of how it could occur, it is impossible to decide whether to interpret the imagery as a Monophysite merger of the divinity of Christ with his humanity, to the latter’s disadvantage, or a diophysite separation of Jesus’ humanity from his divinity, with the consequent denial of his divinity. Both of these errors presuppose, naively but nonetheless a priori, the cosmological dehistoricizing of the eternal Son, Jesus the Lord, with the consequent problem of arranging for the historical incarnation of the nonhistorical monarchical Son which impossibility can have no solution.
Origen, however, freed himself, equally a priori, from this cosmological rationality, recognizing that conversion from it must be to the faith of the Church that the historical Jesus Christ is Lord. This faith is free, a priori. Consequently it knows no antecedent justification, and no compromise, for between the freedom of that conversion and the immanent cosmological necessities which it rejects, there is no continuum. Tertullian had spoken to this radical dichotomy more pungently, as that between Athens and Jerusalem, but not more clearly.
The usual cosmological readings of the fire-iron imagery in the Peri Archon II, 6, 4-6 reject the concretely historical point d’appui of Origen’s theology, the communication of idioms in Jesus, whose concrete ground is the Henōsis, the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, at once divine and human. Origen’s fire-iron image describes this Personal unity, but is not intended to account for it. Origen uses the image of iron heated to incandescence to illustrate the factual union of the created and consequently corporeal noes with Jesus the primordial Son, the Logos This image of incandescent iron immediately suggests to the cosmological mentality the cosmological quest for its a priori possibility, either the mixing of humanity and divinity which Grillmeier has read into Tertullian’s Christology, or their analytical separation into necessarily distinct natures or substances incapable of association, much less of union. Neither alternative consists with the Catholic tradition that Jesus is the Lord, nor with the communication of idioms in him, nor with Origen’s commitment to the truth of that tradition, nor for that matter, with Tertullian’s. Origen presented the fire-iron imagery as a “similitude,” a vivid aid to the Christian imagination informed by the faith of the Church, upon whose tradition his theology rests, and to whose members its apologia is directed. Once again, his theology addresses the Church, not the academy. In this ecclesial context, he did not present fire-iron image of the human and the divine in Christ in order to justify the Mysterium fidei by submitting it to the criteria of the cosmological wisdom which he had rejected a priori in favor of the faith of the Church. Yet again, the defining object of Origen’s theology is the object of the Church’s faith and worship, the subject of the apostolic tradition, the unfathomable mystery of Jesus Christ the Lord.
As mystery, the revelation given in Christ is a gift to the mind; to be received in freedom and not otherwise for, as free, it has no antecedent possibility and no other source than its revelation in Christ, whose mystery is by definition ex nihilo sui et subjecti. Its historical objectivity is its liturgical mediation by the historical worship of the historical Church. Because Origen’s Catholic quaerens intellectum is thus liturgically grounded, directed to the object of the Church’s faith and worship, its radical statement is that of Phil. 2:13: Jesus Christ is Lord. Origen’s Christology is founded upon the mystery of the unity of Personal humanity and Personal divinity in the Person of Jesus the Lord. Consequently, he is no more concerned to provide for the antecedent possibility of that mystery than his critics are to account for their own commitment to the dehistoricizing project which defines cosmological rationality.
Origen introduces the fire-iron imagery by drawing an analogy between the nuptial imagery of the union of husband wife in “one flesh.” He then presents the imaging of the union God and man in Christ as comparable to the union of fire and metal in incandescent iron, thereby pointing up the illustrative intent of symbolism as such[320]. As the free unity of man and woman in “one flesh” has defied cosmological analysis down to the present, without prejudice to its historical reality, so Origen’s comparison of the unity of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ the Lord to that of incandescent iron is of the same illustrative character. It does not explain the mystery which it affirms. Origen does not present the nuptial imagery of the “one flesh” as an explanation of the Henōsis of divinity and humanity in Christ; neither does he present the imagery of glowing iron as an analysis of that free union of the divine Word with the created, pre-fallen corporeal nous of Christ. As the free unity of man and woman in marriage is factual but inexplicable for, as free, it also is a mystery, de nihilo sui et subjecti, the product of freedom, not of necessity, so it must follow that the yet more profound mystery of the unity of the Christ is given in history as the free gift of the free truth by whose acceptance in faith the fallen mind is freed from its spontaneous participation, simply as fallen, in the flight from freedom that is imposed by the immanent necessities of autonomous rationality.
A famous passage in the Peri Archon, Bk. II, 6, 3, asserts the soul of Jesus to have been the condition of possibility, i.e., “mediante anima,” of his primordial unity (Henōsis) with the eternal Son. But the Henōsis is the Mysterium fidei, which has no condition of possibility..
In this connection, Henri Crouzel has quoted a Letter of Jerome containing his Latin translation of a crucial text in Bk. II, 6, 3 of the Peri Archon. Its thirty-nine words do not occur in Rufinus’ translation of the Peri Archon. Crouzel has provided infra their French translation in the Traité des Principes, which reads as follows:
15. Jerôme, Lettre 124, 6: « Et in inferioribus » : ‘ Nulla alia anima, quae ad corpus descendit humanum, puram et germanam simultitudinem signi in se prioris expressit nisi illa de qua Saluator loquitur : Nemo tollit animam meam a me, sed ego ponam eam a meipso. Et plus bas : ‘ Aucune autre âme qui soit descendue dans un corps humain n’a exprime en elle un ressemblance pure et authentique du signe antérior, si ce n’est celle dont le Sauveur dit : Personne ne m’ôte mon âme, mais c’est moi qui la déposerai de moi-même. » Rufine a supprimé le début, avant la citation. Ce signe antérieur, c’est l’état de perfection de preéxistence. Il n’ensuit pas nécessairement que cette âme soit la seule à n’avoir pas péché, mais que sa correspondance au Verbe a atteint une perfection complète, ce qu’aucune autre n’a pu faire (underlineation added).
Crouzel, Traité des Principes II, Note 15, 174-5.
The first sentence of Jerome’s Lettre 124, « Et in inferioribus » may be translated as follows :
No other soul which may have descended into a human body has expressed int itself a pure and authentic resemblance of a prior sign, other than that of whom the Savior said: No one takes my soul away from me; rather it is I who disposes of it myself.
Rufinus’ text immediately follows the “ego ponam eam,” of Jn. 10:18, without a break, foreshortening Jerome’s translation of that text:
ab initio creaturae et deinceps inseparabiliter ei atque indissociabiliter inhaerens, utpote sapientiae et uerbo dei et ueritati ac luci uerae, et tota totum recipiens atque in eius lucem splendoremque ipsa cedens, facta est cum ipso principaliter unus spiritus, sicut et apostolus his, qui eam imitari deberent, promittit, quia qui se iungit domino, unus spiritus est. Haec ergo substantia animae inter deum carnemque mediante (non enim possibile erat dei naturam corpori sine mediatore misceri) nascitur, ut diximus, deus-homo, illa substantia media existente, cui utique contra naturam non erat corpus assumere. Sed neque rursum anima illa, utpote substantia rationalis, contra naturam habuit capere deum, in quem, ut superius diximus, velut verbum et sapientiam et veritatem tota iam cesserat (underlineation added).
Traité des Principes I, II, 6, 3, 100-105; 314.
The underlined language appears to warrant the anima mediante explanation of the prior possibility of the Personal unity of Christ, i.e. of the Henōsis, which was followed by Gregory of Nazianzen and, in his early dependence upon him, by Augustine. In the thirteenth century the notion of the Incarnation as mediante anima entered Christology by way of St. Thomas. If the language quoted above be understood as concerned for establishing the prior possibility of the Henōsis, Origen has lapsed into a cosmologized Christology incompatible with his foundation of the hypothesis of the Henōsis upon the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord. However, Origen does not appear to have understood that language analytically, for he has failed to notice this incongruity. Immediately following the concluding “cessaret” from Peri Archon II, 6, 3 ut supra, he proceeds to stress the “communication of idioms” in Jesus, which he describes as a communication of Personal Names:
Unde et merito pro eo vel quod tota esset in filio dei vel totum in se caperet, filium dei, etiam ipsa eum ea qua assumerat, carne dei filius et dei virtus, Christus et dei sapientia appellatur; et rursum dei filius, per quem omnia creata sunt, Jesus Christus et filius hominis nominatur. Nam et filius dei mortuus esse dicitur, pro ea scilicet natura, quae mortem utque recipere poterat, et et filius hominis appellatur, qui venturus in dei patris gloria cum sanctis angelis praedicatur. Et hac de causas per omnem scripturam tam divina natura homanis vocabulis appellatur, quam humana natura divinae nuncupationis insignibus decoratur.
De Principiis II, 6, 3; ibid., I, 314, 106-11. For Crouzel’s commentary, see Traité des Principes, II, 175-76, nn. 18, 19, 20.
When these statements are removed from the context of Origen’s doctrinal fidelity, and his construction of a systematic theology whose coherence is precisely that free fidelity, to be read instead as an extrinsically ordered congeries of incoherent discrete atoms of meaning whose unity can only be imposed ab extra, they are not paradoxical in the sense of apparently contradictory, for in fact they are mutually exclusive, the product of mutually exclusive concepts of God, viz., one, the cosmological Absolute of Middle Platonism, and the other, Jesus Christ the Lord, the object of the Church’s historical faith.
As a simple matter of definition, God as Absolute cannot become flesh; this has been amply demonstrated by the nineteen centuries of Christological befuddlement since Tertullian’s comparable musing upon the prior possibility of the Incarnation in the Adversus Praxean. Origen’s equivalent recourse to mediante anima in Peri Archon II, 6, 3 does no more than illustrate the futility of the Platonic provision of a mediation between the absolute and the relative, which is entirely alien to Origen’s stress upon the communication of idioms in Jesus. Then his notion of an Absolute divinity is governed by the necessities of cosmological rationality, and is either a deus otiosus, a Monas necessarily absent from history, or a Neoplatonic One, necessarily productive of intelligible emanations into history, thus diffusivum sui into a pantheon, the ‘great chain of being.’ From his earliest years Origen abjured this imposition of cosmological necessity upon the revelation in Christ.
In the several years spent under instruction by Ammonius Saccas, Origen became familiar with all of Greek philosophy. Gregory the Wonder-worker (Thaumaturgus), who studied under him for seven or eight years at Caesarea, bears eloquent testimony to Origen’s philosophical learning and theological competence, and also to his awaremess of the dangers of reliance upon the pagan wisdom, lest it become for its students a substitute for the Christian faith that Jesus is the Lord.
Unfortunately, it is not Origen’s respect for the Mysterium fidei, evident in the closing lines of Peri Archon II, 6, 3, that is remembered, but rather his apparent lapse into Middle Platonism. It was Gregory of Nazianzen’s version, of this “haec ergo substantia animae inter deum carnemque mediante” that became a Christological commonplace.[321] Thus the provision of an account of the “how” of the Incarnation of the non-historical Son has come to be assumed to be the basic task of Christology as such. Origen’s Christology presupposes, and is founded upon, the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, quite as is Tertullian’s. Thus grounded, it can provide no such antecedent possibility. Origen simply asserts with unchallengeable certitude the faith of the Church that Jesus Christ is Lord. The mediante anima interpretation of his Christology, by Gregory of Nazianzen and the early Augustine, is in both cases the product of an incomplete conversion of the cosmological imagination, which presents the permanent temptation to Catholic theology, and on occasion to Origen as well. In this case however, he is too intent upon the inexhaustible mystery of the union of divinity and humanity in the Person of Christ to have entered upon its denial,
The cosmological quest for necessary reasons is a humanly ineradicable consequence of the Fall; it is our unfree fleshly solidarity with the refusal by the first Adam of the nuptially-ordered freedom offered him in order that he might become the head of the creation that is in Christ. All our spontaneities are thereby fallen, in need of continual conversion to and participation in the Church’s sacramental mediation of the free solidarity with the risen Christ offered us in the Eucharistic celebration of the Event, the One Sacrifice by which we are freed to be free to live in Christo.in ecclesia. However, this conversion remains always fragile, tempted continually by our ‘sarkic’ solidarity with the first Adam’s refusal to be free, i.e., with his rejection of its nuptial realization in One Flesh with the bridal Eve; that refusal left them with no personal unity: they both “became flesh” without recourse, lacking all unity, intent upon a return to disintegration, to the ‘dust of death.’.
Origen’s insistence upon the full humanity of Jesus, carrying with it the implication of a human soul in Christ as essential to his full humanity, is at one with his fundamental assertion of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord who otherwise could be neither the divine Son of the Theotokos, nor the human Son of the Father, Jesus the Lord, “one and the same Son.” Origen’s prescience at that time, nearly two centuries before the Church’s definitive statement in the Chalcedonian Symbol of her faith that Jesus is the Lord, despite its affront to cosmological rationality, is more than remarkable. It is not too much to regard it as inspired.
Today, fifteen centuries after the definitive approval by the Symbol of Chalcedon of Origen’s insistence upon the full humanity, the full divinity, and the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, Origen’s Christology is still heard as an untutored, implicitly Nestorian equivalent of the “two Sons” Christology attributed to Diodore of Tarsus, and echoed by the fastidious hesitation of the contemporary fautores of “Christology from below” to accept the full divinity of Jesus.
The cosmological conviction of the incapacity of the divine Son to be a human Person has survived the insistent repetition in the Symbol of Chalcedon that Jesus the Christ is “one and the same Son.” After a millennium and a half invested in futile efforts to historicize the “immanent Son,” theologians of that cosmological persuasion still wait upon a satisfactory explanation of its prior possibility; of course, they wait in vain.
In defense of Origen’s fidelity to the apostolic tradition it must suffice that, as a matter of definition, the Incarnation, equivalently gratia Christi capitis, has no condition of possibility. Origen’s Christology is grounded in the communication of idioms in Christ, i.e., upon the Henōsis, whose “production” by the Father is strictly creation ex nihilo. The truth of the faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord, on which all Catholic theology depends, is not subject to a verification process inevitably directed to accounting for its antecedent possibility.
We may conclude that Origen’s fire-iron image refers directly to the union of the Eternal Logos with Jesus’ fully personal humanity. Because the human Lord Jesus could not but have been possessed of the “forma Dei’ (Phil. 2:6) from his creation “in the beginning:” Origen taught over and again that there is no moment in the primordial creation when Jesus is not its Lord. No more than had Paul, no more than had the Synoptics and John the Evangelist, did Origen try to explain how this union could be. Nothing could have been more absurd than such a project. It is clear that the cosmological impossibility of this union did not trouble him. Few Christian scholars in his age were better prepared to recognize that impossibility as utterly irrelevant. The common supposition of a significant influence of Platonism upon Origen’s theology must collapse when it is realized that his entire theological project rests upon the Incarnation-Kenōsis of the pre-existent Jesus the Lord, which entails a complete disregard of Platonism’s most stringent prohibition, the immanence of God in history.
This is not to ignore Origen’s lapses into cosmological rationality. They rest, quite simply, upon his fastidious reluctance to accept what is essential to his understanding of the Henōsis of the eternal Son, viz., the death of the eternal Son whom he knew to be Jesus Christ the Lord, the Personal agent of our salvation.[322] This refusal tempted him to identify the Father, the source (Πηγή, Αρχή; Archē, Pēgē), of the Trinity, with the divine Substance, although his Trinitarian doctrine understands the Father to be the Head of Jesus, «the one and the same Son[323], and therefore to be immanent within the Trinity, of the same ousia as the Son and the Holy Spirit. This error has further ramifications; e.g., “in the Beginning” then ceases to be the primordial Event of the Henōsis, of creation ex nihilo, and becomes non-historical, i.e., eternal, which forces the subject of the Incarnation to be the eternal Son, not the primordial Son, with the attendant re-entry of the impossible problem of accounting for Incarnation of the Absolute. This temptation is evident in the mediante anima passage in Peri Archon II, 6, 3, wherein the Incarnation thereby rendered possible is not a Henōsis, a union, but a misceri, a “commingling” anakrasis (ἀνακράσις),[324] of the absolute Son and his conjoined humanity. The Stoic krasis (κράσις) which this language echoes, denotes a quasi-mechanical mixture of elements incapable of union, typified by the mixture of the logos spermatikos with the material substratum, the hypekeimenon, which the logos spermatikos cyclically informs, by which it is corrupted, and from which corruption it is cyclically purified in an ekpyrōsis. It is evident that a mixture of incompatibles cannot provide a Henōsis in Origen’s sense of the word, i.e., a hypostasis, a Personal subsistence.
Origen’s hesitation over the death of the Son is the primary source of those “paradoxes,” which pervade his theology, viz., the cosmologically induced retreats from what he has made the sole possible foundation of his historical Christology, the Henōsis, Origen’s foundational theological affirmation is of the fullness of divinity and the fullness of humanity in Christ. Concretely this is the hypostatic union, the single subsistence, of divine Son and the human Jesus, the radically inexplicable Mysterium fidei, the historical faith of the Church that the historical Jesus is the Lord, who died for our sins and for the redemption of the fallen universe. Crouzel summarizes as follows his extended defense of Origen’s retention of his foundational insight, the Personal unity of Jesus Christ the Lord:
C’est l’Homme-Dieu qui laisse son Père et sa Mère, la Jerusalem céleste, pour rejoindre son Épouse tombé (ComMath. XIV, 17) : c’est en effet l’âme du Christ, et indirectement à traverse elle le Verbe, qui est l’Époux de l’Église de la preéxistence tombée par sa faute. C’est l’âme du Christ qui est la victime de la Rédemption ; elle souffre, elle est livrée en rançon au diable, elle descend dans l’Hadès, elle monte au ciel dans son Ascension. Cela ne merite as la scandale, car Origène insiste constamment sur l’union inséparable du Verbe et de l’âme. Voir J. Chênevert, p. 55-88 ; M. Simonetti, « La morte di Gesu in Orìgene », Rivista di Storia e Letteratura religiosa 8, 1972, pl. 19-22 (emphasis added).
Crouzel-Simonetti, Traité des principes IV, Note 38, 257. The reference to Joseph Chênevert is to his L’Église dans le Commentaire d’Origène sur le Cantique des Cantiques, 1969.
Origen never departed from this faith in the Personal unity of the Christ, integral to the apostolic tradition set out in his Preface (ibid., I, “Préface d’Origène,” 73-80). That it is the source of the systematic coherence of his theology should surprise no one, for his theology is finally historical, and history has no other coherence than that given it by its Lord.[325]
Crouzel has pointed out the confusion consequent upon the erroneous supposition that Origen used “kτiσις” exclusively in the sense of creation ex nihilo sui et subjecti, as it would come to be used a century later. With respect to its use in Origen’s theology Crouzel considers ktisis to be properly translated by “production,” rather than “creation;” inasmuch as Origen applied it also to eternal begetting of the Son and procession of the Spirit, neither of whom, as substantial and eternal, have a beginning. In either usage of ktisis, Origen understands this “production” to be proper to the Father. Because the Father, as the head of the Trinity, is the source of its free unity, his “production of it, i.e., his begetting of the Son and production of the Holy Spirit is free.
In the Peri Archon Origen affirms the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son who, as eternally with the Father, has no beginning. The Father’s eternal “production” (ktisis) of the Son and of the Spirit is the “substantial,” the eternal exercise of his omnipotence, as contrasted to the his second “production,” i.e., his “accidental” ktisis the creation ex nihilo of a host of formally identical corporeal noes or Intelligences, and of the physical universe corresponding to and correlative with their primordially unfallen “aethereal” and historically fallen “terrestrial” corporeality.
Origen considers the two levels of the Father’s accidental, i.e., creative “production” to correspond respectively to the first and second chapters of Genesis, and understands the primordial fall and the consequent kenōsis of the Christ to correspond to the third. His exegesis of the first two chapters of Genesis raises problems in theology of the Peri Archon. These will be dealt with further on; here it is sufficient to observe that the stress in Gen. 1 upon the creation of man as male and female, and the nuptial emphases upon their union in “one flesh” in Gen. 2, collide with Origen’s relegation of the origin of sexuality to the fall, whereby it ceases to be inherent in the good creation and, thereby ceases to have the efficacious sacramental significance which the worship of the Church ascribes to it.
Origen’s use of κτίσις (ktisis) in this comprehensive sense at once to designate the Father’s “substantial,” i.e., eternal, begetting of the Son and his eternal “production” of the Holy Spirit, together with his “accidental creation” of the finite creatures constituting the material universe, witnesses to a refusal to treat these distinct exercises of divine omnipotence either as separable or as inseparable; the Father’s creation of the universe is free; it is also factual. The free unity of these “productions” is the foundation and the subject of his theology: the Mysterium fidei who is Christ the Lord, the Alpha and the Omega whose divinity is “substantial” and whose humanity is “accidental.”
Father’s “accidental” production (ktisis) is his creation of finite material beings. These, the “noes,” have their primordial “Beginning“ in the Henōsis, their head, the Christ. Thus they are finite, therefore corporeal and capable of change. One of them, the primordial human nous, Jesus Christ the Lord, is from “the Beginning,” i.e., from the primordial first moment, the Event, of the unfallen creation, in Personal, i.e., hypostatic union, i.e., in Henōsis, with the eternal Son, the Logos. His Henōsis with the eternal Son in the Βeginning, is simultaneous with the creation of the universe, for its is created in him, as its head. (see endnote 300, supra), in the Beginning. There is no created moment when this union of the Personal human nous of Jesus with the Son begins. Rather, this union, this Henōsis, “the Beginning.” the created Person, the nous who is the Logos, the object of the adoration of the noes, the Person at once human and divine, Jesus the Christ.
Insofar as integral with the primordially good creation, which is to say, insofar as created in the Beginning, i.e. in Christ, the noes are of course integral, complete, unfallen. The corporeality correlative to their primordial created integrity is “ethereal,” corresponding to the gift of the Spirit received from their head and hence “pneumatic” rather than “sarkic” in the sense of corresponding to their sinful loss of the gift of immortality and their fall into a mortal or fleshly condition.
Origen understood materiality to be the mark of creation, of finitude as such, in brief, of “accidentality,” the capacity to change, in contrast to the “substantial” standing of the divine Persons who, as immaterial, are neither finite nor changeable. Materiality is therefore common to all that is “accidentally” produced, to those realities which have a Beginning, as opposed to the immaterial, eternal, and unchangeable substantiality proper to the eternity, the divinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The first production, as substantial and eternal, is absolutely immaterial: it is the immediate implication of the Father’s eternal omnipotence, which can only be actual, therefore eternally exercised. It consists in the Father’s eternal and continuing begetting of the eternal and therefore “substantial,” i.e., the immaterial, unchanging, eternal divine Son, and the eternal outpouring of the immaterial unchanging, eternal and therefore divine Spirit. The “substantial” or divine standing of the Son and the Spirit cannot be distinguished from their origin in the Father, with whom they are one substance, mia ousia . It is then entirely appropriate to affirm their consubstantiality with him, although it is vigorously denied that Origen ever referred to the Son or the Spirit as homoousios with the Father, i.e., of the same substance, although this is implicit in their substantiality, their divinity. From the apostolic tradition, Origen knew that the Father is the unbegotten source of the Son and of the Spirit who, because derived eternally from him, are like him divine and consequently “substantial.” He knew that their consubstantiality could only be Personal, i.e., with the Father, not with the divine substance, the Trinity, for the Church worships One God, the Trinity, in the Father, through the Son’s outpouring of the Gift of the Holy Spirit, by which we are at once created and redeemed..
Like the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit each possesses the concrete Personal singularity of hypostasis. However, the doctrine of their ab aeterno “production” by the Father which the apostolic tradition knew to be ‘begetting’ as to the Son, had not in Origen’s time resolved the manner of the origin of the Holy Spirit from the Father.[326] With respect to this then open question, Origen was undecided as to whether the Spirit is to be considered to generated by the Father or not (natus an innatus), thus whether or not the Spirit is also in some way a Son, but he clearly affirms the full divinity of the Spirit as the consequence of his procession from and consubstantiality with the Father, and his hypostatic distinction from the Father and the Son.[327]
By this analogous use of “production,” Origen emphasizes that the Father is the unique Source, (ἀρχἡ) and Principle (πηγἡ), of all that is real; all that is “produced,” whether this be the “substantial” production of the Trinity, or the Event of the “accidental” production, “in the Beginning,” of the universe of finite, changeable creatures. Summarily, Origen understands the Father to be at once the eternal Producer, the immanent Source, of the substantial Trinity, and the eternal Producer, the Creator ex nihilo sui et subjecti, of the material universe, by his Mission of Jesus Christ the Son who is from the Beginning the head of the created universe, from the Beginning the source of its free unity, and from the fall, the High Priest of the One Sacrifice by which is established the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve, the New Covenant, the New Creation, by which we are redeemed.
Origen does not confuse these distinct “productions.” Neither does he dissociate them, for they have the free unity of the Henōsis, as will be seen. It is further evident that Origen’s understanding of the Trinity as substantial, i.e., as immaterial, bars any subordination from his Trinitarian theology. The immateriality and indivisibility of the substantial divinity, of the Trinity, is indivisible, mia ousia . This was universally held from the time of the Apologists. The ascription of subordinationism to Tertullian, as necessarily implicit in his Stoicism, ignores his assertion of the tres persona constituting the substantial unity, the Trinitas. prior to any Trinitarian speculation.
We have seen that Origen sharply distinguished two levels of divine “ktisis” or productivity: the first, from eternity, is the Father’s “production” of the Son by generation, and of the Spirit mediated by the Son, for whose procession from the Father Origen found in the apostolic tradition the assertion, not the explanation, but of whose eternity he was in no doubt. This level of ktisis, of divine ‘production,’ he termed “substantial.” Its ‘product,’ “ousia ,” is the substantial Trinity, whose immanent cause or source (Archē or Pegē) is the Father.
Around this clear implication of the consubstantiality of the treis hypostaseis turns the debate over Origen’s explicit use, or not, of “homoousios” in reference to the Word, the Son. On this point the authorities have long been divided, with no scholarly resolution in sight: Catholic scholars such as Henri de Lubac and Henri Crouzel uphold his use of the term, as has also the Anglican scholar J. N. D. Kelly. Comparably eminent Protestant authorities such as R. P. C. Hanson deny it vigorously as an interpolation by Rufinus, the authenticity of whose Latin translations of Origen’s works is routinely in issue in this controversy.
Their division is of less moment than may appear. When the unity of the Trinity is understood to be that of mia ousia, one substance, its members cannot but be consubstantial in a sense that anticipates the Nicene definition of the Personal homoousion of the Son, for the Father is not the ousia; he is one of its treis hypostaseis. While this is a cosmological impossibility, for the cosmological rationality holds that causes so transcend their effects as to be unrelated to them. From that determinist stance, it is evidently absurd to speak of an immanent Source of the divine substance. Catholic Christianity is a conversion from this reliance upon immanent necessity. Thus for Theophilus, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Irenaeus and Origen, the Father is the Trinity- immanent Head of the Trinity, the source of its free unity, in such wise that the consubstantiality or homoousion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit must be Personal, not substantial as the Eusebians insist, thereby leaving Sabellianism the single alternative to the Eusebian subordinationism, which alternative their disciples read into the Nicene Creed; they had already read the Eusebian subordinationism into the treis hypostaseis taught by the Peri Archon.[328]
Because he is immanent within the Trinity, the Father is not the divine substance, as the subordinationists presume. His Personal divinity, his hypostasis, that of the Ἀρχή (Archē), the Πηγη (Pēgē), the source of the substantial unity that is the Trinity, does not transcend the divinity of the Son he begets, nor of the Spirit who proceeds from him as from his Source. The Father’s ktisis, in this Trinitarian context, constitutes what John of Damascus will refer to as the Trinitarian circumincession or perichōresis (περιχώρησις) the ordered dynamic interrelation of the members of the substantial Trinitarian community. This community has its source in the Father, i.e., in his generation ab aeterno of the eternal Son, and the procession from him ab aeterno of the Spirit through the Son. The Father’s dynamic Headship of the Trinity, his “substantial” ktisis, is eternal, without beginning or end. As the source of its free unity, the Father’s exercise of his Headship, his eternal “production” of the Son and the Holy Spirit cannot but be free. The alternative would be a pantheism of which the apostolic tradition knows nothing.
Eastern Trinitarian thought, as J. N. D. Kelly has observed, tends to treat the distinction of the Trinitarian Persons as rationally and perhaps ontologically prior to their Trinitarian unity, while the Latin West is given to the alternative emphasis, although we have seen that G. L. Prestige has seriously questioned the existence of this Oriental-Latin polarity. Nonetheless, within the context of the Filioque controversy, the tension between the two approaches to Christology continues to divide the Latin and Greek Churches. The Trinitarian modalism tolerated for a time in Rome in the early decades of the third century still tempted Novatian in mid-century, and has been thought, as by J. N. D. Kelly, to have influenced Pope Dionysius’ criticism of Dionysius of Alexandria, a proposition in need of further substantiation than Kelly has provided.
The Greek theologians’ spontaneous prioritizing of the Personal distinctions within the Trinity rendered them generally distrustful of all modalist (Sabellian) preoccupations, although Marcellus of Ancyra and Eustathius of Antioch have been regarded as exceptions to the rule.[329] The Trinity was generally conceived―better, perhaps, imagined―in terms arising out of a non-reflective identification of the Father with the divine Substance, with the cosmologically inevitable consequence of an unacceptable and, apart from outright Arians, commonly resisted subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the one God, the single supreme divinity who is understood, within the subordinationist context of Arianism and homoiousianism, to be the Father. The difficulty is obvious enough: without a spontaneous and at least imaginative identification of the Father with the absolute and indivisible divine Substance it is not easy to recognize the Father as the source of the Trinity, i.e., of the full divinity of the Son and the Spirit. However, in the third century Origen, like Tertullian, Hippolytus and Irenaeus in the second, rejected this reasoning in favor of the apostolic tradition that the Father is so named by reason of his eternal generation of the Son. This is a recognition at once of the co-eternity of the Father and the Son, and of their concretely relational, mutually correlative, divine Names, each of which identifies the Trinitarian Person by or with a unique relation to the other Person. This intra-substantial polarity or mutuality had been recognized by Hippolytus [330] and perhaps been intimated by Novatian, but Origen is the first clearly to recognize the intrinsically relational meaning of “Father,” and thereby of “Son” and “Holy Spirit.” Origen’s Trinitarian theology of treis hypostaseis, mia ousia imports the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son, but Origen was unable to state the relation of the Holy Spirit to either, except insofar as knew the Father to be the Source of both the Son and the Holy Spirit. Although Origen went so far as to call the Son a “second God,” (δευτερος θεος΄- deuteros theos) he understood this as a distinction in the Son’s order of relation, his generation by the Father, not the subordination of an inferior to a superior. By this expression Origen distinguished the Son from the Father in a manner comparable to the Tertullian’s single Trinitarian use of census (Adversus Praxean 3) to describe the “unfolding” of the Trinity from its immanent Archē, the Father.
As has been seen, the authenticity of Origen’s ascription of “homoousios” to the Son has long been debated, with no scholarly resolution in sight.
While the doctrine of the Trinitarian Missions of the Son and the Spirit by the Father was undeveloped in Origen’s time, Crouzel recognizes its application to the primordial Jesus the Bridegroom, the head of the bridal Church.[331] Paul had taught that creation is in Christ; Origen developed this theme, applying it, unlike Paul, to the substantial or eternal Trinitarian level of the Father’s production. Origen regards the Father’s begetting of the Son as preliminary to the Father’s production of the universe, for the eternal Son is the source of its prior intelligibility, i.e., of reasons and ideas; this notion is clearly Platonic, but also is perhaps a reminiscence of Justin Martyr’s displacement of the impersonal Stoic Logos by the Christian Logos who is Jesus the Lord, were it not that for Justin it is not the eternal Son who displaces the Stoic Logos, but the historical Jesus the Lord.
Nonetheless, on this nonhistorical basis, Origen can assign the “production” of the universe to the Father and at the same time avoid any confusion between the substantial and accidental levels of “production. The Son’s reality as the source of the intelligibility of creation is substantial, at one with his eternal Sonship, while his headship of the created order is at one with its Beginning, simply his Personal Henōsis with the Personal humanity of Jesus the Lord, which has no other reality than that of the Beginning, the Henōsis-Event which cannot be other than the primordial Mission of the Son. For Origen, the Mission of the Son is historical, the Mission of Jesus the Christ. In this, he is certainly at one with Justin Martyr:
. . . et quod hic deus in novissimis diebus, sicut per prophetas suos ante promiserat, misit dominum Jesum Christum, primo quidem vocaturum Israhel, secundo vero etiam gentes post perfidiam populi Israhel. Hic deus justus et bonus, pater domini nostri Iesu Christi, legem et prophetas et euangelia ipse dedit, qui et apostolorum deus est et ueteris ac novi testamenti).
Traité des Principes I, Préface d’Origène, 80, 64-71 (emphasis added).
The significance of this statement can hardly be exaggerated: Origen’s Naming of Jesus Christ as the subject of the Father’s Mission is his subscription to the Spirit Christology of the Apostolic Fathers, for whom Jesus Christ pre-exists as ‘Spirit,” “in the Beginning,” and is the subject of the kenōsis, the Incarnation. The pre-existent Jesus Christ is the ‘Spirit’ of Lk. 1:35.
At the same time, in so speaking Origen may be heard to accept the common unreflective patristic understanding of the Mission of the Son as propter peccatum; perhaps sensu aiente although, apart from Origen, the Fathers paid little attention to the indispensable primordiality of Jesus’ Mission as the condition of the possibility of the primordial refusal by the first Adam of the Gift of the Spirit, and thus of the fall. However, this unreflective supposition that the mission of the primordial Jesus is propter peccatum cannot be ascribed to Origen, for he does not meld the Mission of the primordial Jesus with his kenōsis, his becoming flesh, his Incarnation. Rather, Origen’s Christology is founded on the primordial Event of the Henōsis, the Beginning of the “accidental production,” the creation ex nihilo whose head, in the Beginning, is the integral Spirit, the Power of the most High, Jesus Christ the Lord.
It is therefore important to note the distinction in Origen’s Christology between the Event of the Henōsis, the primordial Beginning, in which Jesus possesses the form of God, and the Event of the kenōsis, and thus to distinguish between his theology of the Henōsis, the Father’s mission of the Primordial Son, Jesus the Lord, and his theology of the kenōsis, the Incarnation, the Event of Jesus’ becoming flesh, his assumption of the form of a slave, his conception by the Theootokos.
Crouzel concludes his discussion of Origen’s Christology with the assertion that “Christology is the central point of his teaching and of his life.” We have noted that, in this, Origen’s theological point d’appui is the same as Tertullian’s i.e., the communication of human and divine idioms in the Person of Christ, upon whose unqualifiedly Personal unity Tertullian was the first to assert, and upon whose Personal Incarnation Tertullian based his Christology and his Trinitarian theology, first set out in the Apologeticus, and from which Evans is convinced he never significantly departed
Origen, like Tertullian, grounded his Trinitarian speculation upon the historical fact that Jesus Christ is Lord. Thus founded, his theology was historical from the outset and could not but remain so, whether as Christological or as Trinitarian. In brief, the Trinitarian theology of Origen’s Peri Archon is the reflex of his Christology which, like Tertullian’s, rests not upon abstract speculation but upon the historical faith that Jesus is the Lord. Like Tertullian, Origen understands the primordial Jesus the Lord to be the subject of the Incarnation.
Unfortunately, Origen’s Commentary on Genesis is lost apart from a few fragments. However, in his development of the primordially good creation ex nihilo in the Peri Archon, Origen very clearly speaks in the context of the Pauline doctrine of headship set out in I Cor. 11:3,[332] wherein the Head, the Father, the head of the Trinity, Jesus, the Head of all men, and the husband, the head of his wife in their nuptial union in “one flesh,” is a member of the substance of which he is the head, and of whose free unity he is the source.
It has been pointed out in the treatment of Origen’s theology in Volume III that Origen has confused his recognition of Jesus as the bridegroom and head of the bridal Church by his interpolation of the Middle a notion of the Logos, the eternal Son, as the principle of the intelligibility of all creation. This accords with the Platonic emanationism, not so much of the Middle Platonic confusion as of the dawning Neolatonism taught by his mentor, Ammonius Saccus, who taught Plotinus about a decade after Origen studied under him. In this transformation of Plato’s thought, the absolute One emanates a mediating principle, nous, or Intelligence: this corresponds to Origen’s eternal Logos-Son, who epinoia is the sum of all finite knowledge. However, thus conceived, he is not eternally begotten, homoousios with the Father, and does not possess that consubstantiality by which he is “God from God, true God from True God, Light from Light” nor can he be the subject of the Incarnation which the Creed proclaims him to be. He is not then Christ the Lord, the subject of the Henōsis and the Kenōsis, the head of the Church and so of all creation.
Beguiled by the Neoplatonic cosmology, Origen was distracted from the one thing necessary, his focus upon the Henōsis, the Event of Jesus Christ the Lord, the head of all creation, the source of its free significance, of its free unity, and so of its free beauty. It is necessary to choose between the vagary of his Neoplatonized eternal Son, and his faith in Christ our Lord. Henri Crouzel has documentted Origen’s fidelity to the faith of the Church; we may dismiss the vagary; see endnote 242, supra.
Thus as the Father as the Head of the Trinity, the source of its free unity. so the primordial Jesus the Christ, as her head, is the source of the free unity of the bridal Church, while she, the Bride, is “the gathering of the intelligences,” (Crouzel, op. cit., at 218). Origen here refers to the primordial good creation, whose goodness, in opposition to the cosmology of the Valentinian Gnostics and to the semi-gnostic heresy of Marcion, is the justice of its creation. This justice ensures the equality of the noes, who contemplate the Logos with an identical fervor. Later, by the cooling of their worship, their sinful self-distantiation from the Logos, they will differ among themselves, but they do so sinfully, against the will of their creator. The failure in justice is theirs, not his.
The Pauline development in Colossians and Ephesians of the headship doctrine of I Cor. 11:3 recognizes in Jesus the head of the bridal Church in a nuptial union which fulfills the prophecy of Gen. 2:24, for in that union he pours out upon his Bride the Spiritus Creator by the reception of which Gift she is freely One Flesh with him. Through her freedom, Jesus the Lord is the primordial head of the Good Creation which the bridal Church embodies and, whose goodness is her free unity with him, her fidelity to him, her conception of him. By his One Sacrifice, he established the primordial One Flesh in fallen history, restoring its free unity as its Head, its source, its Alpha and its Omega, its Beginning and its End. His Eucharistic immanence in our fallen history is his Lordly transcendence of history through the Eucharistic worship of the Church he instituted. “For freedom he has made us free:” (Gal. 5:1) He has freed all of fallen humanity to return to its primordial freedom in the One Flesh by free personal participation in the Eucharistic worship by which he is Present in union with his Bride. By his offering as the High Priest of the One Sacrifice, on the Altar and on the Cross, his institution of the Eucharist, he is manifest as the head of all creation, its Beginning and its End.
Origen’s identification of the community of the noes with the bridal Church intimates their femininity vis à vis the Logos, although in Origen’s doctrine, sexuality is the product of the fall. However, this sexuality can only be feminine sexuality, for the Logos is primordially the bridegroom of the primordial Church, thus primordially masculine. However, this intimation of a universal femininity before the Logos anticipates Origen’s later persuasion of the femininity with respect to the risen Lord of those noes whose fallenness is into historical humanity.
Crouzel has pointed out that the problem of the origin of the soul was unresolved by the apostolic tradition as it existed in Origen’s day.[333] Origen’s doctrine of the “pre-existence of souls,” as it has come to be called, is a summary dismissal, both of the currently contending accounts of the soul’s origin, whether theory of the immediate creation of the soul of each person, or the ‘traducianism’ that supposed the soul to be passed on by the male in sexual generation. Both views suppose a divine creation of persons whose historical situation dooms them to live in relative inequality and disadvantage to a point inconsistent with the doctrine of the good creation. Origen’s hypothesis of the pre-existence of the noes, including the nous who is their Head, the primordial Logos, the object of their adoration. His excogitation by Origen is intended at once to defend the intrinsic goodness of creation and of the Creator and, at the same time, to affirm the primordial pre-existence of Jesus Christ the Lord, which Irenaeus’ Christology had presumed but did not develop. Origen’s novel conjecture of a not quite universally distributed primordial sin common to all the noes apart from the nous of the primordial Christ who, possessing the forma Dei (Phil. 2, 7) cannot sin, is intended to uphold the equality and the moral freedom of the unfallen noes.
Created utterly equal with each other, each possessing an untrammeled moral freedom, their sin and fall cannot be attributed to divine injustice, for Origen has made it clear that their fall is their personal responsibility. He leaves unsettled the simultaneity of their sin and fall into the earthly condition of dichotomized human souls. Created in the Beginning in ardent contemplation and adoration of the Christ, their head, they all fell from that ardor, perhaps by a species of accidie, a sullen boredom with contemplation, perhaps by a “cooling” of their devotion to Christ their head, the Logos, but, in either case, solely in consequence of their personal misuse of their own freedom, a moral fault for which their creator God is not responsible and which therefore is not inherent in the world which he made good, as the pagans and the Valentinians and the Marcionites suppose in a common denial of the goodness of the physical universe.
The universality of their fall is nonetheless problematic.[334] Even given that some noes did not fall (e.g., those who became prophets), Origen leaves unexplained the simultaneity of the fall of the others. Were an explanation of sin possible, it must be found in their free unity, whose source is their head, the primordial Jesus in whom, as Paul teaches, they are created. Their fall is from this primordial integrity, an integrity not merely personal, but also communal, in that they are not created piecemeal, but in free community, which is to say, as freely subsisting in a free substance whose head, the Logos, is their source. It must follow that neither can their fall be piecemeal: Origen recognizes that whether in their primordial integrity or in their fallen fragmentation, they constitute the free unity that is the primordial bridal Church.. However, Origen’s concept of the fall as a failure of due devotion fails to invoke the fact of Jesus’ headship of the noes. He recognizes as well that the redemption of the fallen Church, disintegrated by the loss of its free unity, is the work of her head, the historical Jesus Christ whose One Sacrifice restores her primordial integrity, her free unity, her One Flesh with him. All this is implicit but not clearly spelled out in Origen’s treatment of the fall of the noes.
However, his explicit deployment (endnote 259, supra) of the Pauline doctrine of headship is itself extraordinary for, apart from Irenaeus a generation or two earlier, that brilliantly integrating insight of St. Paul has gone largely unnoticed by the patristic tradition. The indices of the standard patristic commentators evince little or no interest in I Cor. 11:3. The same disinterest marks the Carolingian and medieval traditions, as it marks Catholic theology today. Neither the Fathers nor their successors in interest have recognized, as Origen did, the indispensability to Jesus’ redemptive Mission of his headship of the noes, the Church, and thereby of all creation. The Christ’s “recapitulation of all things” (Eph. 1:10) is duly noted by the patristic tradition, but the notice uniformly fails to link that passage to Paul’s earlier assertion (I Cor. 11:3) of the Father’s headship of Jesus, of Jesus’ headship of all men, and of the husband’s headship of his wife. The Trinitarian foundation of headship is of definitive importance, but it has been ignored since Origen.
Origen’s radically Christological hypothesis of the primordial “pre-existence of souls” is therefore at the same time a reply to then-current heresies which directly or by implication denied the doctrine of the good creation. The most widely dispersed of these was the Valenntinian Gnosticism, but the Christian faith in the good creation which is in Christ was then being contravened not only by the Gnostics’ attribution of evil to the creator-demiurge of the material universe, which their dualism taught to be the principle of evil, but also by the Monarchians, who denied the concrete distinctions in the divine unity implicit in the distinct “Personal” divinity of Jesus and the Spirit and, more particularly by the heresy of Marcion, whose dualist separation of the Old Covenant from the New was driven less by a Gnostic dualism than by an ideological anti-Semitism, which required that the God of the Old Covenant be rather a demiurge than the Father or the Son. For Marcion, the God of the Old Covenant transcends the rest of creation but still is less than divine, merely the creator of the material world, the merciless divinity of the Jews and so the author of Law, not the merciful Father of Jesus the Christ taught in the Christian scriptures. Marcion rejected the authority of the Old Testament entirely: he supposed its prophecies of the Messiah to concern only a Jewish Messiah, and not to bear upon Jesus the Christ, whom he held to have no relation whatever to the Old Testament history, nor in fact to historical humanity: Marcion’s collection of the Apostolic writings had mutilated the Letters of Paul and the Lucan Gospel to support his indictment of the God of the Old Covenant and his absolute severance of Jesus from any association with it, to the point of a docetism. Here a tinge of the Gnostic deprecation of matter as the principle of evil supports his anti-Semitism.[335]
Origen’s basic objection to Marcion’s heresy is its separation of the Old Covenant revelation from that of the New, with its effective denial not only of the unity of the Old Covenant as fulfilled in the New Covenant, but also of the Old Testament emphasis upon goodness of the material creation, which the hypothesis of the pre-existence of the integral good creation could not but defend. All of these heresies were marked by the rationalization of historical reality, the replacement of its free intelligibility by abstract necessitarian analyses, inevitably dualist, which force the mind’s flight from history to a timeless empyrean. The fragmentation of fallen reason cannot admit the free unity of history, of the good creation, which it therefore condemns as irrational, unresponsive to the necessitarian cosmological analyses.
Origen refused to rationalize the free truth revealed in Christ, as concretely signed by the historical communication of idioms in Jesus Christ the Lord. For him to put in issue the communication of idioms in Christ would have been to accept the cosmological critique as valid, and thus to deny a priori the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord. While Origen’s rejection of the dualist moral doctrine of his adversaries is inherent in the reliance of his theology upon the historicity of its foundation in Jesus the Lord, this nexus was not immediately apparent to his Gnostic adversaries. Therefore he spelled it out in his integration of the primordial “pre-existence of souls” with his Christology, wherein the primordial Henōsis of the Logos with the personal, i.e., hypostatic humanity of him who in the union, “from the Beginning,” primordially, is Jesus Christ the Lord, the Son, the Logos, who is the head of the noes and the object of their adoring contemplation. Only this primordial Henōsis, the hypostatic union of the human hypostasis of Jesus the Christ with the divine hypostasis of the eternal Son, is able to conform to the faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord upon which faith Origen has founded his Christology, whose inseparability from his hypothesis of the pre-existence of souls” is evident. As we have seen Crouzel observe, Origen’s Christology is the heart of his theology as such.
The faith of the Church in Jesus Christ the Lord finds its expression in the assertion of his Names, “Jesus,” Christ, and “Lord.” He is given the first Name by the revelation of an angel; he is given the second and third by his Apostles, who recognized in Jesus at once the longed-for Messiah of the Old Testament prophecy, and the divine Son of the Father.[336]
For Origen, this reliance upon the Personal unity of Jesus Christ the Lord is axiomatic, foundational, the sole possible basis for theological inquiry. For him as for the Apostolic Fathers, as in fact for the Apologists and for Tertullian in the Christology of the Apologeticus as well, the unqualified Personal unity of Jesus is an a priori historical datum of the faith of the Church, not open to doubt, not submitted to the scrutiny of any supposedly higher criterion of unity. From the Beginning, Jesus Christ is the Bridegroom, the head of the primordial Church, the primordially good creation of material noes or Intelligences, hypostases who from the beginning are in rapt contemplation of the Logos, Jesus, their head, the source of their free unity, in whom they are created.
Origen’s excogitation of a primordially, not eternally, pre-existent creation of the noes, the finite Intelligences, presupposes the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord from the Beginning for, as the Bridegroom, the head of the bridal Church in whom the noes exist from the Beginning, he is their created head and, as head, is the source of their created free unity and thus their creator. Origen’s affirmation of the union (Henōsis) of the created Personal human intelligence (hypostasis) of the Christ. with the divine hypostasis, the Son, is not troubled by a need to account for its prior possibility, knowing that, as the mystery of faith, it can have none. Theological hypotheses which constitute his “connected body of doctrine” the product of a “research theology” possess the free coherence, the “order” of the tentatively offered “body of doctrine” constituting the Peri Archon. As it stands, this product of his “research theology” is an invitation to the educated Christian community of his time, and of all time, to do likewise, to enter more deeply into the inexhaustible profundities of their Catholic faith.
Crouzel has referred to Origen’s hypothesis of “the pre-existence of souls” as “the strangest thing” in his theology.[337]. He supposes this theory to have its origin in Platonism, i.e., in the doctrine of anamnesis, a universally given intuitive reminiscence of the Forms of the ideal world. In this he is probably correct. He does not think this hypothesis to have been motivated by any reliance upon the Platonic anamnesis of Forms; rather he believes its motivation to have been Origen’s determination to justify the Church’s faith in the goodness of creation, then under assault by the generally dualist mentality of the time, which supposed matter to be the principle of evil―but this mentality is also Platonic.
Origen, defending the faith of the Church against these attacks, was intent upon defeating the cosmological assumption that creation as such could not but be essentially unjust by simply reason of its materiality. His theory of the pre-existence of souls postulates their creation in utter equality, materially distinct from each other by reason of their created finitude and consequent corporeality, but formally identical, in that each is absorbed in the same fervent contemplation of the Logos. Their loss of fervor could then not have its explanation in their material reality, for their creation in integrity (in fact, their consubstantiality, although Origen has not seen this), in the Beginning, excludes any differentiation in their extrinsic circumstances or intrinsic characters.
Thus posed, theory of the pre-existence of souls would amount to no more than the a priori rejection of cosmological pessimism in favor of the faith of the Church in the intrinsic goodness of creation. So understood, it lacks that foundational integration with the communication of idioms without which it stands en plein air. There is no reason for this abstraction of the pre-existence of souls from the “connected body of doctrine” which is theology of the Peri Archon. In fact, such an abstraction is systematically forbidden; it would ignore the Henōsis, the Christological “beginning” upon which the whole of his theology rests. There is then an incongruity between Origen’s reliance upon a Platonic Form to explain the formal identity of the noes, and his reliance upon the Henōsis of the eternal Logos and the primordially human nous of Christ in the Beginning as the source, the foundation, of the articulated ‘body of doctrine” that constitutes the Peri Archon.
Origen affirms the Intelligences (noes, logika, noetika), to be from the Beginning formally identical, distinct only materially, by the ‘ethereal’ corporeality inherent in their finitude. They are thus numerically distinct, but otherwise therefore utterly equal, joined in a pure devotion to the Logos, i.e., to the Henōsis who, from the Beginning, is the human Jesus, the Bridegroom of the Church, and therefore their head.[338]
In some manner their devotion failed simultaneously and practically universally.[339] This was a moral failure, for there was no inequality between them, nothing in their finite and corporeal creation which could have induced that failure of devotion in any one of them. Thus the hypothesis of the pre-existence of souls provides a speculative basis for Origen’s defense of the goodness of the created universe. The fall and moral degradation of the Intelligences is not caused by nor is it implicit in the material creation as is supposed by Middle or Neo-Platonism, by contemporary versions of Gnosticism, and by dualist heretics such as Marcion. Rather, their sin and fall is not caused by anything; it has no antecedent possibility. The failure of the Intelligences to persevere in their adoration of the Logos, their head, is a free failure, hence a moral failure, to persist in the freedom given them in the Beginning.
Apart from the “soul” of Jesus, who from the Beginning has the forma dei, and therefore is immune to sin, the noes fell of their own accord. Their fall from the freedom of their rapt contemplation of the primordial Jesus, the Logos who is their head, was their fragmentation, for only in that fervor were they in union as equal members of the primordial Church, of whom their head, Jesus the Christ, is the Bridegroom and the head. Crouzel’s discussion of Origen’s hypothesis of the pre-existence of souls in abstraction from the primacy of Christology in Origen’s theology, and particularly, his abstraction from Jesus’ headship of the Intelligences whereby he is the source of their created free unity, and thus is their creator, puts the cart before the horse. No treatment of the “pre-existence of souls” can prescind from Origen’s recognition of the headship of the primordial Jesus the Lord over all creation, and specifically of the Intelligences who, as fallen, have become human souls,
The Henōsis of the human Person of Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom of the primordial Church, is the head of the Intelligences, not by reason of their primordial devotion, but by reason the identity of the Henōsis with the Beginning, the “accidental production” that is the creation of the universe.
Crouzel recognizes Origen’s acceptance of the exegesis of Lk. 1:35, native to the “Spirit Christology” of the Apostolic Fathers, which understands angel’s statement to Mary that “Holy Spirit will come upon you” in that verse to refer to the pre-existing Jesus, not to the third Person of the Trinity.[340] As has been noted, this reading was the standard patristic exegesis of Lk 1:35 in the second and third centuries. It was accepted by the patristic tradition generally well into the fourth century, surviving in the Alexandrine tradition at least until the deaths of Athanasius and Marcellus of Ancyra. It entered into the Euchologion of Serapion of Thmuis, whose Eucharistic epiclesis invokes Christ upon the elements, not the Holy Spirit.[341]. The Lucan account of the Annunciation presupposes the primordial pre-existence of Jesus: it knows nothing of a non-historical Son. As has been pointed out earlier, there is no other basis for understanding Mary’s conception of Jesus her Lord, by which alone she is the Theotokos, the title which Origen is reported by Socrates to have given her in Book I of his Commentary on Romans.[342]
Origen’s “Spirit Christology” provides a more comprehensive foundation for the “pre-existence of souls” than Crouzel has recognized, for the primordial Christ is their head, their source, in such wise that their creation in him cannot but also be primordial. Further, the Spirit Christology excludes any possibility of the Christological adoptionism that Crouzel finds latent in Origen’s Christology. It is of course evident that Origen uses his favored hypothesis of “the pre-existence of souls” to refute the dualist critique of creation as inherently unjust. The indefeasible Christological foundation of the “accidental creation” easily accounts for his otherwise rather offhand dismissal of all competing notions of the origin of the soul, for the pre-existent Intelligences are created in Christ as the head of the primordial Church, of which they are members from the Beginning. Crouzel has found little foundation other than ignorance and misunderstanding for the negative reaction in the early fourth century (e.g., by Peter Martyr, the exiled and martyred bishop of Alexandria, (d. 311) to the Origen’s hypothesis of the “pre-existence of souls.[343] Origen is here concerned for the passage of the created noes or Intelligences from their primordial pre-existence into fallen historicity, by which they become the souls of fallen human persons who, by reason of their fallenness, are either male or female; prior to the fall, they have no sexuality. Their head, Jesus the Christ, simply as their head, is immanent in their substance from the Beginning, and remains thus immanent as their head in his kenōsis, his free immersion in their fall from primordial free unity.[344] Thus Origen’s hypothesis of the Henōsis is the precondition for his understanding, as redemptive, of the kenōsis of the Son who is the pre-existent Jesus the Lord, the “one and the same Son,” although Origen does not use that expression. This primordial Personal union of the Person of the eternal Son with the Person who is Jesus the Christ is Origen’s foundational theological expression of the communication of idioms, although again that term does not occur in the Peri Archon, which speaks of Names rather than “idioms.” “Idioms” would come into use only with Cyril’s first and second dogmatic Letters to Nestorius. In the Peri Archon Origen speaks instead of the divine and human “hypostases” who, in the subsistent unity of their Henōsis, bear the Names and so the hypostasis, the unique subsistence, of Jesus Christ the Lord, the Logos of Jn. 1:14, the primordial Jesus Christ of Phil. 2:6-7.[345]
The Henōsis is the Beginning of the “accidental” ktisis, the Father’s creation of all that is finite and corporeal; it must then pre-exist the fall.[346] The nous with whom the Son is in primordial union, Jesus the Christ, possesses the forma Dei from the Beginning and also, from the Beginning, is the masculine bridegroom of the Church. The other noes attain sexuality only by their fall,[347] In that Henōsis with the Son, which is his created Beginning and the Beginning as such, Jesus the Christ possesses the ethereal, pre-existent corporeality proper to his human standing as the primordial head of creation. His primordially integral corporeality will become the humanity of Jesus the Lord in his kenōsis, wherein the pre-fallen, ethereally-corporeal human Hypostasis, Jesus the Lord, immanent in humanity as its head, submits to the fall to become terrestrial, i.e., flesh, while remaining immanent humanity as its head, even as fallen.[348]
Here it should be pointed out that Origen’s affirmation of the Henōsis of the Logos with the personal nous who, in fallen history, will be the full humanity of Jesus the Christ, is not the first theological recognition of the communication of idioms in the Person of Jesus. That honor belongs to Irenaeus who, a generation earlier, toward the end of second century, had identified Jesus as “one and the same Son.”[349] However, Origen is the certainly the first to affirm that the communication of idioms is Personal, in the sense that the Personal homoousios of the Jesus, the Son, with the Father, as Personal, entails his Personal consubstantiality with all human persons, for he their head, the source of their humanity. Thus he is Personally human as well as Personally divine, “one and the same Son.:
Jesus the Son’s double consubstantiality is implicit in the early forthright una persona, duae substantiae Christology of Tertullian’s Apologeticus. Unfortunately Tertullian became momentarily confused by the abstract cosmological ‘one vs. many’ dilemma posed in Adversus Praxean, 27 which forced him to choose between the monophysite and diophysite alternatives posed by his inadvertent enlistment in that cosmology. However Origen recovered from his comparable confusion in Peri Archon 3, 6, 2. He not only anticipated the Nicene proclamation of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father, as Crouzel has shown, but in doing so, also anticipated the Chalcedonian affirmation of Personal divinity and Personal humanity of Jesus, for the nous in Henōsis with the Logos is not a “nature,” as Rufinus supposed, but the “hypostasis,” the subsistence, and thus the Name by which the apostolic tradition affirmed Jesus to be the Lord.
This union, Henōsis, of the Person of the Logos with the Person of Jesus has been much criticized, and little understood. It is uncritically read as inevitably adoptionist. This unwarranted inference presupposes an attempt by Origen to account for the prior possibility of the Henōsis, understood in terms of the Logos-sarx analysis of the Incarnation, a cosmological project totally opposed to Origen’s radical commitment to the apostolic tradition of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord. Adoptionism is entirely alien to the focus of his quaerens intellectum upon the unity of the Christ.[350] The communication of idioms is intrinsic to the liturgy whereby the Church and her worship are historical. In that worship, the unity of Jesus the Lord is affirmed in the communication of Names in him, viz., Jesus Christ the Lord, whose unity, thus Named, cannot but be Personal.[351] In brief, Origen’s Henōsis is also a hypostasis, the primordial Personal Beginning, the Subsistence who is Jesus Christ the Lord in the divine substance that is the Trinity, and in the human substance as its head, whereby he is consubstantial at once with the Father and with us, as the Symbol of Chalcedon has taught,
Origen’s theology is then a wisdom whose unity is historical because liturgically mediated, rather than abstract and systematic in the sense of being logically integrated in terms of the necessary reasons proper to cosmological rationality So to reason is to dismiss what is basic to his Trinitarian doctrine and to his Christology, the historical communication of divine and human idioms in Jesus the Lord, the bed-rock of his theology. He has no interest in the abstract, finally cosmological inquiry into the conditions of possibility of the union of humanity and divinity in Jesus the Christ: the historical reality, the unity, of Jesus Christ the Lord, the mystery of the faith, is the presupposition of his theology, which is a quest for understanding, not an attempt to provide one.
His hypothesis of the primordially good creation of a multitude of identical Intelligences is no more than the development of a conjecture which is founded upon the objectively historical reality of the mystery of the union of divinity and humanity in Christ. He deploys this theory, not to provide for the prior possibility of the Incarnation as systematic theologians before and after him have attempted and failed to do, but as its implication. Neither, pace Crouzel, does Origen deploy the “pre-existence of souls” simply to justify the goodness of creation, although it has that consequence. Rather, his hypothesis of “the pre-existence of souls,” , is essential to his defense of the doctrine of the Word made flesh against the Gnostic, quasi-Gnostic and Monarchian assaults upon that doctrine, which marked the first half of the third century. These had their origin in Marcion’s anti-Semitic rejection of the divinity of the God of the Old Covenant, in the dualism of the Gnostics who, in denying the goodness of the Creator and of the material world, were forced to reject either the divinity or the humanity of Jesus, ending with denying both, and in the Monarchians who, upholding the unity of God, could not accept the personal differentiation between Father, Son and Spirit within the divine substance that is explicit in the faith that Jesus is the Lord.
In order to meet the attacks of these adversaries to the faith of the Church of his time, Origen relied upon what would later be called the analogia fidei, the historical, free, and ultimately liturgical intelligible unity in which each element of the faith of the Church in her Lord may be understood to support and to be integral with the rest. He understood the historical Lordship of Jesus the Christ to be single object of the Church’s faith; it then could not but be the single subject of theology as such. His third-century statement of this Mysterium could be no more than the tentative presentation of a “connected body of doctrine,” some elements of which, notably the “pre-existence of souls,” he presented as hypotheses providing what he considered to be the most satisfactory solutions of problems left open by the rule of faith as it then existed. This hypothesis is incomplete, as any theologoumenon must be. He failed to address the problem raised by the simultaneity of the fall of all the noes other than the nous who from the Beginning is in Henōsis with the eternal Son and, as fallen, is the Personal humanity of Christ. This would require a further discussion of the refused headship of the fallen Adam into which Origen did not enter, but which he provided for in recognizing that Jesus, the Beginning is from the Beginning of creation its head, the Logos who is the object of the adoration of the unfallen noes.
The moral dimension of this second level of divine production, the creation ex nihilo of the Intelligences, the utterly equal noes, one of whom is the pre-existent nous of Christ who “from the Beginning,” from first moment of creation, is in union with the Word, can be too quickly stated, and too little understood.
The creation of the noes is the creation of the Church whose members they are. Their creation, coincident with hers, is therefore also primordial, in the Beginning. From that Beginning, they exist in a fervent contemplative adoration of their head, the Logos who is Jesus their Lord. Their contemplation is the worship primordial Church’s worship of her Lord, her head, for in their primordial community, the noes are the bridal Church of whom the primordial Christ is the head and, as such, the source of her free unity, her union in One Flesh with her Lord.
The noes, or Intelligences, inasmuch as created and consequently finite, are thereby corporeal with the “ethereal” corporeality appropriate to their primordially unfallen integrity, wherein: Origen understands them to be sexless. Their aetherial corporeality connotes the creation of an etherially physical universe, but Origen does not develop this theme; he understands the primordial creation as the creation of the logika, the noes, the intelligent creatures which, as fallen, include men, angels, demons, the Intelligences which Origen in some manner identifies with the stars. We have noted the argument of Crouzel’s long-time collaborator, Manlio Simonetti, that some of the noes did not fall. However, Origen’s “accidental production,” the primordially good creation, is primarily constituted by those Intelligences who, as fallen human souls, however strict their association with their own terrestrial corporeality, are themselves immaterial. Origen holds that it is only thus that they may image the immaterial God. However, Origen nuances this immaterial imaging of God, for it engages the body as well, as the “shadow” of the soul, even in the Christ. Origen stresses their primordially “aetherial” corporeality as the consequence of their standing as creatures, but is more concerned to affirm their formal equality, their common personal integrity in their common worship of the Logos, which was lost in their fall, and regained by the One Sacrifice of Jesus the Lord, the restoration of the primordial One Flesh of the Bridegroom with the Bride.
Origen’s hypothesis of the primordial creation of the Intelligences, i.e., of “pre-existent souls,” which aroused the objection of Peter of Alexandria and Methodius of Olympus early in the fourth century, is not fanciful. Integral with his Christology of the Henōsis of the hypostasis of the eternal Logos and of the created hypostasis, the nous of Jesus, the Bridegroom and head of the Church, who comprises the noes, it could not but be responsive as well to the particular need of Christians in the third century for an account and defense of the goodness of creation, then under attack on generally dualistic grounds. The commonplace cosmological monism of the era inevitably generates the insoluble problem of “the one and the many,” in which the multiplicity and mutability of material entities, oppose the formal principle of unity and stability as irreconcilable with it, and hence as the principle of evil. It is thus that the possibility of a good creation, and of a good Creator was challenged variously by Gnostics, Marcionites and Monarchians, all of whom supposed the terrestrial world to be fallen as such, in the sense of inevitably and irredeemably corrupt by reason of its materiality, Their challenge could be met only by providing a rational account of account of the origin of evil in the moral corruption of creatures who, in the Beginning, as created in integrity, were incorrupt. Origen’s postulate of their primordial integrity denied the dualist explanation of evil while offering an alternative to the historical pessimism inseparable from the essentially pagan dualism of the time. It is typified by Anaximander who, in the sixth century B.C., had explained motion as a cosmological struggle (genesis) to overcome the injustice inherent in material differentiation as such.[352]. The primitive Eleatic logic of that time[353] supposed all differentiation to be due to the possession of more or less perfection. Comparably rationalized despairs of history pervaded all the high cultures of the pagan world, as they now threaten the quondam Christian civilization of the West, whose first ecumenical Council condemned Arius’ appeal to cosmological rationality to deny the divinity of the historical Jesus Christ, the Lord. That rationality does not permit the immanence in the fallen world of the concrete unity of goodness, beauty and truth which all men seek; that quest demands the dehistoricization, the reduction to abstractions, of all such goals of human striving: it constitutes a flight from historical existence to a timeless aeon.
When the common good of a free society is identified with such an abstraction, such as identity, or fairness, or justice, or equality, or any of the surrogates for these ideals, there arises the insoluble problem of the one and the many, which in turn presupposes the injustice pervading the entire order of creation, i.e., of the many. For a current example, the “diversity” now identified with the common good ceases so to be sought when it imperils the dominant secularity. Particularly the diversity that is faith in Jesus the Lord is increasingly found incompatible with the secularity that would redefine the common good as the absence of all inequality, of all difference.
We have seen that the pagan mythologies interpreted the masculine-feminine polarity in this sense, i.e., as unjust per se, condemned as deviation from the nihilistic moral norm, the identification of justice with the ineffable goal of a non-historical and therefore radically indiscernible absolute identity. any assertion of whose reality is finally mythical, as in Plato’s anamnesis of the Forms. Catharism imported into the West the nihilism latent in that paganism; its extinction there by the crusade called by Innocent III continues to be mourned by televised historikers. The essentially pagan historical pessimism of the dualist account of moral evil as caused rather than as free is presupposed by the adversaries of the Christian doctrine of the creation as ex nihilo, as free of any antecedently necessary taint by a demonic material principle. The reduction of justice to identity and of injustice to difference was a standard and apparently inexhaustible resource of the anti-Christian polemic. It continues to fuel the contemporary expressions of our practical atheism.
Origen wished to transcend this historical pessimism by presenting the creation of finite moral creatures in such wise that their sin and fall would not be explainable in terms of the dualistic appeals to their material finitude, i.e., as inherent in the injustice of their inevitable material differentiation. His theory of the creation ex nihilo of a multitude of primordial, “pre-existent” utterly equal noes assured that none of them would possess any innate disposition to sin as a consequence of their corporeal individuation, nor would any pre-existent moral weakness explain the sin of the noes who have fallen for as we have seen, in Origen’s account not all of them fell. Their creation in equality barred all differentiation in moral capacity and moral responsibility among them.
Nonetheless, apart from some few unexplained exceptions, the utterly equal noes fell, substantially at the same moment, from the ardor of the contemplation of the Word with which their existence had begun. In contrast to their head, they did not possess the forma dei, but rather adored it in their head, the Logos, Jesus their Lord. Origen insists that their fall was moral, the product of a personally free sinful diminution of devotion to their contemplation of the Logos. With this, they lost their primordial integrity, their formal identity, their ethereal corporeality, and fell into a formally differentiated terrestrial corporeality whose differentiation corresponds to the degree of their individual personal sinfulness. Here however a limit would seem to have been supposed. t does not appear that the noes constituted primordially as members of the primordial Church, could have fallen into a condition less than human. As fallen, as possessed of terrestrial corporeality, their primary differentiation was sexual, a formal distinction irreconcilable with their primordial integrity and equality. This raises further difficulties. Inasmuch as Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, written ten or a dozen years after the Peri Archon, supposes the immaterial souls of all the fallen noes, apart from their masculine head, to be feminine, it might be expected that Origen would have stated this consequence in the Peri Archon, but there is no mention of it there.[354]
Origen’s invocation of psycho (“cooling”) and koros (desolation, ennui, accidie) of the noes describes rather than explains the failure of their worship of the Logos and their fall. Further, by reason of the generality of these descriptions, they suggest, even presuppose, what remains inexplicable, the simultaneity and universality of the fall.
Insofar as it is a moral failure, the primordial sin, the fall of the noes is inexplicable by definition, simply as sin, for it is thereby ex nihilo; had it an explanation, it would not be sin, and not a fall. Earlier in these pages we have referred to Karl Barth’s reference to sin as “the impossible possibility;” medieval writers spoke of it as the “mysterium iniquitatis.” All attempts to rationalize its mystery are inevitably dualistic denials of its moral freedom.
Origen’s recourse to the equation of justice with formal identity is at one with his failure to grasp the full meaning of headship. Specifically, by relying upon a Platonic “Form” to provide the moral freedom of the fall of the noes, he asks of Platonism what it can not provide, the free unity of the members of the Form, i.e., of the primordial or unfallen human community. This deficit is evident in Plato’s authoritarian construction of the ideal society in The Republic.[355] Origen’s failure to integrate the headship of Christ into his systematic theology and thus into his account of the fall of the noes is equivalently his failure to recognize that Jesus is the Lord, i.e., that he is the head of the Church comprising the noes and therefore is the sole source of the freedom of the ecclesial community in which he and they subsist and from they fell. Their fall is their turning away from him and from that free unity of which he is their source: i.e. from their primordial integrity. Origen failed to see that in fact no other free community than the One Flesh of the Bridegroom and the Bride is conceivable. The confusion of cosmological rationality with his fides quaerens intellectum consequent upon this mistake diverts his theology from its own free unity, its coherence, for that rests upon the apostolic affirmation that Jesus is the Lord, the only possible foundation of theology, and most certainly the foundation of his own “research theology.”
The postulate of a Platonic Form of humanity, upon which Origen relies to explain the justice of the material creation, is locked into an immanent cosmological necessity. Its unity, its ineffable synthesis of the one and the many, is not free. Thus immersed in its own immanence, the Form cannot explain the morality, the justice, of the primordial creation, for Platonism knows nothing of the prerequisite moral freedom of that justice, or of the free unity of the community of the noes. Platonism knows a fall, but knows it as a cosmic fatality, not as a free and consequently morally signed event. Granted that the Form may provide for the formal identity and the material distinction of the noes, to seek in it a basis for insight into their moral freedom and their fall is to ask more of Platonism than it has to offer.
The moral freedom of the fall of the noes presupposes their free community, whose only possible source is the One Flesh whose free unity has its sole source in the Bridegroom, the head of the Church, Jesus the Christ. The justice of creation which Origen wishes to substantiate, the justice which knows no subordination, no domination, the primordial free unity of the noes, has its source in the Creator precisely as the immanent head of the primordially free human substance. The Bridegroom, Jesus the Lord, is the source of that free unity, finally the unity of the Church, the New Creation, the New Covenant, the second Eve in One Flesh with her Lord, instituted by the One Sacrifice of Christ, her head.
Origen’s account of the fall of the noes fails to mention the source of what he knows to be objectively real, the moral freedom of their simultaneous and nearly universal fall, for he does not recognize that their worship of him who is the Bridegroom of the Church is the unique source of their free unity. Consequently, having ignored the source of their unity in Christ, he fails to see that their sin, which he recognizes to be their failure of worship, is identically a refusal of the gift of their free unity, and therefore a turning away from its source, their head This occurs despite his recognition that, with the fall, Jesus, his glory veiled, assumed the form of a slave, but retained his headship of the Church, of creation as such, and that, enfleshed, enslaved by the fear of death, he continues his obedience to his Mission to give the Holy Spirit, to restore the primordial free unity of the created universe, of making all things new through his offering of the One Sacrifice, thereby instituting the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the New Creation.[356]
Origen understands his hypothesis of the Formal identity of the noes in the Beginning to bar their sexual differentiation, which is perhaps inconsistent with the Plato’s hylemorphic dualism, for in The Republic he tends to the homogenization of the sexes. However, the human Jesus the Lord, the nous possessing the forma dei by reason of his Henōsis with the eternal Logos in the Beginning, is masculine, not only as the Bridegroom of the Church, but also as her head, as the source of her free unity and therefore that of the noes whom the broad; Church comprises. Jesus is therefore primordially distinct from them, as from his Bride, simply as her Bridegroom, a clearly masculine office. It is only well after writing the Peri Archon that Origen draw the inference of the fallen femininity of the other noes’ relative to their head’s primordial and perduring masculinity, a theme more fully developed in his Commentary on the Song of Songs. The impact of this feminization of Catholic spirituality is obviously negative; yet more so is its desacramentalization of that spirituality, for the immediacy of the nuptial union of the bridal soul with her Lord knows no mediation and, taken literally, permits none. However Origen did not go so far as to regard the bridal relation of the individual Christian to the Christ as a dissociation from the sacramental worship of the Church, as Crouzel has shown.[357]
Even so, ideas have consequences. The latent incongruity of the femininization of the soul of the worshipper became patent with the weakening of civil and ecclesial coherence in the aftermath of the Gregorian Reform and the Berengarian refusal of Eucharistic realism. The consequent decline of religious practice spawned a variety of antinomian aberrations, chief among them the rise of lay preaching. By the end of the twelfth century, St. Francis, a lay preacher, remained loyal to the faith and worship of the Church, but he had no misgiving over assuming a responsibility reserved by the Church to the ordained. This dissociation of the celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy from the preaching office is manifest in the devotio moderna of the later Middle Ages, when the Gospel had begun to be preached by the laity and by deacons such as Gerhard de Groot, a genius who sought no ordination to the priesthood, for preaching required only the diaconate. Even that had become rather de trop. Preaching had begun to displace the Mass, and with that the Church’s worship in truth ceased to be thought to need sustenance from the Eucharistic liturgy; academic learning would do as well if not better. Supported only by an increasingly humanistic learning, the Church’s doctrinal and moral tradition were opened to debate and controversy, and ecclesial unity gave way to impassioned disputation among the learned and the less than learned. Thereby the historical unity of the Church, her Eucharistic worship, became a matter of diminishing concern. Specifically, the nuptial symbolism of the Eucharistic institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant failed to inform the medieval theology, and the recognition of the sacramental significance of marriage precisely as covenantal, as engaging the equal and irreducibly distinct dignity and responsibility of the spouses, found little expression in dogmatic and moral theology. Thus increasingly remote from its liturgical foundation, morality ceased to engage covenantal fidelity and responsibility, and so became obediential, a flight from moral responsibility rather than its exercise.
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Other foundational elements of Origen’s doctrine, such as the unqualified goodness of the Creator and of creation itself; the concrete reality of the three hypostases of Father, Son and Spirit in the unity of God; the co-eternity of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; the unity of the human and the divine in Christ in his pre-existence, the historical economy of salvation, the Resurrection; and the unity of the Old Testament with the New, are truths he knew to be intrinsic to the rule of faith in Jesus the Lord, the only-begotten Son of the one God and thus intrinsic to the ordinary teaching of the apostolic and post-apostolic Church. Prime among the truths of the apostolic tradition is that Jesus Christ the Lord died for our sins. Origen explicitly affirms Jesus’ Personal death. That he died for our salvation is integral to the apostolic faith set out in Origen’s Preface to the Peri Archon.[358]
In all questions not settled within the rule of faith, Origen intended to present reasonable but tentative responses to those questions posed to the ecclesial tradition which he saw to be of particular moment; These included, replies to Gnostic and Monarchian assaults on that tradition which challenged its rationality. The foundational unity of his theological construct is to be found in the communication of idioms immediately implicit in the Church’s faith that Jesus Christ is Lord.[359] From this foundation, he explored the Revelation that is the Christ, Eucharistically immanent in the bridal Church who receives, celebrates and thereby mediates his Truth from which all else derives, as upon it all else depends. The rational, intelligible unity of the “connected body of doctrine” articulated in Origen’s theology is free, reliant not upon systematic necessities but on the faith of the apostolic Church that Jesus, the Son of Mary, is the Lord, the Son of the Father. From this faith he never departed, despite the cosmological confusion which troubled his theology.
Crouzel has pointed out that the post-Apostolic development of doctrinal clarity would wait upon the peace of the Church following upon the Edict of Milan, issued some dozen years prior to the Council of Nicaea. More specifically, it would wait upon rejection of the Arian heresy by the Council of Nicaea. The Conciliar rejection of that submission of the Catholic faith to the canons of cosmological rationalism had freed theologians from its determinist diktat, enabling them henceforth to explore the free truth of the Mysterium fidei and so to find their a priori in the historical reality of Jesus is the Lord―which is to say, in the communication of human and divine idioms in the Person of the Christ.
The post-Nicene exercise of that theological freedom was almost immediately challenged, ab intra as well as ab extra, as a threat to the unity of the Empire. The challenge finally failed in 381 at the First Council of Constantinople, but the mentality underlying it, the conventional cosmological wisdom of the pagan world, confused the West as well as the East before and after Nicaea, and continue to do so.
This conventional wisdom, the Middle Platonic mix of Stoicism and Platonism, is no more than a spontaneous expression of the fallen loss of the free unity of thought, and a consequent recourse to the fictive necessities of autonomous reason. Fallen rationality supposes the unity of truth and reality to be thus locked within logical necessity as to bar the free historicity of reality and truth as irrational in such wise that the fallen quest for wisdom finds surcease only in a flight from the universal irrationality of historical existence. The pagan wisdom and its neo-pagan secularist surrogate is always an historical pessimism, and a consequent condemnation of any exercise of free personal responsibility. Such freed exercise of responsibility was always an introduction of novelty: this, whether in religion or in law, was regarded by Plato as criminal hubris, meriting death.[360]. The Church’s assertion of Jesus’ Lordship of history was precisely such a revolutionary novelty; it threatened the unity of the cosmologically ordered culture, and required a cosmologically inconceivable subordination of the Roman empire to the moral authority of the Church. Athanasius was the first bishop clearly to perceive this necessity, and to refuse the attempted exercise of imperial authority over the Church, although the path to that refusal had been blazed by martyrs since the first century.
The faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord is a radical historical optimism, for it asserts that God is present in history, in fact that Jesus Christ is thus the Lord of history as to be at once its Alpha and its Omega, its Beginning and its End. The sophisticates of the pagan world rejected this optimism out of hand. Its explicit assertion of the Resurrection, as by Paul in the Areopagus, found no more hearing than the condemned Christ had received from Pilate. Consequently the preaching of the Church by the Apostles was received most eagerly by those most remote from the pagan sophistication, such as the peasants in Bithynia whom the younger Pliny found singing hymns to “Chrestos" as though to God.
While Origen could not but be affected by the pre-Nicene theological confusion, its influence is felt rather in his exegesis and his spirituality than in his theology, although it appears there also as has been seen. Insofar as theology is concerned, like the other pre-Nicene theologians loyal to the rule of faith, he affirmed from the outset the communication of idioms in Jesus that is implicit in and inseparable from the Church’s faith that he is Christ the Lord. As with the Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, the focus of Origen’s theology is upon the historical object of the historical faith of the historical Church, Jesus the Lord, the Christ, the God-man. The historical foundation of his theology is akin also to Irenaeus’ focus upon the second Adam, and to Tertullian’s foundational affirmation in the Apologeticus of the two substances, the divine and the human, in the one Person of Jesus the Lord. This faith-conviction, whose theological expression is the Henōsis, stands athwart any abstract, cosmologizing and therefore dehistoricizing interpretation of his hypothesis of the primordial pre-existence of the created and corporeal Intelligences, the noes who, as fallen, are the fallen human inhabitants of the fallen universe, the creation which is good by the historical immanence within it and throughout it of Jesus Christ the Lord, its Head, the Alpha and the Omega. In Origen’s hands, this stress upon the radically free historicity of scriptural exegesis underwent significant development, as Henri Crouzel has observed:
In Exégèse Médiévale56 H. de Lubac points to Origen as the author of another classification, one which corresponds more closely to his practice but which he never expressed as a theory, the doctrine of the quadruple meaning. Formulated for the first time by Cassian, expressed in the famous distich of the Dominican Augustine of Dacia, it was to be current throughout the Middle Ages. After the literal meaning rhe allegorical meaning is the affirmation of Christ as the key to the Old Testament and the centre of history. Then come two corollaries, the moral or tropological meaning which governs the moral life of the Christian in the interval between the two advents of Christ, and the anagogical meaning which gives a foretaste of the eschatological realities. The allegorical meaning brings us from the Old Testament to the New, it corresponds to the spiritual exegesis of the old Scriptures. The tropological meaning concerns the temporal Gospel: it applies to the Christian what is said of Christ and that is an important aspect of the spiritual exegesis of the New Testament. The other aspect of this same exegesis, the prophetic role which the new Scriptures possess in relation to the eschatological good, by a prophecy that makes already present what is prophesied, is the anagogic meaning, placed at the meeting point of the temporal Gospel with the eternal Gospel. But these last two meanings can also be found in the Old Testament, after the allegorical meaning has transformed it into a New Testament.
56 I/I Paris, 1959, pp. 198-219.
H. Crouzel, Origen, 80.
Origen’s fourfold historical exegesis, his doctrine of the four senses of Scripture, received its methodological expression in the medieval paradigm of sacramental efficacy developed by Anselm of Laon in the first decade of the twelfth century: sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum. Its rationalization, i.e., its reduction to intrinsically necessary causes, collapses it into the “two-stage” Christology which dehistoricizes Jesus the Christ, reducing the history-constituting Event of his Incarnation-kenōsis, into the “becoming human” of a nonhistorical Verbum who, as absolute, cannot be the subject of a mission by the Father, cannot “become flesh,” cannot divest himself of his divine dignity, can neither be conceived by Mary nor born of her, cannot be the one and the same Son of the Father and of the Theotokos, cannot redeem the world by his Offering of the One Sacrifice as the high priest, the head of the Church. In sum, the absolute Verbum, whom this rationalization of the tradition would make the subject of the Incarnation, cannot redeem the fallen world, and cannot be the object of the Church’s worship. With this finally Monarchian denial of the Trinity and therefore of Jesus the Lord, of the Logos sarx egeneto, the Church’s worship is dehistoricized, ceases to be sacramental: it has lost all significance. The Church ceases to be the bride of Christ, the historically immanent mediator between fallen humanity and the Kingdom of God. We are left in our sins. But Origen’s deployment of the four senses is firmly rooted in his quaerens intellectum whose object is the Mysterium fidei, the historical Jesus the Christ, fully human and fully divine.
®2Crouzel’s criticism of the Henōsis as latently diophysite
By way of a preliminary reply to the indictment, perennially renewed, of Origen’s Christology as adoptionist, it should be recalled that on at least two occasions Origen was asked to assist in persuading an adoptionist bishop to return to the Catholic faith, and that in each case he succeeded in doing so. A more unlikely adoptionist would be difficult to find. It is also flatly impossible to associate him with the alternative to adoptionism, i.e., monophysism, for he most certainly holds that Jesus possesses a human soul. Nonetheless, Henri Crouzel himself considers Origen’s theological hypothesis of a Henōsis in Christ whereby he subsists at once in humanity and in divinity, to possess a Nestorian implication. He considers it fortunate that Origen did not use prosōpon (i.e., equivalently Tertullian’s “persona”) rather than hypostasis to designate the members of the Trinity, reasoning that inasmuch as “prosōpon” implies a subjectivity and consequently subsistence in an intellectual substance in the sense of a self-aware self, which in Origen’s time was not explicitly conveyed by “hypostasis,” Origen narrowly escaped a proto-Nestorianism. Crouzel concludes that:
If he had had a precise concept of the person, his doctrine of the pre-existent soul of Christ would scarcely have avoided Nestorianism, for he then would have seemed to give to the Word became flesh a double personality, that of the Word and that of the soul. So it is the progress of theology that made Origen seem a heretic.
Crouzel, Origen, 194.
With all due respect to a great scholar, whose learning on all matters concerning Origen is unparalleled and upon which this study of Origen’s theology has relied throughout, it cannot be admitted that “the progress of theology made Origen seem a heretic.” “Seem a heretic” is ambiguous, but minimally it supposes that the subsequent “progress of theology” has put Origen’s orthodoxy in issue. In the first place, theology as Catholic puts no one’s orthodoxy in issue, for it does not possess dogmatic standing. Secondly, Origen’s theology is not only an anticipation of the doctrine taught by the Council of Nicaea; it also is vindicated by the Spirit Christology taught by the Symbol of Chalcedon, which defines Jesus’ subsistence in humanity and divinity, one and the same Son of the Father and of the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos.
The “progress of theology” in the Logos-sarx direction indicated by Crouzel ceased with Council of Chalcedon, whose Symbol precisely annuls that “progress” by teaching, as Origen taught, that Jesus subsists in the Trinitarian substance, consubstantial with the Father, the immanent Head of the Trinity, and by teaching that “the one and the same Son, Jesus, subsists in the human substance and so is consubstantial with us. Jesus could not be thus consubstantial with us were he not the immanent Head of the human substance, whose members are consubstantial with their head “as the one and the same Son” is consubstantial, homoousios, with his Head, the Father. Quite as apart from the Father’s eternal headship of the Trinity, its free substantial unity could not exist, so likewise, apart from Jesus’ created headship of humanity, its free substantial unity could not exist for, as sent by the Father, Jesus the Lord is the unique source of that free unity. It is thus that in him we are created, for the free unity of a created substance cannot be distinguished from the substance itself. When the headship of the divine substance is ignored, as by all cosmologies, it loses its free Trinitarian unity to become a Monad; when the head of the human substance is ignored, as by all cosmologies, humanity has no unity and disintegrates without limit.
The Logos-sarx Christological analysis underlying Crouzel’s criticism rests upon the supposition that the Incarnation is the event in which the eternal Logos becomes human, whereas the Chalcedonian Symbol, whose doctrine Origen anticipates, explicitly teaches that Jesus is the subject of the Incarnation, much to the confusion of the long since classic Thomist Christology, which cannot accommodate the fact that Jesus is the “one and the same Son” and in consequence knows nothing of his primordial pre-existence, nothing of the free unity and intelligibility of the creation that is in him. Consequently the Thomist Christology dehistoricizes the fullness of Jesus’ humanity into “human nature,” the fullness of his divinity into “divine nature,” thus denying what Chalcedon has definitively affirmed eight times, that Jesus Christ is the “one and the same Son.”
The Logos-sarx Christology developed its full expression in its monophysite systematization by Apollinarius, whom I Constantinople condemned by name. Taken up Cyril of Alexandria in the next century, the a priori disjunction by the “Logos-sarx” analysis of the divinity and humanity that are at one in the Name of Jesus the Lord, imposed upon Cyril the same false task that had baffled Tertullian in his debate with Praxeas, that of providing for the antecedent possibility of Incarnating the eternal Logos. Cyril chose the option which Tertullian had rejected as impossible, which I Constantinople had rejected as heretical, viz., the incongruous “notional” (i.e., abstract) humanizing of the eternal Word. There can be no question that Cyril, in condemning Nestorius’ radical diophysism, recognized and affirmed the full Personal humanity of Jesus the Lord as dogmatically indispensable. Therefore the condemnation of Apollinarianism does not touch Cyril, who abandoned his theology in his condemnation of Nestorius’ denial of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord and its corollary, his denial of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
It clearly follows that Cyril’s celebration, in Laetentur caeli, of the title given our Lady at Ephesus, Theotokos, cannot be reconciled with his early theological insistence that the agent of our redemption is the eternal Son, sensu negante. Cyril’s Logos-sarx Christology, like that of St. Thomas eight centuries later, cannot admit that Jesus, the agent of our salvation, is a human Person; it follows that Mary’s Son cannot be divine, nor can Mary be as Cyril rejoiced in naming her, the Theootokos. Cyril’s greatness was his refusal of “the progress of theology.”
When Cyril died in 444, a dozen years after subscribing to the Formula of Union, Dioscorus succeeded him as the bishop of Alexandria. Dioscorus had long opposed Cyril’s agreement with the Antiochene insistence upon the full humanity of Jesus, and refused to accept the Formula of Union’s definition of the Personal humanity of Jesus. Once in office, fully committed to the Logos-sarx Christology, he took for granted its postulate that a non-human Logos is the sole agent of our redemption, and affirmed its corollary as summarized by Eutyches’ substitution of a dehistoricized, impersonal, and consequently abstract human “physis” or “natura” for Jesus’ human “hypostasis,” his human subsistence, his human “prosōpon.” In sum, Dioscorus denied what the Alexandrine tradition had since Origen affirmed, the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord. Thereby the agent of our redemption once again became, as with Apollinarius, neither human nor divine, the abstract, non-historical and non-human“ Son” or “Word.”
It is not possible to associate “progress in theology” with the dehistoricization of Jesus the Lord that is the immediate implication of the commonplace denial that he is a human Person. Theology is always a quest for a more adequate understanding of Jesus, a yet further entry into the free truth of an inexhaustible Mystery which we shall not comprehend here or hereafter, but whose Truth we must affirm if we are to have a basis for a fides quaerens intellectum which must be free and historical if it is to bear upon the free historicity of its object, Jesus the Lord. Theological quaerens intellectum can be free on no other basis, and on no other basis can it “progress.” It was clear to Origen in his youth that cosmological wisdom could not address the Truth incarnate in the Christ, for that Mysterium is impervious to the fatalities, the immanent necessities, of cosmological rationality. Theology, to be Christian, must begin with the Beginning who, for Paul and for John, and for Origen, is Jesus the Lord.
The Beginning is the object of theology of the Peri Archon, whose Trinitarian doctrine is the reflex of its Christology. Origen’s quaerens intellectum, like Tertullian’s, is Christological from the outset; neither could start with the Trinity, a mystery of which both recognized that we know nothing apart from its Revelation, who is Jesus the Lord. The result is that Origen’s hypothesis of a free Henōsis of the fullness of humanity and divinity of Christ is equivalently the hypothetical affirmation of the primordial Event of the Father’s Mission of the Son, Jesus the Lord the Revelation. This Event Paul has named the Beginning, which he identifies with Jesus the Lord in Col. 1:18.. As Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine is the reflex of his theological focus upon the historical Jesus the Christ, the second Persona of the Trinity, so Origen’s Trinitarian theology is the reflex of his historical Christology, in which the hypotheses of the Henōsis is presented as the primordially free event which is the prius, the condition of possibility―emphatically not the cause―of the Incarnation, the ensarkosis recited in Jn. 1:14 and its equivalent, the kenōsis recited in Phil. 2:5-11. As the transcendent free Event of the primordial union of the eternal Logos with the human Person who in that union is Jesus the Lord, the Henōsis cannot but identify with the Mission of the one and the same Son, Jesus the Christ.[361]
For Origen, the eternal Logos subsists primordially, i.e., from the Beginning, in Personal Henōsis with the human hypostasis who, in that Henōsis, is Jesus the Lord; quite as Jesus the Lord, in that Henōsis is the Logos, the Word. Here, as had Irenaeus thirty years earlier, Origen anticipates the Symbol of Chalcedon: Jesus the Christ is Personally identical with the Logos and thereby is as Irenaeus named him, “one and the same Son.” As Irenaeus was the first to affirm this truth, so Origen was the first to develop its implication, the full communication of Names, of hypostases, of subsistences, in the Person, the single subsistent Henōsis, the hypostasis who is Jesus the Lord, the head of the Church, the head of the physical universe that is created in him. All criticism of this theology of the Beginning rests upon the unreflective postulate that the Beginning cannot be the Beginning: it must have a cause, which assumption is a denial, however naïve, of the faith of the Church.
This dehistoricizing of the Incarnation in conformity to the demands of cosmological rationalization was initiated innocently enough in the latter half of the second century by the Greek Apologists, whose naïve identification of the Logos of Middle Platonism with the Logos of Jn. 1:14 was so much in conformity with the cultural sophistication of the time that it could hardly have avoided a broad influence. A few decades later, their cosmologization of the Logos was rejected by Tertullian who, in Apologeticus 21, grounded his Trinitarian doctrine in the historical Jesus the Christ. Tertullian’s Christology is equally historical; he speaks always of the Christ as foretold by Jewish prophecy, never of a disembodied Son; it is Jesus who is begotten of the Father, who has a mother. The dehistoricization of Jesus the Christ appears to have begun some fifty-five years later, at the second Council of Antioch (268), fourteen years after the death of Origen, when the learned Antiochene priest, Malchion, prosecuted Paul of Samosata’s unitarianism as adoptionism. [362]
However it may have developed, the Logos-sarx dehistoricization of the subject of the Johannine logos sarx egeneto introduced the permanent cosmological dilemma, first encountered by Tertullian, of accounting for the humanity of Jesus, of justifying a choice between the mutually exclusive and equally impossible alternatives of monophysism and diophysism. The reign of this cosmological confusion was summarily ended by the affirmation at Chalcedon of Jesus’ single subsistence at once in the Trinity and in the substantial humanity created in its Image.[363] This Conciliar identification of Jesus as the subject of the Incarnation recited in Jn. 1:14 rejected out of hand the subordinationist confusion of Arius and his affines. The stark dogmatic affirmation at once of Jesus’ subsistence in the substantial unity of the Triune God, and in the substantial unity of our analogously poly-personal humanity, thus consubstantial with the Father and “with us,” deprived cosmological Christology of a place to stand.
Contemporary Catholic theologians, still persuaded that the Thomist version of the Logos-sarx analysis is immune to criticism, cannot accept the Symbol of Chalcedon as it is: foundational for all Christological development, for all progress in theology. Any Christological format which ignores or rejects that foundation ceases thereby to be Catholic; speculation thus misled is not a fides quaerens intellectum, but a cosmological expression of dissent. As John Paul II famously observed, dissent is only dissent; it has no Catholic theological interest. Nonetheless, theologians whether Latin or Greek alike under the influence of St. Thomas have ignored the Symbol’s assertion of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord since the Council of Florence failed to resolve the Ottoman threat to Constantinople in the first half of the fifteenth century The Symbol of Chalcedon teaches neither a “double personality” in Christ, nor the “mixtio” or “krasis” imputed to the Christologies of Tertullian and Gregory of Nazianzen.[364]. Rather, the Symbol affirmed what Origen had taught, that Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Son, the Logos, is a single subsistence, fully divine and fully human, whose human and divine Names, Jesus and Lord, affirm his Personal unity. Chalcedon taught what Origen had taught as to the hypostatic consubstantiality of the Son with the Father; it taught, again as Origen had taught, that Jesus subsists in the divine substance, eternally begotten by the Father. It taught what is implicit in Origen’s attribution of headship to Jesus the Lord, that Jesus is consubstantial with those of whom he is the head, not least with the Theotokos.
Thus the Symbol taught that Jesus (identified eight times as “the one and the same Son,” not the ‘Trinity-immanent Logos’) subsists in the Trinity and thereby is consubstantial with the Father. It taught that he subsists in the human substance and thereby is consubstantial with us. The Symbol affirmed explicitly of Jesus, “unum eundemque,” that he subsists in each substance, viz., in the Trinity whose substantial unity was defined at Nicaea, and in humanity, whose substantial unity is taught by Paul’s assertion of his headship of all men. As the Father is the head of the Trinity in which he subsists, so Jesus is the head of the human substance in which he subsists. Thus his Name, his Person, his subsistence, is single, that of Jesus the Lord, the Christ, the “one and the same Son” of the Father and of Mary.
Once again, the Symbol displays no more interest than had Origen in explaining the prior possibility of the Personal unity of Personal humanity and Personal divinity in Jesus the Lord. Its assertion is liturgical, therefore doctrinal. Pace the historikers, the Nicene Creed, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Formula of Union and the Symbol of Chalcedon are not speculative theological propositions, but Conciliar affirmations of the Church’s faith: they do not wait upon “reception.” Consequently their summation in the Symbol of Chalcedon is conclusive. It affirms and confirms the faith of the Church in the communication of divine and human Names – “idioms”—in Jesus the Lord, which Origen had affirmed from the outset as the foundation of his Christology. The Names are Personal; they are not ‘natures.”
Origen, after Justin, Irenaeus and Tertullian, but independent of them, saw this unity of the irreducibly distinct Personal Names in Jesus to be the necessary implication of the free assertion of the faith that Jesus is the Lord, for in no other way can Jesus be the fully human and fully divine Son of Mary, as the apostolic tradition affirms him to be. Origen is not mistaken in positing in the Henōsis the primordial hypostatic union of the Eternal Word and his primordially Personal corporeal and human nous. No union of the eternal Logos with “humanity,” or “human nature” or any other impersonally understood and therefore abstract surrogate for his Personal humanity can consist with the Personal fullness of humanity which Jesus possesses solely by his subsistence in the one human substance of which Origen affirms him to be the head, and which proceeds from him as created in him.
Because the nous, the pre-existent Jesus who, in Henōsis with the Logos, subsists in humanity as its head and source, his humanity must be concrete and, as concrete, can only be Personal. Any consideration of Jesus’ humanity that would avoid his Personal humanity deals only with abstractions, not with the historical Name, Jesus the Lord, the Son of the Father and of Mary, and not with the faith of the Church.
When the communication of idioms, viz., the unity of the Personal fullness of humanity and the Personal fullness of divinity in the one and the same Son, is denied, theology does not “progress.” Rather, it stops, locked into timeless abstractions, immobilized by its own refusal of the historicity of the Logos, the Subject and thus the Event of the Incarnation of the primordial Jesus the Lord, and the single object, Mysterium fidei, of the fides quaerens intellectum, in Origen’s time and in our own.
In these still prevailing circumstances, in which theologians of the first rank are unwilling or unable to accept the doctrine of Chalcedon, it is not possible to speak of “the progress of theology.” Theology has been immobilized for fifteen centuries by the inability of its professed practitioners to “receive” the Symbol of Chalcedon. Even the “reception” of the Nicene Creed is on hold, pending a clearer determination of the meaning of “homoousios” than the Nicene Creed is thought to have provided. It is the tragedy of Catholic theology that, a millennium and a half after its definition at Chalcedon, “theology” still does not accept the Personal consubstantiality of Jesus the Lord, defined at Nicaea and re-affirmed at I Constantinople, at Ephesus and at Chalcedon, although the scriptural record and the liturgical-doctrinal tradition could not be more clear.
In the end, the crippling irrelevancy of these cosmological concerns must give way to the insistent doctrinal themes of the first four Councils, culminating in the Chalcedonian Symbol, viz., that Jesus is “one and the same Son” in his humanity and in his divinity. His human Sonship and his divine Sonship are at one in his Person, the Son of the Father and the Son of Mary, one and the same Son. In short, he is Jesus Christ the Lord, the same yesterday, today, and forever.
We have seen Origen affirm without reservation the headship of Jesus the Christ over all creation; see endnote 605 supra. This headship is economic, historical, and universal, simply unqualified. It is radically by his headship of the Church, of the Good Creation, achieved in the Eucharistic offering of his One Sacrifice. that he transcends history as Eucharistically immanent in it, as its Lord, its beginning and its end. As its head, as the source of its free unity, the universe is created in him and by him is redeemed. When death, the last enemy, is destroyed, Jesus will submit his headship to the Father, his Head, the source of the Trinity and thereby of the final unity of the Kingdom of God (I Cor. 15-20-25).
This clarity of insight into the historicity of Jesus’ headship is compromised by Origen’s doctrine of the epinoiai of the Logos.
Crouzel has insisted upon the central role of the “epinoiai” (ἐπἱνοιαι) in Origen’s Christology.[365] The most significant of the epinoiai refer to the Son in the eternal context of the Father’s “first production” or “first creation,” which is to say, they refer to the Son’s begetting. These primary epinoiai of the eternal Son, “Wisdom” and “Logos,” designate the Son sensu negante, simply as the “Only Begotten.” They affirm his consubstantial divinity, as the Son, while elaborating upon its significance. The Son as Wisdom is the full, the complete utterance of the Father’s truth. That utterance in the Son, in a manner rather obscure, is multiple:
Thus the subordination of the Son and the Spirit is closely linked to their divine missions. The mediating role of the Son in his divinity even rebounds in some measure onto his inner being, for if the Father is Absolutely One, the Son, One in his hypostasis, is multiple in his titles, his epinoiai. This is the third reason for ‘subordinationism’ and if on this account the relation of Origen with Plotinus, probably through their common master, Ammonius Saccas, is clear, it must not be forgotten that Origen’s equivalences are based on the unity of their nature. When one speaks of Origen’s subordinationism, it is easy to forget that it is a quite equivocal notion, as Marcus’ book has shown.42 It is wrong to confuse the subordinationism of Origen with that of the Arians.
42. W. Marcus, Der Subordinationismus als historisches Phänomenon, Munich, 1963.
Crouzel, Origen, at 188; emphasis added.
It is clear that Origen does not understand the Father to be absolute in the strict sense of an unrelated Monas, a simply immanent Self. This cosmological notion of God as monadic forbids his eternal begetting of the Son, forbids his sending of the Son and production of the Holy Spirit, ut ita porro. Justin was the first to deal with this problem; his solution, in sum, was to ignore it. His Christology is historical from the outset. The Father’s “Naming” of the Son is a relation to the Son; for Justin, it is equivalently Jesus Mission from the Father. Tertullian toys with this cosmological notion of God, but, following Justin, also dismisses it. His dismissal of cosmological theology goes well beyond Justin, for he makes the Father to be a member of the Trinity, whereby he is no longer the divine Substance, the Monas implicit in Justin’s theology but whose implications Justin ignored.
Origen of course also understands the Father to be a member of the Trinity and, like Tertullian, he identifies the divine substance with the Trinity. However, when dealing with the epinoiai, he ignores what that notion of the substantial Trinity requires, viz., the consubstantiality of its members. Crouzel’s observations here are not in issue, for they do no more than affirm Origen’s personal orthodoxy and the explicitly orthodox thrust of his “research theology.” At the same time, Crouzel recognizes in the epinoiai the dualist Platonic heritage whose full expression is the Plotinian Neoplatonism set out in Porphyry’s Enneads, in which the absolutely Monadic divinity, the One, requires mediation in order to be known―by a mediator who, by definition, must be subordinate to the One, and consequently less than absolute.[366]. The mediation cannot but be pantheistic, therefore irrelevant to the Catholic tradition.
It is in this pantheistic context that Plotinus provides the emanation of the Logos from the One and, through the Logos, the emanation of the World-Soul, which Crouzel looks upon as corresponding to the Incarnation. In fact, the multiplicity of the epinoiai which Origen ascribes to the “substantial production,” the eternal generation of the eternal Son, even as concentrated in him as Wisdom and Logos, are in tension with the Son’s homoousion, the utterly simple Personal unity, the fullness of divinity, that is his Personal consubstantiality with the Father. The Son’s eternal Personal unity is identically his Personal divinity, which as Personal must equally be unqualified.
Origen has repeatedly affirmed the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ as our single access to the Father and in doing so makes his doctrine of the Trinity to be the reflex of his doctrine of the Christ. Attention has been drawn to with Tertullian’s Christology in the Apologeticus, which is very clearly the corollary of Trinitarian doctrine taught in that document, therefore entirely dependent upon the Revelation of the Trinity who is Jesus the Lord, thus upon the free historicity of the apostolic tradition. Tertullian is never concerned with the insoluble problem of a non-historical Son who cannot be the subject of the historical Incarnation. The argument in the famous passage in the Adversus Praxean 27 concludes:
Thus also the apostle teaches of both his substances: who was made, he says, of the seed of David―here he will be man, and the Son of Man: who was defined as Son of God according to the Spirit2―here he will be God, and the Word, the Son of God: we observe a double quality, not confused but combined, Jesus in one Person God and Man. I postpone <the consideration> of “Christ.”
2 Rom. 1. 3, 4.
Ernest Evans, Against Praxeas, 274
The same reasoning applies to the historical Son. The Personal unity of Jesus Christ the Lord transcends all multiplicity, for only thus is he at once Jesus and the Lord, as Origen, alone among the Fathers apart from Irenaeus and Tertullian, not only well understands, but which he makes to be the foundational postulate of theology as such. The Personal unity of Jesus the Lord is the communication in him of divine and human of idioms, i.e., of the historical Names, Jesus and Lord. His Personal unity is concrete, historical, and cannot be designated by abstract terms: this is fundamental. Persons cannot be categorized, for their head is Personally consubstantial with them. Origen knew the Father to be the head of Jesus the Lord, and Jesus the Lord to be the head of his creation, although the full implication of Jesus’ historical headship is incompatible with his quest for a nonhistorical basis for creation in the epinoia.
This consideration introduces the remedy for this incongruity. In fact, Jesus Christ is the head, the source, of all men, of the Church, of the Good Creation. He is the source, as her head, of that full outpouring of the Spiritus Creator upon the Church, the second Eve, and through her, upon the world, by which the Good Creation is restored to its primordial free unity, the One Flesh of the bridal Church with her Head, the Christ who is consubstantial with all those who are created in him.
By this Gift of the Spirit that he was sent to give, Jesus the Lord has made all things new, never to be undone. In sum, the Mysterium that is Christ, the Head, sent by Father to give the Spirit, entails all that Origen intended by the multiplicity of epinoiai in the Christ, and does so within and reliant upon the Personal unity of the one and the same Son, the Word incarnate, the Beginning and the End, in whom all things are made, and by whose exercise of headship over them they are redeemed. He is the Wisdom who will judge the living and the dead, the Truth who cannot deny himself. His mystery, his Henōsis, cannot be parceled out in epinoiai; it is single with the unqualified unity of his Person. He possess the absolute simplicity which can only be Named. .
Origen is familiar with the Father’s headship of the Son, and the Son’s headship of the noes whose unity is that of his bridal Church. With the fall of the noes from their primordial integrity, from their primordial community, their adoration of the Logos, which achieved and sustained their free unity, there followed their loss of that free unity, and its inexorable consequence, the dynamic fragmentation unto death that is the single alternative to the free nuptial unity of the bridal Church, the Good Creation. The primordial Jesus, as its head, is immanent in the One Flesh, the Good creation. With its fall, he is himself fallen from his primordial dignity, in order that, still their head, he may restore what the Good Creation, the Church comprising the Noes, has lost, her free unity, her free truth, her beauty, of which as head he is the unique source, as Augustine was perhaps the first to grasp, seeing in his Lord the “ancient beauty that is forever new.”
In short, the epinoiai are not merely dispensable to the integrity of Origen’s theological vision. They also embarrass it by their re-insertion of the cosmological “problem of the one and the many” into a theological reflection founded upon Origen’s a priori refusal of that false problem. Origen’s foundational theological reliance upon the communication of idioms in Christ, in the Henōsis, dismissed it out of hand, for that free truth, that Mysterium fidei, knows no cosmological quandaries. The transcendence of the Christ over the whole of creation, the whole of history, is his free gift of the Spiritus Creator, given us in our creation, enabling all of us to seek it, to be drawn to it, simply because of its beauty. This is the Augustinian trahi a Deo, the direct intellectual and existential intuition, spontaneous and unreflective, integral with our creation, the immediate appropriation of the free truth of the good creation as beauty that is a permanent element of human consciousness. Thus freely drawn to it, we are also freed by that Gift of the Spirit afforded us by Jesus’ One Sacrifice, to make it our own, to utter it in the multitudinous ways which form a culture, a free society whose bond is its fidelity to the “ancient beauty, forever new,” Christ the Lord.
The trahi a Deo is not an imposition, for freedom cannot be imposed; we can refuse to be free. Our fallen solidarity with the fallen first Adam is a standing temptation to do so, countered always by our solidarity with the second Adam, by whose triumph over the last enemy through his One Sacrifice, he has restored to us the freedom to be free. In our fallen world, in our fallen minds, our critical reason is left to, even locked into, its fallen necessities, which can only fragment. But we are not left to ourselves. The supposition that we are left alone is the radical error of the Reform, the refusal to recognize the historical immanence and historical efficacy of the grace of Christ, with the result that we are indeed left alone: God is in heaven, not here with us in a meaningless world.
Created in Christ, we are radically dependent upon him. Even as fallen, each of us is drawn to him, by the trahi a Deo, the beauty of the Good Creation whose reality is the freedom of truth, the beautiful which, as von Balthasar has insisted, needs no apologia, no demonstration. We cannot but immediately recognize the beautiful as such, by the intellectual intuition that is our direct consciousness, antecedent to all reflection. It cannot be annulled by whatever reflective ‘sarkic’ rationale, but our intuition of it is veiled, seen “ as through a glass, darkly,” for in the fallen world beauty is always veiled, crucified.
Sustained by the worship of the Church in this struggle to recognize in beauty the freedom of truth, nourished by the bread of life and the cup of everlasting salvation, our fragile freedom to be free is continually restored, our vision clarified, and our hope renewed. We could not intuit the beautiful were we not free to do so by that most fundamental grace, our creation in Christ, for the beautiful is the splendor of truth, its freedom, and only as freed to affirm it are we capable of recognizing it. Its intuition is then graced by what must be the universal distribution of our trahi a Deo, a universality that cannot be other than our creation in Jesus Christ the Lord, our consubstantiality with him as with our head, the source of our free unity. To this there is no alternative, save the despair of the “father of lies and his disciples described in Jn. 8:44. who hate the free truth that is Christ, the ancient beauty who is forever new, a despair which, as our Lord has said, “cannot bear to hear my word.”
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In sum, all that quasi-conceptual multiplicity which, under Platonic influence, Origen ascribed to the eternal Wisdom, to the eternal Logos, has no historical unity, whether in Platonism nor in any other cosmology. Neither does Origen provide it with one, for the historically graced free unity of our minds is a mystery incapable of adequate articulation: We seek the truth in its free unity, which is to say, at a level transcending all articulation: the level of the Gift of beauty, whose source is the mystery of Jesus the Lord, the “ancient Beauty who is forever new,” the head in whom we are crated and with whom, by our creation in him, we are consubstantial, attuned to his glory, however veiled.
Origen’s Eucharistic doctrine has been the subject of a considerable discussion. Much of it is reminiscent of that to which Augustine’s has been subjected, as by Johannes Betz, who has found in it the same failure of realism which he has attributed to that of Augustine. [367]
Origen’s Eucharistic doctrine offers a final witness to his reliance upon the communication of idioms as criteriological for his faith and for his theology and, not incidentally, presents a final vindication of his orthodoxy. Stress has earlier been laid upon the coincidence, given doctrinal recognition at Ephesus, of Christological and Eucharistic orthodoxy. As the communication of idioms is at one with the Church’s faith that “Jesus Christ is Lord,” so it underlies the Eucharistic celebration of his One Sacrifice. It is Jesus the High priest who offers the One Sacrifice through his priests, as it is Jesus whom he, the High Priest offers, as the Personal Victim of his own One Sacrifice. Origen is a witness to this Eucharistic orthodoxy: we cite here Eucharistic passages from his works as translated by Msgr. Jurgens:
I wish to admonish you with examples from your religion. You are accustomed to take part in the divine mysteries, so you know how, when you have received the Body of the Lord, you reverently exercise every care lest a particle of it fall, and lest anything of the consecrated gift perish. You account yourselves guilty, and rightly do you so believe, if any of it be lost through negligence. But if you observe such caution in keeping His Body, and properly so, how is it you think neglecting the Word of God a lesser crime than neglecting his Body?
Jurgens, Early Fathers, §490, 205-06.
Formerly in an obscure way, there was manna for food; now, however, in full view, there is the true food, the Flesh of the Word of God, as He Himself says: “My Flesh is truly food, and my blood is truly drink.”(1)
1. Jn. 6:56
Jurgens, Early Fathers I, §491, 206
For the feast of the Passover a lamb was designated for the sacrifice by which the people should be purified. For other feasts sacrifice was made of a male calf; and for still others, of a goat or a ram, or a female goat or a female calf. But these things, about the beasts mentioned, you well know. Of these animals, however, which served for the purification of the people, there is one which is said to be our Lord and Savior. John was greater than all the prophets (2), and he so understood it, when he indicated this of Him by saying: “Behold the Lamb of God! Behold Him who takes away the sins of the world (3)!” … So long as there are sins, it is necessarily required that there be also sacrificial victims for sins. But suppose, for example, that there had been no sin. If there had been no sin, there would have been no necessity for the Son of God to become a lamb; nor would it have been necessary for Him to take flesh and to be slain. He would have remained that which He was from the beginning, the Word and God. . . . In all these sacrificial victims there was one lamb who was able to take away sin from the whole world. Therefore have other victims ceased to be, because this victim was such that, although one alone, He sufficed for the salvation of the whole world. Others remitted sins by their prayers; but He by His power.
2. I.e., John the Baptist. See Luke 7:26-28.
3. Jn. 1:19
Jurgens, Early Fathers I, §492, 206.
There follows at 210, a fragment from the Commentaries on Matthew preserved in Eusebius’ History of the Church. In this long passage the double causality of the Eucharistic sign is recognized and puzzled over: viz., the sinner is not sanctified by his unworthy reception: Origen has in view Paul’s admonition in I Cor. 11:27-30:
[11, 14] That which is sanctified through the word of God and prayer (1) does not of its very nature sanctify him who avails himself of it. If this were the case, it would sanctify even him that eats unworthily of the bread of the Lord, and no one would become infirm or weak on account of this food, nor would they fall asleep. Paul indicated something of this kind in the saying, “this is why many among you are infirm and weak, and why many sleep (2).” In regard to this Bread of the Lord, there fore, there is advantage to him who avails himself of it, when, with undefiled mind and pure conscience, he partakes of the Bread. Therefore, neither by not eating, that is by not eating of the Bread which has been sanctified by the word of God and prayer, do we suffer the loss of any good thing; nor by eating do we gain the advantage of any good thing. The cause for our suffering a loss is wickedness and sin; and the cause of our gaining advantage is righteousness and right actions. Such, then, is the meaning of that which is said by Paul, “Neither shall we suffer any loss if we do not eat, nor if we do eat shall we gain any advantage (3).” And indeed, if everything that enters into the mouth goes into the stomach and is cast out into the privy (4) even the food which has been sanctified through the word of God and prayer, being material, goes into the stomach and is cast out into the privy. But in accord with the prayer that comes upon it, and according to the proportion of the faith (5) it becomes a benefit, and is the source of clear vision in the mind, which looks to that which is beneficial. It is not the material of the bread but the world which is said over it which is of advantage to the one who eats it not unworthily of the Lord.
These things, indeed, are said of the typical and symbolic body; but much more might be said about the Word Himself, who became flesh and true food, of which he that eats will surely live forever, no wicked person being able to eat it.
1. I Tim. 4: 5.
2. I Cor. 11:30
3. I Cor. 8:8. N.B. Paul was speaking of food offered to idols, not of the Eucharist.
4. Mt. 15:7
5. Κατà τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως.
Jurgens, Early Fathers I, §504, 210-11, 212.
Jurgens observes, in an accompanying extended footnote 6, p. 212, that here Origen’s thought is “more akin” to impanationism than to transubstantiation, but that is an anachronistic observation, as Jurgens himself indicates further on. He concludes that Origen is puzzling over problems whose solution awaits Augustine’s recognition of a double efficacy in the historical res sacramenti, a distinction set out more distinctly in the twelfth century sacramental paradigm as between the necessary effect of the Eucharistic signing, the res et sacramentum and the free, anagogical effect, the res tantum which, as sacramentally signed, is not to be read as though merely eschatological: rather, it is historical precisely in its reference of the sacramental signing to the anagogically fulfilled Kingdom of God, apart from which reference the concretely free significance intrinsic to the Eucharistic order of history is reduced to an extrinsically imposed quantification of time, a chronology. This methodological dehistoricization of the liturgically integrated text of Scripture requires the composition of the surrogate “narratives” that are the final product of much contemporary exegesis.
As for Origen’s Eucharistic doctrine, the excerpts Jurgens provides in §§490-491 supra sufficiently evidence his belief in the Real Presence. It should be kept in mind that his reference to the neglect of the Scriptural Word of God in §491 is not in derogation of the Eucharistic Real Presence. Rather Origen there insists upon the inseparability of the Eucharistic and the Scriptural Word, as does the Eucharistic liturgy itself. Excerpt §492 is a meditation on the Passover sacrifice of the Lamb of God as fulfilled in the Eucharist. It must follow that Origen understands the Eucharistic presence to be that which was taught thirteen centuries later by the Council of Trent, viz., the Event-Presence of the High Priestly offering of himself to the Father as the Lamb of God.
Robert J. Daly’s translation and annotation of Origen’s “Treatise on the Passover and Dialogue with Heraclides;” [hereafter, Dialogue with Heraclides] (endnote 409; cf. endnote 162) runs contrary to the concern evident in this excerpt for the Passover sacrifice of Christ, as also it does to the language of Origen’s Homily 24 on Numbers, as translated and excerpted by Jurgens in §492. supra. In his Dialogue with Heraclides, Daly argues that Origen rejects the early association of “Passover” with the Passion via its association with suffering suggested by the Greek rendition of the Hebrew word for Passover: i.e., pesach, by πάσχα, a cognate of πάσχειν, ‘to suffer.’ Daly reasons that Origen reads pesach in the sense of Christ’s “passing over” to the Father, and proceeds to argue that while Origen recognizes the event of the Passion to be the historical part of the “passing over” of Christ to the Father, he understands that historical event to be over and done with, no longer a “living” event” and thus to be unworthy of Scriptural notice. Daly is unconcerned for Eucharistic realism, here as elsewhere.
In the final excerpt supra, §504, Origen confronts a paradoxical truth which he finds in I Cor. 11:27-30; i.e., the unworthy reception of the Eucharist. Jurgens sums it up with his usual insight:
In fine, Origen seems almost to be reaching out toward such a theological distinction as that of the Sacramentum tantum and the Res et Sacramentum. That such distinctions are yet beyond his grasp should cause no wonderment. Excellent theological considerations in regard to the present passage will be found in the footnotes of the Migne edition, vol. 13, col. 948-952.
Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 212, note 6.
Such perplexity can proceed only from a profound participation in the faith and worship of the Church: Origen’s expression of it is a classic instance of the fides quaerens intellectum; theology can never transcend its quaerens to become a docens. Origen’s profound humility in the face of the mystery of Christ is set out at length in Pamphilus’ Apology for Origen.[368]
The foregoing examination of theology of Origen’s theology rests upon its having been founded on his radical insight into the primordial union of the fullness of divinity and of humanity in the Name, i.e., the Personal unity, of Jesus the Lord. No theologian before him, and none after him, has matched the profundity of that insight. Origen recognized, as Tertullian had, that names denote persons. He could not but recognize in consequence that the human Name, “Jesus,” given by the angel of the Annunciation to the Son whom Mary would conceive, is Personal. Recognizing that the divine Name of “Lord,” given to Jesus by the Apostles, is Personal, he could not but recognize as well that the apostolic faith that Jesus is the Lord asserts in him a Personal union of the divine Son of the Father and the human Son of Mary.
Irenaeus had perceived this Personal unity of the Christ, Naming it that of the “one and the same Son,” well before Origen, but left it undeveloped. Origen’s insight into the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ as a Henōsis of “hypostases,” i.e., “subsistences,” anticipates what Chalcedon defined, the subsistence of Jesus, “the one and the same Son,” in divinity and humanity, and thereby his divine and human consubstantiality. The Symbol of Chalcedon is the definitive affirmation of the Catholic faith that Jesus is the Lord. It rests upon the Councils of Nicaea and Ephesus, which themselves rest upon the apostolic tradition. So also does Origen’s theology: the Preface of the Peri Archon, as we have seen, affirms that it is Jesus Christ who is sent by the Father. It follows that Origen’s theology is not an unsupported speculation; it is grounded in the faith of the Apostolic Church.
ŸŸŸ
Origen is not the source of the Alexandrine tradition for, insofar as that tradition is historical, it is the Catholic liturgy, the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth of Christ the Lord, at once moral and doctrinal It is not a theological tradition, for it rests upon the Church’s worship, not upon the learning of the academy. Its foundation is doctrinal, the apostolic tradition that Jesus Christ is Lord.[369] This Name is the concrete historical expression, at once liturgical and scriptural, of the communication of idioms in Christ, for, at bottom, the ‘idioms’ are Names.
However, and beyond question, Origen is the major theological exponent the Alexandrine tradition, and its major theological resource. His Peri Archon is the only adequate theological articulation prior to the Council of Nicaea of the Catholic faith that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Catholic theology, insofar as authentic, is always a historical fides quaerens intellectum. Its object is always the historical Jesus the Lord as mediated by the Eucharistic worship of the Church. This mediation, this worship, is historical by reason of the concrete historicity of its object, Jesus the Lord. Insofar as theology takes its object seriously, i.e., insofar as it is itself serious, it can proceed only by rejecting the dehistoricizing impact, the effective veto, of the fallen rationality that Paul condemned as sarx, and whose immanent necessities the Enlightenment identified with autonomous reason.
The immanent determinism of the philosophical tradition of the Mediterranean world, the quest for antecedently necessary explanations of whatever falls under its scrutiny, forces the flight from history which marks all the expressions of that pagan wisdom, which can find no historical mediation of the kalos kagathon (καλος κἀγαθον), the “beautiful and the good,” which continually it seeks, and never finds. Nothing in history manifests the intrinsically necessary perfection presupposed by the cosmological soteriologies, whether grounded in the pagan mythologies or in the contemporary neo-pagan ideologies. Every search in concrete reality for the immanently necessary unity, goodness, and intelligibility of being presupposed by cosmological rationality must fail, as the Pythagorean discovery of irrational numbers intimated long ago. Speculative reason, as pagan, must be a quest for the non-historical absolute, and remains so, for the historical mediation of gratia Christi is free by definition.
Origen may have learned from Clement to regard the Greek philosophical wisdom as included within those ‘spoils of the Egyptians’ which are available for Christian use; in any case he was well aware, from his considerable immersion in that wisdom, that the Christian use of the pagan wisdom tradition must be its conversion. Plato, the greatest of the pagan seers, understood wisdom to entail a flight from the irrationality of history to the realm of the ideal truth whose intuited unity was beyond historical expression; hence his recourse to myth. Aristotle resisted the flight to the Platonic empyrean by attempting the imposition of a novel act-potency determinism upon the universe but, as Plato had predicted, he had been unable to resolve the problem of Parmenides, the need to choose between the irreconcilables of unity and plurality. The same enigma baffled the syncretic Middle Platonism of the third century: it could discover no intelligibility in history. Its fragmentary insights were religious, finally mythical, rather than rationally coherent. Wisdom as myth had fed the pagan mind, but left it unsatisfied. The Neoplatonism of Plotinus is a similarly incoherent melding of the Platonic and the Aristotelian dualisms; it provided to an inherently unstable pantheistic resolution of the problem of the one and the many: the immanently necessary relativization of the One, the Absolute, and once again a recourse to myth; see Volume III, endnote 37.
The consequent dissatisfaction might be assuaged by distraction;, but could be eliminated only by conversion from the pagan and neo-pagan fatalism to the historical optimism inherent in the faith of the historical Church in Christ, the Lord of history, its Beginning and its End.
It is under those auspices that the “quest for the ‘historical Jesus” continues, simply as the spontaneous expression of a reason so fallen that only the free reception of the free gift of truth, the inexhaustible mystery of faith, can free it from the futile quasi-theological exploration of its own immanent necessities. Theology as authentic, as faith seeking understanding, begins with and depends upon theologian’s personal reception and appropriation of the gift, the free immanence in history, of Truth Incarnate, whose reception can only be liturgical, for its mediation is liturgical simply.
The liberation of the mind from its immanent necessities is accomplished neither by a reception of novel information, nor by a submission of the mind to a sacrificium intellectus as the price of salvation. Rather, it consists in the free conversion of theologian to the inherent freedom of the historically objective truth that Jesus Christ is Lord. It must be stressed that this affirmation is liturgical, radically Eucharistic. It is not the product of speculation, but of the free conversion to the historical faith that Jesus is the Lord. This conversion to the faith of the Church is fulfilled by participation in the Eucharistic liturgy.[370] This alone sustains the project by which, over the first four centuries of the Church’s existence, the cosmological presuppositions of fallen rationality, imprisoned in the immanent necessities of its own confection, were confronted and defeated. The liturgical mediation of the truth of Christ, not as information, but as Christ himself, the Word made flesh, is indefeasible, for it is a work of God, not of man, and cannot be thwarted or undone.
The conversion to faith in Christ is a free entry into the free truth of Christ: “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1; RSV) Thus understood, conversion is a personal recognition of the enormous attraction, the beauty, in which freedom and truth are at one, inseparably, as John Paul II’s greatest encyclical, Splendor veritatis, has reminded the world. In Augustine’s brilliant percept, conversion is motivated by a love of “the ancient beauty who is forever new.” Such conversion, from sarx to pneuma, from the futility of the flesh to the personal fulfillment that is pneuma, the Gift of the Holy Spirit, fulfilled by liturgical entry into the victory of Christ, has no antecedent possibility. Neither is it self-sustaining. The faith that Jesus Christ is Lord never ceases to be a gift, continually to be received. It is the cognitive dimension of personal participation in the freedom of the Eucharistic worship of the Church, a continuing personal entry into and appropriation of the sacramentally-mediated free truth of the revelation that is Christ, and so the personal entry into the sacramentally mediated freedom of the Kingdom of God.
Only by that mediation, by that free participation in the worship of the Church, is freedom actual in history. Only there can we image God by our fidelity to the Covenant instituted by the Christ’s One Sacrifice, offered on the Altar and on the Cross, and represented on the altars of the Church. Only in that worship is the reality of our twin solidarities, with the fallen Adam and the risen Christ, apparent to us. Only thereby is our personal fissure known to us, viz., that we are simul peccator et justus, and only thereby and therein is the schism, innate in all of us, transcended and healed. Apart from that worship, the fatalities constitutive of our fallenness prevail. We are then left to our own devices, and, as Paul asserts in I Cor. 15: 19, “we are of all men the most to be pitied:” knowing the Truth, we have rejected Him.
The lexical assumptions underlying the Alexandrine theological tradition were those of the Logos theology of the nascent Trinitarian speculation of the late second century Greek Apologists, notably Athenagoras and Theophilus, who read the Johannine “Logos” historically as the Evangelist had used it, as a title of Jesus the Lord, not abstractly, as Logos was understood within the Middle Platonic intellecttual culture of their time. The Greek culture had always taken for granted the non-historical notion of Logos: Justin Martyr was the first to reject this fixation by asserting in his Apologies that the cause of the immanent rationality of the universe is the Jesus the Lord, and that therefore its immanent rationality is free and historical. Theophilus and Athenagoras followed him in reading the “Logos” of the Prologue and the Synoptics as Jesus the Lord but without immediate reference to the historical revelation of the Trinity in Christ. Hampered by a Stoic terminology, they found it appropriate to establish the Son’s divinity before asserting his Incarnation. The conformity of their Trinitarian doctrine to the Church’s apostolic and liturgical tradition, despite the incongruity of this abstract starting point, witnesses to their existential conversion from the fatalist cosmological consciousness imbuing the second-century Mediterranean culture, to the free historicity of the revelation given in Christ. Their conversion is evident in Theophilus’ recognition that the One God is a Trias (τρίας), a Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, whose unity is the free transcendence of the permanent cosmological enigma of “the one and the many,” and in Athenagoras’ recognition of the permanent liturgical order of recitation of the “trias,” that of the doxological sequence of the Names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which he named its τάξις (taxis), its inherent order.
While still in his youth Origen had become familiar with what then, ca. 200 AD, amounted to the leading edge of Alexandrine intellectuality. There can be no doubt that the Platonism learned during his brief association with Clement, later from Ammonius Saccas, and thereafter from a wide reading in the works of the leading philosophers of the Hellenistic world, influenced his theological development and yet more, his allegorical exegesis. Nonetheless, Origen’s theology has its foundation, not in Platonism however refined, but upon the communication of idioms in the Christ. His exegesis intends loyalty to the historicity of the Scriptures, as his theology intends loyalty to the historicity of Jesus the Lord. This intention, this loyalty, is not subjective; it is concrete in the method of speculation which produced the Peri Archon. It rests upon his faith in the historical reality, the Event, that is Jesus the Lord, the union in his Person of the fullness of divinity and the fullness of humanity. Origen is unique in recognizing that the fullness of humanity, like the fullness of divinity in Jesus, can only be Personal. This recognition is implicit in the very early Alexandrine naming of Mary as the Theotokos, and in the yet earlier apostolic tradition that she conceived her Lord, but first attains theological affirmation in the the De Principiis of Rufinus’ translation .
It is only on this basis, the Henōsis in Jesus the Lord of Personal divinity and Personal humanity, that Origen’s theological method is that proper to the fides quaerens intellectum whose product, termed a “body of doctrine” by Rufinus, comprises the hypotheses, the elaborated questions, which constitute the quaerens intellectum of his personal faith, but which cannot articulate the Mysterium fidei from which that quaerens proceeds. His theology intends the coherent expression of his fides quaerens intellectum, which can never be apodictic, never an affirmation, but always an integrated question, an entirely tentative hypothesis. The hypothetical product of his theological speculation, his quaerens intellectum, is directed to the mystery of Christ mediated by the apostolic tradition which he knew his theology not to transcend or otherwise control.
It must be kept in mind that the apostolic tradition is liturgical from the outset; “they recognized him in the breaking of the bread.” The apostolic preaching of the life, death, and Resurrection of the Christ is not reducible to an oral tradition in the usual understanding of that term.. While the foundation of that preaching is the apostolic reminiscence or anamnesis of Jesus the Lord, that reminiscence is Eucharistic, the liturgical memorial of Jesus the Lord. Its celebration is the infallibly effective representation of the prime Event of history. The liturgical anamnesis of this Event, the apostolic offering of the One Sacrifice warranted and commanded at the Last Supper, at once inspired and required the apostolic preaching of the Event of the sacrificial Lordship of the Christ.
The written summations of that preaching, which century or two hence would form the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, are published first in the Letters of Paul, then in the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, then in the Gospel of John, in his Letters and those of Peter, James and Jude, in the Letter to the Hebrews, and in the Apocalypse. To these Origen would perhaps have added two or three from the Apostolic Fathers, which were still considered to be Scripture in his time. The earliest of the New Testament writings did not appear until some twenty years after the crucifixion and the resurrection of the Christ, and the latest perhaps not much before the middle of the second century. In brief, the Sitz im Leben of the Scriptures is the Church’s liturgy, centered upon the Eucharistic anamnesis of the Event of the One Sacrifice whose High Priest and Victim is Jesus Christ the Lord as the fulfillment of the sacrificial liturgy of the Jews. The fixing of the Canon of the New Testament required some centuries; Origen’s contribution to it, if not indispensable, can hardly be exaggerated.
In the Preface of the Peri Archon Origen laid the speculative elaboration, the hypothetical explanation, of the basic affirmations of the Catholic faith: viz., the divinity and the headship of Jesus; the Trinity; the good creation. These doctrines, the content of the apostolic/doctrinal and moral tradition as it had developed in the first half of the third century, through the preaching of the bishops, constitute the point d’appui from which Origen would undertake the crucial apologetic task of his time, that of replying to and countering the regnant heresies, notably the Monarchianism which was beginning to threaten the Trinitarian faith, the Gnosticism implicit in Marcion’s anti-Semitic dualism, then widely disseminated in the Orient, and the explicit Gnosticism of Valentinus and his associates, whose more developed dualism, radically antagonistic to the immanence of the divine in history, focused upon its corollary, the denial of the Incarnation. These were all reducible to cosmological and consequently dualist denials of the capacity of history to mediate the divine. In the end, their dualism is reducible to an a priori denial of the communication of idioms inseparable from the apostolic faith that “Jesus Christ is Lord.”
In consequence, the Peri Archon is, at bottom, Origen’s speculative defense of the communication of idioms in Christ, for on this all the rest depends. If it were to be adequate, this defense required what had not been attempted, or even conceived before him: the excogitation of a speculative integration, at once Trinitarian, Christological, and ecclesial, of the apostolic tradition that would be alert to the dualist errors then in circulation and fashion the riposte essential to the Christian education of the cultivated audience, pagan as well as Christian, to whom the Peri Archon is directed.
It is evident that Origen was not a systematic theologian in the contemporary sense, i.e., he was not intent upon the integration of the doctrinal tradition through its enclosure within a supposedly more universal world-view, whose universality is its ideal necessity, which is also its nonhistoricity Origen had early learned that only the Church’s wisdom is thus universal, thus transcendent, and that it is so as historical and free. Its free historicity bars its submission to any criterion of its truth whose claim to universality and transcendence is not free and historical, for the submission of the Christian faith to such a criterion could only deny the freely revealed, freely affirmed truth that Jesus Christ is Lord. The circumscribed world view of the contemporary Middle and Neoplatonic eclecticism might well serve the preliminary formulation of theological quaerens intellectum by furnishing its terminology, but not its hermeneutic, for that is controlled by the faith that Jesus is the Lord, which requires the conversion of that terminology to theological quest to understand ever more fully the mystery who is Christ the Lord.
The openness of the Hellenistic philosophical tradition, “the spoils of the Egyptians,” to the Christian fides quaerens intellectum had been taken for granted, but Origen was the first to transform the Hellenistic tradition, in its Middle or Neoplatonic guise, into a “new hermeneutic.” He did this, so to speak, ambulando, simply by assigning novel historical meanings to a cosmological vocabulary which he assumed to be open to that conversion. Origen’s ‘new hermeneutic’ was immediately misunderstood, first by Peter, the martyred Bishop of Alexandria (d. 311), and Methodius, the martyred Bishop of Olympia (d. 311), both of whom rejected his theology of the resurrection and notably by Eusebius of Caesarea and his disciples, who rejected his Trinitarian doctrine in favor of imposing a subordinationism upon it.. However, Origen used his broad and deep acquaintance with the Greek philosophical tradition to adapt it to his purposes. By the last quarter of the fourth century his theological hermeneutic was understood to be a Trinitarian Christology, whether accepted, as in Alexandria, or rejected, as in Antioch and the rest of the Orient.
An analogue of Origen’s novel hermeneutics had occurred earlier to his Latin near-contemporary, Tertullian, who proposed “substantia” to designate the unity of the Trinity, and “persona” to designate the plurality of its members, hence for Tertullian the Trinity is “una substantia, tres personae.” Tertullian deployed the same terms in his Christology, using “persona” to designate the unity of Jesus the Christ, and “substantiae” to designate the two irreducible realities, the one divine, the other human, that are at one in his Person. Hence, for Tertullian, Jesus the Christ is “una persona, duae substantiae.[371]” while the Trinity is “una substantia, tres personae.’ While Tertullian’s substantia-persona resolution of the cosmologically insoluble problem of the one and the many, in the Trinity and in Christ, is the first clear theological rejection of the cosmological determinism which identifies “person” with “substance” and which consequently bars any consideration of the truth of the faith that Jesus, the Lord, is sent by the Father to give the Spirit, in principle it had been affirmed a decade earlier by Theophilus and Athenagoras.
Tertullian’s rejection of the cosmological identification of ‘person’ with ‘substance’ implied the free coherence of the plurality of the divine Personae with the unity of Trinitarian substantia, and the similarly free coherence of the unity of Persona of Jesus the Christ with the plurality of substantiae in him. However, cosmological rationality, whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, or their eclectic mix in Middle and Neo-Platonism, condemned as irrational the free metaphysical unity which, in the Apologeticus, the De Carne Christi and the De Resurrectione, Tertullian affirmed of the Persona who is Jesus the Christ, and the free metaphysical unity of the Trinitas comprising the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In these works, he ignores cosmological rationality and affirms the faith of the Church, providing in his persona-substantia analysis the base upon which Latin theology thereafter developed simply because it was conformed to the faith of the Church and ignored the cosmological objections to that faith.
Tertullian’s disinterest in providing an explanation of the antecedent possibility of the Trinity seemed to later theologians to have left his Trinitarian doctrine open to mutually opposing cosmological interpretations as tritheist and subordinationist. Such interpretations beg questions which in the Apologeticus Tertullian simply ignored. Both are cosmological rationalizations of the apostolic tradition, and therefore distort Tertullian’s liturgically-grounded affirmation, at once historical and free, of the three divine Names, therefore of three Personae, in one divine Trinitas. He never permitted the immanent necessities proper to pagan philosophical wisdom to annul the free truth of the apostolic tradition, mediated by the Church’s Eucharistic liturgy.
Origen’s theological hermeneutic, founded historically on the liturgical affirmation that Jesus is the Lord, and thus upon the communication of idioms in the Jesus the Christ, similarly rejected the pagan determinism. He fully accepted the liturgical corollary of faith in Christ, viz., the free unity of the Trinity as revealed in and by the free unity of the Person whom the apostolic tradition affirms to be Jesus Christ the Lord. For Origen, as for Tertullian, the challenges of cosmological rationality were of no concern or interest. His theology was historical from its outset. His use of “ousia ” to denote the absolute unity of the Trinity, and of “treis hypostaseis” to denote the relational unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit, removed these terms from their cosmological context, and from the obscurity which a century later would still permit the Nicene condemnation of Arius to employ “ousia ” and “hypostasis” as equivalent designations of the absolute unity of the Trinity.
Origen’s decision to designate the Trinitarian unity as “ousia ” corresponds to Tertullian’s use of “substantia” for that purpose. However, while Origen’s designation of its Members as “treis hypostaseis” parallels Tertullian’s “tres Personae,” his use of “hypostasis” retains a lexical ambiguity, for it can designate a concrete unity, which can be understood to be either a divine Person, thus a Personal unity, or the substantial Trinity which comprises the divine Persons. Origen’s emphasis upon referring the mia ousia to the unity of the Trinity permitted him to reserve “hypostasis” for the Trinitarian Persons. Here, he was a century in advance of the Council of Nicaea, which still used “ousia ” and “hypostasis” as equivalent terms, referring both to the Trinity. However, that equivalence permitted the Eusebian reading of a tritheist instead of a Trinitarian doctrine: under that reading his “treis hypostaseis” became “three substances,” i.e., three divinities instead of one Trinity.
Origen did not use the Greek near-equivalent of the Latin “persona,” i.e., “prosōpon.” (πρόσωπον) Evans has pointed out that prosōpon had been made available to third-century Greek theology by way of Hippolytus, the last Western theologian to write in Greek, who had thus translated Tertullian’s “persona.” Origen’s Christological vocabulary departs from Tertullian’s in designating the primordial unity of Jesus the Christ not as prosōpon but simply as the primordial Event of the Personal union, “Henōsis,” of the eternal Logos with the primordial-fallen Personal humanity of Jesus, the nous whose “ethereal’ corporeality marks him as finite, as a creature. In this primordial union with the Logos the Personal humanity of Jesus the Christ possesses the forma Dei “in the Beginning,” which phrase refers not to the Father’s “substantial production” of the Trinity which, as eternal, has no beginning, but to the “accidental production”, the creation ex nihilo, of the finite, physical, and mutable universe of man. This “accidental” production is essentially the “Henōsis,” the primordial dynamic unity, the Event, in one hypostasis, the one subsistence of Jesus the Christ in the fullness of divinity and in the fullness of humanity, and thereby irreducibly distinct Personal fullness of divinity and Personal fullness of humanity that are united in his Person. We have noted that this free Event coincides with the doctrine of the Father’s Mission of the “one and the same Son.”
Origen is unique in requiring a distinct term to designate the unity of the divine and the human in Jesus the Lord. Had he treated the Personal unity of the Sermo-Logos as non-historical and abstract, i.e., as simply that of the Eternal Son, who then becomes the supposed subject of the Incarnation, there would have been no need to affirm a union, for the postulate of the Personal unity of the eternal Son as the Personal subject of the Incarnation would have made it beside the point and, as irrelevant, unnecessary. This identification of the non-historical Sermo as the subject of the Incarnation may seem to have been taken for granted by Tertullian in the Adversus Praxean, 27, but the context of that passage must be kept in view. See p. 172, supra: v. Adversus Praxean 27
There Tertullian is engaged in refuting Praxeas’ Monarchian identification of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; he concedes, for purposes of his argument, that error, intending to force Praxeas to recant by pointing our that the Christian tradition, which Praxeas does not intend to deny, distinguishes between the Incarnate Son, and the Father by whose Mission the Son is Incarnate. This solution to a false problem was forced upon him by the need to speak intelligibly to his interlocutor, Praxeas, a Monarchian who knew no Trinity, but was a Christian, probably an archaic one.
Origen’s use of Henōsis to name the union of the divine and the human, i.e., the communication of idioms, in Jesus the Christ would be similarly unnecessary were it to designate the union of a divine “nature” with a human “nature,” for these are abstractions, i.e., mutually exclusive, clear and distinct ideas whose interrelation can only be conceptual and therefore mutually exclusive. The assertion of a union of :natures” in Christ immediately raises the Tertullian’s monophysite vs. diophysite quandary, the impossibility of whose resolution is a clear indication of its cosmological ground, its return to the pagan puzzlement over the impossible union of the one with the many, which Origen’s stress upon the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord rejects out of hand. Concerned entirely with the historical communication of idioms in Christ; Origen uses Henōsis to designate the free, factual, primordial, historically objective union of the divine Son with the Personal human subject, the created corporeal nous who, in that factual primordial Event of Henōsis, from that Beginning, from that first instant of the good creation, possesses the forma Dei and is the primordial Christ, the Lord. The primordial noes are not natures: they are personal subjects, for they are from the Beginning engaged in the adoration of the Logos who from their Beginning is in Personal unity, Henōsis, with divine Son and, from that Beginning is the head of the Church, thus the head of the noes, and therefore of the created universe, Jesus the Lord.
Origen’s contribution to Trinitarian theology and to Christology is enormous. He founded his theological inquiry upon the doctrinal tradition, equivalently the Eucharistic liturgy and the apostolic preaching mediated by its celebrants, the local bishops. (They would not meet in councils before the end of the third century. The first was at Elvira, perhaps as early as 295 A.D., perhaps as much as 20 years later). The tradition thus presented to Origen by the Alexandrine liturgy and catechesis was the subject of his inquiry. His considerable familiarity with the Greek philosophical traditions had convinced him that they offered no access to the truth of Christ, to which he had been committed from his childhood. Consequently he set out, in the Peri Archon, to integrate hypothetically the doctrinal tradition as it then existed, i.e., largely in a catechetical format, in such wise as more deeply to appreciate its inherent intellectual unity, its intrinsic rationality, the presupposition of the Church’s worship of the Word made flesh. Intent on the historical tradition of the Church, he rejected out of hand the cosmological point d’appui which, momentarily, in the Adversus Praxean 27-28 had confused Tertullian’s Christology by making the subject of the Incarnation (and of the kenōsis) to be the non-historical second Person of the non-historical Trinity. The corollary of this error is the standing dilemma which bars speculative access to the profundity of the Christian revelation: the abstract divinity of the cosmological worldview is incapable of historical immanence.
The history of theology has made it evident that theological controversy arises out of the common use of a culturally-conditioned vocabulary, one whose theological inadequacy is clarified only after definitively corrective hermeneutical decisions have been made by the liturgical authority of the Church’s Magisterium. These decisions are explicit in the first four Councils, whose hermeneutical rules are those inherent in and governing henceforth the Church’s liturgical affirmations, her doctrinal tradition.
Magisterial correction generally occurs as a defensive response to a public rejection of the doctrinal tradition in favor of the dualism inherent in the time-honored cosmological world-view to which the conventional meaning of the available vocabulary could not but conform. The Council of Nicaea is the first instance of such hermeneutical correction at the doctrinal level by the Church’s universal Magisterium. The Catholic Magisterium is controlled by and has the authority of the Church’s liturgy; its office is doctrinal, not theological, and is not tested by theological rationality. Because the foundation and substance of the doctrinal tradition is liturgical; so also must be the Church’s communication of that truth.
Origen wrote the Peri Archon almost a century before Nicaea. He had to rely upon the apostolic tradition as it existed in the ordinary preaching and catechesis of the Church under the teaching authority of the bishops as successors of the apostles. The magisterial authority of the Apostles, to which the bishops succeeded, is the radically liturgical preaching inseparable from the authority given them at the Last Supper, over the celebration of the Eucharist, the Church’s worship of Truth in truth. It is thus that Origen, a Christian from his childhood, the son of a martyr, who himself from his youth had sought martyrdom, could not satisfy his restless mind with a wisdom less than free, less than coherent.
When in his latter thirties Origen undertook the composition of the Peri Archon, he had long since found this liberating wisdom in the historical freedom of the Church’s worship and in the apostolic tradition. This conviction did not confer upon him an immunity to the persuasions of the pagan wisdom. Conversion from those idolatries begins with the faith of Abraham in the One God who called him into an unknown land an unknown future; it is fulfilled in personal commitment to the apostolic faith that Jesus is the Lord, which is historical and, with the confidence of that faith, looks to an unknown future. In fallen history, this conversion is always incomplete. We need not wonder at having found it so in Origen’s theology. No theology is free of cosmological distraction from the faith of the Church, nor will be while our solidarity with the fallen Adam yet obtains.
In his provision for the full divinity and the full humanity of Jesus Christ the Lord, Origen anticipated both the Nicene Creed and the Symbol of Chalcedon. His hypothesis of the Henōsis of the Personal divinity of the eternal Logos and the Personal humanity of Jesus the Christ was revolutionary when it was published and remains so today, despite its confirmation at Nicaea, which condemned subordinationism, the cosmological alternative to the mia ousia of the Trinity. Despite its confirmation at Chalcedon, which condemned the cosmological alternatives to the Personal humanity, the Personal divinity of Jesus, the “one and the same Son, viz., the monophysite and diophysite Christological heresies then in futile contention remain so today.
The contemporary secular cosmology, still travelling as theology, continues to deny, with Eusebius, the meaning and the merits of the Nicene Creed and, with Dioscorus and Nestorius, continues to deny the intelligibility of the Symbol of Chalcedon. Short of the radical conversion to the historical truth of the mystery of Jesus the Christ, which led Origen to his indispensable affirmation of the Personal humanity, the Personal divinity, and the Personal unity of the Lord, there is no exit from cosmological temptations, as there has been none in the past. When these are not abjured, they control and annul theological speculation. Cosmology denies the rationality of that indispensable conversion to the free historicity of truth; Origen, for his part, denied the rationality of cosmology, affirming in its stead the free rationality of the historical revelation given us in the historical Jesus the Christ, faith in whom freed his theological quaerens intellectum from the quest for immanent necessities which forces cosmology to dehistoricize the truth of Christ.
Origen’s Peri Archon provides the indispensable foundation for Catholic theology as such. As foundational for the Alexandrine tradition, it fed into the Nicene Creed by way of Alexander and his deacon, Athanasius, later the indominatable bishop of Alexandria, whose faith in the communication of idioms is simply Origen’s. For nearly half a century he defended the faith taught at Nicaea against the cosmological onslaught of the Eusebian subordinationism, a heresy at once Trinitarian and Christological. Such defense of the faith of the Catholic Church that Jesus Christ is Lord will continue to be necessary while men continue to be fallen.
The originality of Origen’s anticipation of the doctrine of Nicaea is perhaps open to question by reason of his trip ca. 212 to Rome, where he heard Hippolytus preach.[372] However, inasmuch as a dozen or more years would pass before Hippolytus, in his Refutatio omnium haeresium, would teach that Son is of the same substance with the Father because generated by him, he is an unlikely source for Origen’s disputed attribution of homoousios to the Son.[373]
Half a century later, bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, a pupil and disciple of Origen, replied to Pope Dionysius of Rome concerning his failure to use “homoousios” to bar the tritheism of which he had been accused. He insisted that, while he avoided its use as non-scriptural, his Trinitarian doctrine had been consistent with its meaning. Bishop Dionysius’ unfamiliarity with the term, his failure to associate it with Origen’s theology even as implicit in Origen’s use of ousia to designate the indivisible unity of the Trinity, suggests that his discipleship was rather that of an exegete than a speculative theologian, which is consistent with the perduring respect given his commentary on the Apocalypse.[374]
The manner of the entry of the homoousion into the pre-Nicene Roman doctrinal vocabulary is in need of further examination. It has been suggested that it rests finally upon Tertullian’s tres personae, una substantia.[375] Attempts to find a pre-Nicene theological use of this term that would anticipate the Conciliar definition are unlikely to succeed, for the significance, i.e., the intelligibility, of its attribution to the Son by the Council of Nicaea is not theological but doctrinal and therefore liturgical. Its authority is independent of speculative considerations to the point of dismissing them outright. The Council did not teach the homoousion of the Son as though proposing a theoretical solution to a theological problem. The Nicene Creed is a dogmatic statement of the faith of the Church. By their proclamation of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, the bishops who met at Nicaea faced and fulfilled their common magisterial and therefore liturgical responsibility, viz., to confirm the Church’s worship of Truth in truth. They had no other authority, no other responsibility. Particularly, they had no academic responsibility or authority; complaints of their failure to exercise it are therefore groundless. The choice by the bishops gathered at Nicaea of “homoousios” to defend what Arius had denied, the divinity of the Christ, may well owe something to the “Affair of the two Dionysii,” and thus to Origen as the mentor of Dionysius of Alexandria but, were this to be established, the doctrine taught at Nicaea could not be inferred from that exchange The bishops’ exercise of their liturgical responsibility at Nicaea was to affirm the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord in response to the Arian heresy, and to teach that therefore he is homoousios with his Father. Thus, by refusing its postulate, viz., the monadic unity of the divine substance, they resolved the cosmological confusion which had produced the Arian subordinationism. They had no interest in a theological dispute with Arius. Their use of “homoousios” was utterly novel; its affirmation of the truth of the Church’s worship, her liturgy, could not have been borrowed from some antecedent parallel, for there were none. Prior to Nicaea, “homoousios” had no fixed meaning. After Nicaea, its meaning had become doctrinal in such wise that challenges to it became heresies.
While the Oriental bishops under the influence 0f Eusebius of Caesarea’s subordinationism refused to accept the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father during all of the nearly fifty-six years between the Councils of Nicaea and I Constantinople, their resistance to the authority of the Council of Nicaea was inspired by the politicization of the faith of inherent in Eusebius’ denial of the authority of the Council of Nicaea. This denial left no ecclesial authority to which the Eusebian bishops might appeal, leaving them dependent upon the authority of the Roman emperors, first Constantine, after him Constantius and Valens. Eusebius’ condemnation of the Nicene doctrine of the substantial unity, “mia hypostasis, mia ousias” of the Trinity transformed him into the leader of a political movement as the sole alternative to accepting the authority of the Church’s apostolic tradition. His followers accepted his obeisance to the imperial throne and made it their own. The Eusebian subordinationism, whether homoean or homoiousian, together with its rationalization into Neo-Arianism by the Arian die-hards, finally collapsed with the accession of the pro-Nicene Emperor Theodosius to the throne and their consequent loss of the imperial support upon which the Eusebian condemnation of the Nicene Creed had relied since 328 when, after their condemnation by the Council of Nicaea, the “two Eusebii,” the anti-Nicene bishops of Caesarea and of Nicomedia, regained the imperial favor and on that basis proceeded to impose by force majeure their denial that Jesus Christ is consubstantial with the Father and, by implication, their denial that he is the Lord.
In 362, the Nicene Trinitarian doctrine was re-affirmed by the Council of Alexandria, whose Tome to the Antiochenes rested on the dogmatic fact that the homoiousians’ rejection of the Arians as heretics left them with no rational alternative to recognizing the authority of the Nicene Creed. Athanasius had been pointing out in his De synodis that the sole alternative to the homoousion of the Son is the Arian hetero-ousion taught by the radical Arians, Aetius and Eunomius; the Council of Nicaea had left no room for compromise. It is likely that here Athanasius and his allies at Alexandria either underestimated or reckoned without the political commitment of the homoiousian party in Antioch, their consequently political interpretation of doctrine, and thus their readimg of the Alexandrine Tome to the Antiochenes as inviting the subordination of Antioch to Alexandria.
The Eusebian politicization of the faith had long driven the anti-Nicenes to negotiation and compromise as the appropriate means of resolving their internecine differences, as well as their tensions with the imperial Arianism. They would continue so to regard doctrine as negotiable for as long as they had imperial support. Their loss of that support in the homoean Council of Constantinople (360), followed in short order by the brief reign of Julian the Apostate, the yet briefer reign of Jovian, and the subsequent fourteen years of persecution by the Arian emperor Valens, left them adrift. Basil had in vain sought the support of Athanasius who, disillusioned by the homoiousian commitment to the negotiation of doctrinal differences displayed at the homoiousian Council of Antioch, in 363, did not answer his letters. Meletius’ proclamation at that Council of his radically unacceptable interpretation of the Nicene homoousion as assimilable to the Eusebian homoiousion was the last straw. Athanasius saw no point in any further association with Basil of Caesarea, whose commitment to Meletius was unqualified. Basil then turned to the West in search of support, but Pope Damasus, an energetic pro-Nicene, had by then succeeded Liberius, after a savage battle with a faction led by a deacon, Ursinus, loyal to the diocese of Milan. That Latin city was still ruled by the Arian bishop, Auxentius, who had been appointed by Constantius in 355 after deposing the pro-Nicene Bishop of Milan, Dionysius. Ambrose would succeed Auxentius in 374.
The faith of the homoiousian anti-Arians gathered in Antioch in 362 was in fact as Epiphanius had labeled it, semi-Arian. The Tome to the Antiochenes required that the homoiousians cease to regard the faith of the Church as negotiable, as they had since the ascendancy of the Eusebian subordinationism ca. 315, and instead join Athanasius in an unswerving loyalty to the Nicene Creed. In sum, he urged them to recognize the doctrinal authority of the bishop of Rome rather than the political potestas regalis of the Roman emperor, to which they had preferred from the outset. In the end, led by Basil of Caesarea, the homoiousians were unable to accept the inseparability of their faith in the divinity of Jesus the Lord from the reception of the Nicene Creed. Further, their political reading of doctrine continued to equate loyalty to Nicaea with political subordination to Alexandria and to Rome. Basil of Caesarea continued his attempt to find a compromise in a common recognition of Meletius as the authentic Bishop of Antioch, and attempted to persuade Athanasius to agree, but without success. Further, Pope Damasus supported Athanasius’ rejection of Meletius, which left Basil alienated from Rome.
During Athanasius’ visit to Antioch in 363, after the homoiousian Council of Antioch, he recognized Paulinus as the authentic bishop of Antioch, despite the alleged irregularity of his consecration by Lucifer of Cagliari. In so doing, Athanasius abandoned as illusory all hope of converting the homoiousians of Antioch to the faith of Nicaea.
The anti-Nicene posture of the homoiousians amounted minimally to schism and, in the end, to heresy. The “reception” of the Church’s doctrinal tradition is radically liturgical, and consequently unconditional. The Church has one liturgical tradition, with which the doctrine taught at Nicene is integral. The Church’s Eucharistic sacrifice is offered by Jesus Christ the Lord, the Son whose Personal homoousion with the Father is indispensable to his offering of the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed. The homoiousian rejection of the Nicene Creed is simply incompatible with communion in the Church’s worship in truth, and consequently with participation in her offering of the Eucharistic representation of the One Sacrifice. In their subscription to the Tome, the bishops at the Council of Alexandria, led by Athanasius, and assisted particularly by Eusebius of Vercelli and Asterius of Borea, hoped that the conservative homoiousians would be concerned to uphold this liturgical unity, for the Church has no other. In this they were disappointed. In the end, however imminent a recognition of the authority of Nicaea might be thought to be implicit in their opposition to Arianism, the homoiousians remained loyal to Meletius, who was loyal to the imperial authority over the Church. When, at the Council of Antioch in 363, Meletius presumed to meld the Nicene affirmation of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the homoiousian doctrine of his substantial similarity with the Father (homoios kat’ousian), their continuing communion with him manifested their commitment to a negotiated pseudo-Christian political unity rather than the liturgical unity by which the Church is historical, and is historically efficacious.
It had been by appealing to a finally ecclesial fidelity that the authors of the Tome hoped to persuade the Antiochene homoiousians of the indispensability of the homoousion to the faith that Jesus is the Lord. The decisive step, the rejection of all subordination within the Trinity, had been taken at Nicaea, where the Church had taught that: Jesus is Lord, homoousios with the Father, and that in consequence the Arians are wrong. Every compromise with the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father is reducible to the Eunomian hetero-ousios, as Athanasius had pointed out in his De synodis, and from which conviction he never wavered.
Origen had rejected the cosmological foundation of subordinationism from the outset. He understood the divinity of the Father to require that he be absolutely immaterial, unchanging, eternal, and omnipotent. He summed up these essential aspects of divinity as “substantial,” as contrasted with the “accidental” or changeable reality of all that is finite and thereby material. Origen inferred from the eternity of the Father that his omnipotence is eternally and continually exercised and therefore “productive.”
All this is incompatible with the later expressions of the Neoplatonic cosmology, but Origen departed radically from that pantheism by placing the Father within the divine substance in such wise that he does not constitute it. The Father is not the Platonic Monas, not the divine substance. Rather, the Father is the source of the divinity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit in a manner incomprehensible except as imaged by the Son’s offering, as the High Priest, of the One Sacrifice by which, as her head, he restores his primordial nuptial union in One Flesh with his bride, the Church.
By his offering of the One Sacrifice Jesus the Lord poured out the Spiritus Creator upon the bridal Church, freeing her to be One Flesh with him. Through their free nuptial union, his Spirit is poured out upon the fallen universe, restoring in sacramento its primordial integrity, renewing all things. This is our Lord’s institution of the New Covenant in his blood, the New Creation, given us daily in signo, in the bridal Church’s worship of her Lord. In brief, the Son’s fulfilling of his Mission from the Father is his imaging of the Father’s Headship as the source and font of the free unity of the One God, the Trinity. As the Father is the immanent source of the free unity of the divine substance, the Trinity, so the Son is the immanent head, the source of the free unity of the human substance, the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the Image of the Trinity.
It has been here asserted that Origen’s understanding of the Trinity is the reflex of his historical Christology, in contrast to that proposed by Tertullian’s “moment of reason” in Adversus Praxean 27, which would have made his Christology the reflex, the dehistoricized corollary, of an abstract Trinitarian doctrine. However, both theologians were committed to the profoundly historical “Spirit Christology” of the Apostolic Fathers, which recognized in the Christ the revelation of the Trinity. In the aforesaid “moment of reason” Tertullian tried to explain to Praxeas, a Monarchian who did not acknowledge the Trinity, how the eternal non-historical Sermo, accommodated to Praxean’s Monarchianism, thus simply the eternal Word, could “become flesh;” in order to distinguish the Sermo from the Father, who is not incarnate, and thereby force upon Praxean a retreat from his Monarchianism. In a similar “moment of reason,” Origen, knowing the Henōsis. the union of the fullness of divinity and of humanity in Jesus the Lord, to be a concretely historical actuality, nonetheless also mused upon its conditions of possibility, finding them in the spirituality of the soul of Jesus: this in Peri Archon, 3, 6, 2.. Neither Tertullian nor Origen dreamed of denying that Jesus Christ is Lord.
It is on this historical basis that the “accidental production” that is the Father’s creation of the physical universe must be understood as precisely the corollary of his Mission of the “one and the same Son,” Jesus the Christ, the historical subject of the historical Incarnation whereby alone it is historical, viz., as the Event of the immanence of Jesus the Lord in the fallen history of the world, which culminates in his offering of the One Sacrifice, Jesus’ plenary exercise of his headship whereby he is immanent in history as transcending its fallenness by his Eucharistic Presence in it, thus as the Lord of history, transforming our created temporality into the history of our salvation.
The eternally continuing substantial “production” (ktisis) by the Father of the Trinity is not of course the creation ex nihilo to which “creation” ordinarily refers. Rather, it is the Father’s “first creation,” his begetting of his Son who, as Son, is divine, immaterial, and therefore “substantial,” and his comparable “production” of the Spirit, both of whom are by that “production” consubstantial with him. As has been seen, while Origen speaks of the Father as “The God,” (Ὁ Θεος – Ho Theos), and of Jesus as “second God” (δευτερος θεος - deuteros Theos), this is not to introduce a dualistic subordinationism into the Trinity, nor is it disparagement of the Son’s divinity. Rather, by this tag Origen refers to the Son’s origin from the Father, a begetting that is eternal and unceasing, i.e., “substantial,” therefore divine.
Thus the Son, like the Father, has no beginning..[376] To have a “beginning” is proper to the “accidentality” of the “second” or material creation of the material universe of “rational beings,” i.e., of the noetika, the primordial Intelligences who are material, possessed of bodies simply by reason of their finitude. The same rationale applies to the Holy Spirit for, however his relation to the Father is understood, it is substantial, eternal and unchanging and, whether or not Origen used the term, there can be no doubt that he taught the consubstantiality of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, with their Head. The apostolic tradition affirms the Spirit’s divinity, and therefore the Spirit eternally subsists in the one divine Trinitarian substance, mia ousia.
As there is one God, there is one divine substance: the consubstantiality of the Son is simply his divine Sonship, his eternal begetting by the Father. His subordination to the Father is economic, not metaphysical. Consubstantial with the Father, sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit, Jesus is obedient to his Mission, “unto death on the Cross.”[377]
A tritheist, i.e., subordinationist interpretation of Origen’s Trinitarian theology is barred by his insistence upon the indivisible immateriality of the divine ousia, upon the eternal generation of the Son, and upon his divine consubstantiality with the Father, a consubstantiality that is also proper to the Spirit.[378] Neither the begetting of the Son nor the production of the Spirit is a separation from the Father; both Son and Spirit are eternally with the Father as distinct hypostases whose distinction is not separation. Such a separation could only be substantial and is therefore impossible, for the Trinity is the divine substance, immaterial and indivisible.
For Origen, the eternal Son, as eternal, is in fact the Intelligible World of the first and eternal or “substantial” creation. In this role, that of Wisdom, which Crouzel has likened to the World Soul, the second emanation from the Neoplatonic One, although as the Logos, the eternal Son would be its first emanation. As the Logos-Son, the Reason of the Father, there are in him the “reasons,” the “ideas,” “epinoia,” that are the presupposition of the intelligibility of the second creation of the intelligent and intelligible world, i.e., the good creation of the myriads of co-equal pre-existent noes or Intelligences wrapped in the contemplation of their head, the Logos. Were these noes not created equal, their very creation would be an institution of injustice. We have seen that: this equation of differentiation with injustice is as old as Anaximander. .Taken at the letter, it is dualist, thus irreconcilable with the nuptial order of creation set out in the first two chapters of Genesis, and consequently irreconcilable with the free “accidentality” of second or “accidental” creation, the institution of the union in One Flesh of the primordial Christ and the primordial Church, by which creation is good and very good (Gen. 1:21-31).
The substantiality of the “first creation” sharply distinguishes it from the “accidental” character of the “second creation” by the Father through the Son as Logos―of the multitude of co-equal “Intelligences” or noes who, apart from the Henōsis of the Logos with the Christ, are less than “substantial;” as finite, they are corporeal, capable of change, and thus capable of falling from their original free absorption in the contemplation of the Son as Logos, as Wisdom.
The pre-existence of the created noes is not ab aeterno, but primordial or pre-existent in the sense of having, in their free unity as members of the pre-existent Church, a beginning prior to fallen history. Origen knows the primordial Jesus to be the head, the Bridegroom, of the primordial Church, and so to be the head of her members, the noes. Their primordially unfallen, integral Beginning is the pre-condition of the fallen world of fallen man. Origen does not relate their freedom to its source in their head, he simply implies it, for their falling away from their devotion to him is also their loss of integrity, of free unity, and so the loss of their freedom.
The fall of the noes from the free community of the pre-existent Church, the Bride, is equally their dissociation from the Bridegroom, the Logos, the pre-existent Christ, the head of the Church and consequently the head of the noes. The primordial Church, for Origen, is Jerusalem, the heavenly community. The noes, who primordially are members of that free community; fall from its free unity into an immanently necessary personal dispersion. As fallen, their community, the Church, is fragmented until restored to the free unity of the One Flesh instituted the sacrifice of the Christ, the head, the Bridegroom of the Church, the source of her free unity, which can only be nuptial, that of the One Flesh.
Origen left implicit but indispensable the free unity, the society, of the noes in their unfallen community, the primordial or pre-existent Church, whose fall is her fragmentation, the scattering of the fallen noes who, as created, have ethereal bodies, and who as fallen have become the souls of their fallen terrestrial or sarkic bodies. While Origen distinguishes the immateriality of the created nous from the corporeality that is the corollary of its finitude, and insists similarly upon the immateriality of the fallen nous who has become the soul of a human person, he understands that fallen soul to be nonetheless deprived of the pneuma which it had possessed primordially, the Gift whose possession is in them the free unity of the primordially integral mind with the primordially integral (ethereal) body. The fallenness of the nous is identically its loss of its integrity, of its free pneumatic unity. The primordially good creation of the nous is integral, in free personal unity. As free, the gift of pneuma could be received and possessed only as a gift capable of rejection. It was inherently subject to rejection and to loss, to that cooling of its devotion to the Lord whose issue is the fall of the nous, the Intelligence, into the mortality of “flesh,” and into its fallen subjectivity, the form of a slave - morphē doulou (Phil. 2:6-7), imprisoned by that fear of death (Heb. 2:15) which is inseparable from awareness of mortality.
Here again, Origen’s theology is historical, profoundly Pauline. Only the recovery of the gift of pneuma will restore our lost integrity; this gift is the work of Jesus the Christ, whose redemptive death is the re-integration of his fallen and shattered bride, the Church, through her unity with her head in One Flesh, the only free unity our fallen history knows. Here again, however, a surd occurs in Origen’s thought. In his Commentary on the Song of Songs he understands the fallen noes, the Intelligences who, as fallen, are the souls of fallen human persons, to be feminine. Inasmuch as Origen supposes sexuality as such to be the consequence of the fall, the femininity of the soul in fallen history must be the consequence of the fall itself. However, that nous, Jesus the Lord, who possesses the forma dei from the Beginning, is also masculine from the Beginning, for Origen understands the primordial Jesus to be the head of the primordially unfallen noes whose free unity is that of the primordially bridal Church of whom the primordial Christ is the Head, her Bridegroom, which office he retains in his kenōsis, his “becoming flesh.”
The doctrine of the femininity of the human soul is perhaps latent in the Peri Archon, particularly in the recognition of the Primordial Jesus as the Bridegroom of the Church and thus as the head of the noes whom the Church comprises. However that may be, its development in the Commentary on the Song of Songs, i.e., its implication that the fallen noes are incapable of headship which, as masculine, is restricted to the historical Jesus the Christ, is a departure from the apostolic tradition explicit in I Cor. 11:3, with which Origen is familiar. The matter is further complicated by Origen’s emphasis upon the immateriality of the soul, which would connote an immaterial spirituality and worship, were the immateriality of the soul absolute. In fact the soul, as finite, is never without its body. This complicates but does not prevent the soul’s immaterial imaging of the immaterial God.[379]
The universal feminizing of these fallen noes is a reversion to a Platonic dualism entirely irreconcilable with Origen’s recognition of the primordial corporeality by which the finite noes are members of the heavenly community, the Church. The fallen Church, with her members, is restored; the restoration of her worship, her sacramental liturgy, includes the celebration of the sanctity of the marriage of fallen men and women whereby their union in one flesh images of the nuptial unity of Christ and the Church. Generally, the supposed feminization of the fallen noes and the consequent desacramentalization of their worship by its reduction to an unmediated bridal union with the Christ, is incompatible with the mediated union with the Christ which he provided by his One Sacrifice, continually offered in the Church’s radically Eucharistic worship. This multiplication of the brides of Christ is also anomalous, for he has but one Bride, the Church.
The primordiality of the Church, her union with her head in One Flesh, is co-extensive with the Father’s “accidental production”, i.e., with the creation of the noes, the noetika, i.e., the creation of rational beings, through the Logos. The pre-existence of the noes whose creation is in the Beginning is ecclesial, therefore primordial, not ab aeterno as is often supposed. Their primordial fall is universal, the fall of the primordial Church, whose fall includes them all, for from the beginning the noes are members of the primordial Church.
However, as has been seen, Origen proposes exceptions to the fall of the noes. These include the angels who remain, in the “heavenly Jerusalem” who is the Mother of the Intelligences and also of the Logos, who is Christ. As unfallen, these angels constitute the “heavenly part” of the primordial Church, where they will be joined by the blessed, who enter Paradise upon their deaths. The rest of the rational beings (noetika, noes) of the fallen and fragmented Church have lost their unity, for their fall shatters the bridal Church, as distinct from the “heavenly Jerusalem,” estranging her from her Lord and Bridegroom. Her recovery from that fragmentation and alienation begins with the epiphanies of the Old Covenant, but the Bridegroom is then still absent from the fallen Church; occasionally he manifests himself in theophanies, but generally he uses messengers. These are “the Bridegroom’s friends,” patriarchs, prophets, angels, sent to foster her love and desire for him. All this is set out in the Commentary on the Song of Songs, and is of more than doubtful consistency with the Peri Archon. The Church’s recovery of her union with her Bridegroom is achieved only by his kenōtic presence to her, first by Mary’s conception of her Lord, the nuptial prolepsis of the definitive institution of the One Flesh of the Bride with her Bridegroom by his One Sacrifice. As Crouzel observes:
At last comes the moment fixed by the Father for the Incarnation:
And He left, for the sake of the Church. He, the Lord, who is the Bridegroom, the Father beside whom He dwelt when He was in the form of God; He left also his Mother, for He was also the Son of the Jerusalem above. He clove to his wife who had fallen down here and they became here on earth two in one flesh.1
He leaves his Father and his Mother, the Jerusalem above, He goes towards the earthly place and says: I have abandoned my home, I have left my inheritance.2 His inheritance is the place where He lived with the angels, it was his condition among the holy powers. I have given my beloved soul into the hands of his enemies.3 He has delivered up his soul into the hands of the enemies of that soul, into the hands of the Jews who killed him. 4
1 ComMt XIV, 17 (GCS X)
2. Jer. 12, 7.
3. Ibid.
4. HomJr x, 7.
Crouzel, Origen, at 219-20.
Origen’s deployment of nuptial symbolism here is flawed insofar as it separates the Church as celestial Mother from the Church as fallen Bride; this permits his supposition of a fallen Church, the bride who has lost her primordial nuptial union with her Lord The later development of the tradition will understand it to be rather the members of the Church who are scattered by their fall, not the Church herself, whose free fidelity to her Bridegroom is primordial and unchanging. The unity of her members was their participation in the free unity of her worship of the Logos. Their abandonment of this, the Bride’s worship of her Head, and thus of theirs, as the source of their free unity with each other and with the bridal Church, is their loss of that unity, their fragmentation. Their failure to unite in the Church’s worship of her head is their loss, not hers. The dependence of the noes upon the Church is not reciprocal; they as her members, do not identity with her: their fall is not hers. Origen did not understand the Bride of Christ to be a “gathered church,” one constituted by its members; he knew her Head, her Bridegroom, to be the source of her free unity: her unity in One Flesh with him is “in the Beginning,” primordial and infallible, for it is his gift to her of the Holy Spirit, by which their union in One Flesh is always new.
The cause of the Church is the One Sacrifice offered to the Father by Christ her Lord, which instituted her free union with him in One Flesh. Her Lord, her head; is the source of the freedom by which she is One Flesh with him. That union is the primordial Good Creation, whose freedom is the condition of possibility of the fall. Of itself it must it must be unfallen in order to be that condition.
On the other hand, Origen’s ecclesiology, by dividing the second Eve between a heavenly and a historical Church, risks supposing the historical Church to be a “gathered Church” in the sense that her reality is constituted by her members:. This is not the case. The unfallen heavenly Church is the Mother whom Jesus must leave to become “one flesh” with Church who is his fallen and fragmented bride. By doing so, Jesus becomes consubstantial with her. Without losing the “forma dei” he assumes the “forma servi.” i.e., the form of a slave.
Origen’s ecclesiology is accurate, for it rests upon Gen. 2:23 and I Cor. 11:3. The Church’s primordial union in One Flesh with her Lord is indefeasible, as his headship is indefeasible. In some measure, Origen is aware of her infallible integrity for, in the heavenly realm, the heavenly Jerusalem, the unfallen Church, is also the Theotokos, whose femininity Origen represents as at once maternal, i.e., the Jerusalem above, and as sponsal, the Bride whose Bridegroom restores in fallen history her union with him in one flesh, which will be transformed into a union in “one spirit” with the resurrection of the dead:
So the King’s Son will, at the resurrection of the dead, contract a marriage which is above every marriage which the eye has seen or the ear heard, or the heart of man conceived.9 And this venerable, divine and spiritual marriage will be celebrated with ineffable words, which it is not possible for man to pronounce 10 . . .a marriage of which it cannot be said: “The two will be one flesh” but, more exactly: The Wife and Husband are a single spirit.11
9. 1 Cor. 2, 9.
10. .2 Cor 12, 4.
11. Gen. 2:24
Crouzel, Origen, 220. Translation from. J. Patrick, ANCL, IX, Edinburgh, 1897, p. 506
In this passage, Origen antecedes but does not anticipate the distinction between the elements of the Augustinian-patristic paradigm of sacramental efficacy, i.e., the effective historical sign, the sacramentum, and its effect, the res sacramenti, in its application to the nuptial One Flesh instituted by the historical offering by Jesus the Christ of the One Sacrifice on the Altar and on the Cross which, for the Augustinian sacramentum res sacramenti tradition, finds its final anagogical effect in heaven. Origen’s ecclesiology knows no anagogical effect, for its reintegration of the sinless heavenly Church, as Mother, with the fallen historical Church, as Bride, i.e., the institution of the One Flesh of the Bridegroom and the Bride by the Christ, is eschatological solely. It has no historical anagoge, and therefore cannot be described as an anagogical fulfillment (res sacramenti) of an effective historical sign (sacramentum). Only in heaven is the Bride prepared to receive her Lord.
Jesus’ kenōsis is his entry into the fallenness of history as the Bridegroom of the Church, her head and consequently the head of her fallen members, to rescue his bride, the fallen Church, to whom he is present proleptically in One Flesh by becoming flesh in the womb of Mary, the integral second Eve, whose relation to her Lord is at once maternal and bridal. We have seen the Socrates’ report of the first chapter of Origen’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, in which Origen had named Mary theotocos.[380] It is clear in Socrates’ account that he was shocked by Nestorius’ opposition to naming Mary the “theotocos,” for she is the mother of Jesus, who is God, as Origen had taught. However the development of doctrine in Origen’s time offered no sufficient foundation for his linking Mary’s motherhood of Jesus to the nuptial union in One Flesh of Christ and the Church.
Origen’s later application of nuptial symbolism in his Commentary on the Song of Songs accepted the traditional understanding of the nuptial symbolism in the Song of Songs to refer primarily to the nuptial union between Christ and his bridal Church. However, he appears to have been the first to lend it a secondary reference to a bridal relation to the Christ of the supposedly feminine souls of the fallen members of the Church. This reference of bridal standing to the soul has no warrant in the Catholic tradition, despite its appeal to many of the Fathers, e.g., Ambrose, who admired Origen, and later medieval theologians, notably Bernard of Clairvaux, and current theologians such as Henri de Lubac. In the latter half of the sixteenth century John of the Cross renewed this theme in his famous poem, “The Dark Night of the Soul” (La noche oscura del alma). Its spirituality has been developed by patristic scholars such as de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar. On the other hand, as has been noted, it has found no place in the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Justin Martyr, the earliest and greatest of the Apologists, applied this symbolism solely to the One Flesh of Christ and his bridal Church, here following the apostolic tradition which knows of but one Bride of Christ, the second Eve. Hippolytus, who wrote the first Commentary on the Song of Songs, followed him in this. It should be kept in view that the head of a substance subsists in that substance, from which it must follow that Jesus, the head of the nuptial substance, the One Flesh, cannot be in nuptial union with a multitude of souls, whereby he would be the Bridegroom, the head, of each, without postulating the substantial standing of each soul and his immanence in it, which is absurd. Apart from this consideration, Jesus’ consequent consubstantiality with each bridal soul is obviously incompatible with his inherent consubstantiality with those of whom he is the head. Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs flatly contradicts theology of the Peri Archon, which anticipates the doctrine of the Symbol of Chalcedon that Jesus is «consubstantial with us” (ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν).
Origen’s Christology is inseparable from his Trinitarian theology and from his theology of creation, particularly as it bears upon the pre-existence of the ‘Intelligences,’ the noes, whose free unity is their ardent contemplation of the Logos, whereby they constitute the pre-existent Church of which Jesus is the head. Origen’s tentatively “connected body of doctrine” identifies the primordial Jesus the Lord with the primordial union (Henōsis) of his created and therefore corporeal nous with the Son, in which union the nous becomes the soul of Jesus in the moment of the kenōsis of the Son, his entry into fallen history. Within the context of Origen’s Christology, it is difficult to account for the fall, the kenōsis, of the primordial Jesus otherwise than by reference to his primordial nuptial union with the primordial Church whose members are the primordial noes. As the Head of the Church and so of the noes, he is freely immanent in their substantial community, the primordial bridal Church, for the Church is created in him; he is immanent in that creation, that substance, simply as its Head, the Bridegroom. Once again, this is the doctrine if I Cor. 11:3.
As has been seen the primordial Henōsis of God and man in Jesus the Bridegroom, and the correlative pre-existence of his bridal Church, were taken for granted by the Apostolic Fathers. Although Origen sometimes refers to the Henōsis as the Incarnation, it is not strictly the Incarnation in the sense of the kenōsis or ensarkōsis enfleshment) of the Son, i.e., the primordial Henōsis cannot be identified with the Καὶ ὁ Λόγος σὰρξ ἐγενετο (and the Word became flesh) of Jn. 1:14, nor with its Pauline parallel, the “ἀλλά ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών” (but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant) of Phil. 2:6-7. It is equally evident that anti-docetic thrust of I Jn. 4:2: πãν πνεῦμα ὂ ὁμολογεῖ Ἱεσοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν (every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God) has no application to the primordial Henōsis., More usually, Origen speaks of the Incarnation as the kenōsis of the Logos who “became flesh.”
Thus the hypothesis of the pre-existence of the noes, from the Beginning, i.e., from the “second creation,” presupposes the primordial union of the nous who, in that union, is Jesus the Lord, with the eternal Son, in a Henōsis which Origen described by the famous image of iron heated to incandescence. This image refers to the possession, from the Beginning, by the Son’s created nous, of “form of God” that is attributed to the primordial Jesus by Paul in Phil. 2, 6.[381] It is by reason of this possession of the “form of God” ab initio by the nous of Christ that, after his kenōsis, this nous, having become the historical Jesus the Lord, remains as before, i.e., sinless from the Beginning. It must be kept in view that the Henōsis of the Logos, the eternal Son, with the created noes, the full and therefore personal humanity of the pre-existent Jesus the Lord, is not a continuum, a process, it is the Event, equivalently the sending of the Son by the Father, whose terminus is the full gift of the Spirit, the Good Creation, the primordial union in One Flesh of Jesus the Head with his primordial bridal Church, upon whom the full Gift of the Spirit is outpoured, and the fullness of creation achieved.
Origen’s ‘fire and iron’ image of the incandescence of Jesus’ soul by reason of receiving the “form of God” from the Son has been read by most of Origen’s commentators as his enlistment in the futile project of providing a credible explanation of the prior possibility of the hominization of the Logos. This requires a showing of how the “substantial” and therefore immutable divine Word can “become flesh:” an evident impossibility. Had Origen intended so to account for the antecedent and consequently abstract possibility, mediante anima, of the Incarnation of the non-historical Logos, his necessarily abstract inquiry would also have dehistoricized Jesus’ humanity, as did the Logos-sarx Christology finally condemned by I Constantinople’s reassertion of the Personal homoousion of the Son, whose Person and therefore whose consubstantiality is human as well as divine. It should be kept in view that the fall, the kenōsis, the becoming flesh, of the created and therefore ethereally corporeal nous who, in irrevocable Henōsis with the Logos, is the primordial Jesus the Christ, requires that, as fallen, he remains corporeal, but with a terrestrial corporeality corresponding to his kenōsis, his reception of the “form of a servant,” which Origen looks upon as displacing his forma dei.[382] In this instance, “forma dei” appears to represent Jesus’ primordial glory, not his divinity. Whether primordially unfallen or kenotic, the humanity of Jesus the Lord is integral, comprising not merely his soul but is also his body. Further, as the head of the noes who form the membership of the primordial Church, his bride, Jesus’ humanity cannot be other than Personal.
Were Origen concerned to provide for the prior possibility of the Incarnation, he would have understood the Johannine “Logos sarx egeneto” to denote not the Incarnation (the ἐνσάρκωσις- ensarkōsis) of the Logos, and therefore the kenotic entry of the primordial Jesus into the fallenness of “flesh” as John and Paul teach the Incarnation to be, but instead he would have understood “Incarnation” to denote an abstract humanization, an assumption of a “human nature,“ a mere category. an abstract Son. Origen refused this mistake; his theology never puts in issue the historical object of the Church’s historical faith as a cosmological project must, but rather, precisely as historical, his theology rests upon the historical faith that Jesus is the Lord, recognizing in that “God-Man” the historical object of the Church’s faith, Jesus as the Lord, the free a priori, the free rational ground, the subject, of the free quaerens intellectum inseparable from a living faith. He is concerned then with the ἐνανθρωπήσεως τοῦ Λόγου, the enanthrōpēseōs, the kenōsis, of the Logos who is Christ the Lord.
Origen supposes the Son, by reason of his eternal substantiality, which is to say, his divinity, to be incapable of change. Change pertains to the accidental order of creation, not to the substantial order of God. Read at the letter, in abstraction from the Son’s Henōsis, this focus upon the Son’s substantial eternity would entail his cosmological dehistoricization, which would bar his primordial Henōsis with the nous of Christ that alone can support the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord.
This abstraction is never in issue for Origen. He understands Jesus’ pre-existence simply as his Henōsis, his Personal union, with the Logos, the Son, in which union Jesus’ nous, his unfallen humanity, possesses the ‘form of God;” but Origen makes no attempt to account for this union, as he would were his theology cosmologically oriented. Rather he understands the Henōsis to be the foundational datum of the faith and therefore the bedrock of his Christological speculation. Thereby he simply bypasses the cosmological quandaries finally dismissed only at Chalcedon. Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine is Nicene in its historicity; it is the reflex of his faith that Jesus is the Lord, sent by the Father to give the Spirit.
Further, given that the Henōsis of the Son with the nous that is Christ includes his conjoined ethereal corporeality, it is evident that Origen’s primordial Jesus is fully human from the instant of his creation, i.e., from the Beginning. His humanity, at once corporeal, ensouled and possessed of the “form of God” by reason of the Henōsis, can hardly be understood to be the condition of possibility of the Henōsis by which he exists, although some disciples of Origen, notably Gregory of Nazianzen,[383] seem so to have read him, understanding the union of divinity and humanity in Jesus to have its antecedent possibility in the immateriality of his human soul, prescinding, as the later “Origenism” did, from its metaphysically inseparable corporeality.[384]
However, probably by reason of the cosmological distortion imposed upon his theology by Eusebius of Caesarea, Origen, thus construed, is generally understood to have sought by this device the necessary conditions of possibility of the Incarnation of the Word, and thus to have taken for granted that the Incarnation, insofar as the object of inquiry, must have a necessarily abstractprior possibility. This unreflectively pagan postulate would pose the false problem of rationalizing the radical grace, ex nihilo, of the Incarnation, gratia principis, which clearly can have no prior possibility.
Nonetheless, and not least for supposing this dehistoricizing postulate to have been accepted by the greatest theological genius of the Greek Church, the false question of how to account for the possibility of the Incarnation continues to dominate Catholic Christological discussion, Byzantine as well as Roman. Origen cannot be blamed for this. He never permitted his academic immersion in the Platonism of his time to separate him from the faith of the Church. In the preface of the Peri Archon he set out the rule of faith as it was known in the mid-third century; he regarded it as absolute, not open to controversy.[385] At the same time, he presented the product of his research, his “connected body of doctrine,” as tentative, never as apodictic, but as open to question and correction, except insofar as it repeats the sacrosanct ecclesial tradition. His use of a fire-iron imagery to describe the union of the nous of Jesus with the Word has been subjected to the usual cosmological interpretations, with none of which can he can charged without anachronism. There can be no question of the freedom of the Henōsis of the Son. As divine, the Son is subject to no necessity; nor can there be a question of the freedom of the Son as human, for his humanity is primordial, unfallen “in the Beginning,” and consequently integrally free.
Some of the confusion surrounding the interpretation of Origen’s theology bears on the relation, or the lack of relation, between the Father’s production (κτίσις-ktisis) (his eternal begetting of the Son and eternal outpouring of the Spirit), of the eternal and changeless, therefore “substantial” Trinity, and his production (again, ktisis) of the “accidental” order of the finite, material, and changeable realities that are created ex nihilo. Cosmological rationality requires that the relation these “productions” be either necessary or impossible. If necessary, there follows the pantheistic universe as postulated by Plotinus. If impossible, God is the Absolute One , the Monad, incapable of relation, whether that inherent in the eternal “production” of the “substantial” Trinity by his generation of the Son and outpouring of the Spirit, or of the “production” of the “accidental” order of creation ex nihilo.
Thus, Origen’s reference to the Henōsis by such terms as enanthrōposis suppose it to identify the Mission of the Son rather with the kenōsis , i.e., with the event of the primordial Son’s immanence in our fallen humanity and history, his Incarnation, his conception by the Virgin. This identification of the Son’s Mission with his kenōsis is commonly labeled “Incarnation propter peccatum.” As soon as “propter” (i.e., because of, on account of) is applied to any aspect of the gratuitous order of our redemption in Christ, we find ourselves committed to explaining the inexplicable, the radical mystery that is Jesus the Lord. The cosmological project thereby posed, that of providing an answer to a perennial ‘Cur Deus Homo?” always proceeds to dehistoricize its subject. In the case at hand, this is done by distinguishing the eternal Personal relations proper to the “immanent Trinity” from those historical or ‘economic’ relations attending Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit. The Personal relations, whether regarded as constitutive of the Trinitarian Persons, or consequent upon their constitution, are eternal, and the cosmological consciousness immediately regards them as necessary, quod non valet, given the truth of the Johannine aphorism that “God is love.” This mentality produces a theology of an ‘immanent Trinity,” and is then at a loss to deal with the freedom of the economy: hence the recourse to “propter peccatum.”
In the course of these deliberations on the Incarnation propter peccatum, the primordial terminus of the Mission of the Son is ignored. The Son’s Mission is creative: it is to give the Spiritus Creator, as the reader has often been reminded. In fact the Father’s Mission of the Spirit is the “creation in Christ” taught in Col. 1:15-20. This Mission is a divine “production:” is therefore indefeasible. The Son accomplishes the work for which he is sent, the giving of the Spirit, and does so primordially. This work, the Good Creation, is not defeated by the Fall. It is an accomplished reality, a fact in being, for it could not otherwise fall nor, once fallen, be redeemed.
Origen’s a priori refusal of these quandaries is unique in the history of theology. His foundational postulate is the historical communication of human and divine Names in Jesus the Lord. He recognized that these Names are Personal, not categorical, and he proceeded on that basis to affirm their hypostatic unity from the Beginning. This unity of a plurality of Names in the one Person of Jesus Christ the Lord is the basic affirmation of the faith of the Church that Jesus Christ is Lord. It is also the indispensable basis of Origen’s synthesis of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine.
The pre-existence of the Son which Origen’s theology is concerned is that of the primordial Jesus the Christ, whom Origen describes as a human hypostasis rendered incandescent by having the “form of God,” as in Phil. 2:6. Jesus has this from the Son who, without prejudice to his divine substantiality, the eternal Son pre-exists primordially by his hypostatic union, Henōsis, with the human Person, Jesus, the created nous, who from the moment of his primordially unfallen creation is Personally united with the Son, thus possessing the forma Dei precisely as a human Person, as is clear from Phil. 2:6-7. Were it otherwise, the primordial Henōsis of the eternal Son of the eternal Father and the human Son of Mary would be not be a hypostasis, a single Personal subsisting at once in the Trinity and in the human substance as its head, the source of its free unity and therefore its creator. .
The creation in the Beginning of the nous of Christ did not entail the fall of the aetherially corporeal noes into our terrestrial, i.e., fallen, corporality, for creation in Christ is unfallen per se. Jesus’ historical existence in the qualitatively different, no longer ethereal but the fallen, terrestrial corporeality that is ‘flesh’ is the consequence of his kenōsis , taught in Phil. 2:6-7, and in the sarx egeneto of Jn, 1:14. It is his free historical immanence in our fallenness by which, obedient to his Mission from the Father, he effects our redemption through his offering of the One Sacrifice, his outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church, One Flesh with him, and through her, upon the whole of the fallen creation. By his obedience to his Mission, all things are made new. .
Origen does not consider the supposed impurity of our sexual conception to be the original fault which caused the Fall. He understands the sexuality of the fallen Intelligences to be the product, not the condition, of their fall. The unfallen ethereality of the created Intelligences is asexual, incapable of carnal impurity as a matter of definition. The sin of the Intelligences must be one open to them in their absorption in the contemplation of the Wisdom who is the Word, joined in the Bridal Church of whom the primordial Christ is the Head and the Bridegroom.
The eternal begetting of the Son who, as eternally with the Father, has no beginning, is contrasted to the creation of innumerable identical material noes or Intelligences, a creation which, as by the Father through mediation of the Son, has a Beginning, from which beginning one of the Intelligences is in pre-existent union with the Son, and thereby is the Christ, the head of the other noes. Origen famously described this union, the Henōsis of the Logos with the primordial Jesus, by comparing it to the union of fire and metal in incandescent iron, thus imaging a permanent union of the human Jesus with the divine Logos for whose reality he offered no account, for to have entered upon such an explanation would have been to put in issue the truth of the apostolic tradition of the free reality, unity and truth of the primordial Jesus the Lord, with the Word made flesh, with the life-giving Spirit who is the risen Lord. This tradition is Eucharistic, a memorial rather than an explanation of the truth of Christ, whose mystery no explanation or ratio can transcend.
In their pre-existence the other noes, whose unity is that of membership in the pre-existent Church, are from the Beginning freely fixed in an adoring contemplation of the divine Logos, their head, the Bridegroom of the Church. The mistake of supposing the object of their contemplation to be the eternal Son, incapable of the Henōsis with the Nous of Jesus which founds all of Origen’s theology, has prompted the adoptionist inference that Jesus, the nous in union with the Logos, is so only by an ardor more fervent than of the other noes. But again, Origen says nothing of this. Any such discussion would enter into that ultimately cosmological inquiry which supposes the first task of theology to be the provision of an account of the prior possibility of the Incarnation. Origen knew this to be entirely incompatible with the Church’s worship of the foundational Mysterium fidei, the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord. Origen rested his theology upon the historical fact of that mysterious unity, the Henōsis, which no Christian could put in issue by submitting it to a supposedly higher truth, that of cosmological rationality.
Each of the primordially created Intelligences, including the pre-existent Jesus, the nous who is in union with the Logos, has an ethereal body: Origen assigned corporeality to creatures as creatures, but the corporeality of their primordiality is qualitatively different from, although concretely identical with, the terrestrial bodies of their fallen condition. Their fall is not a loss of personal identity; rather, it is a loss of personal integrity, an entry into the mortality of the flesh, into the Pauline “form of a slave,’ but is not their dissolution: their creation in Christ is not undone by their fall.
Origen explained the falling away of the noes in two ways. The first is that of a κóρος (surfeit, satiation, satietas), effectively, accidie, the desolate boredom invading their contemplation. This was a major concern of the nascent Eastern monasticism. This explanation of the fall of the noes is difficult to distinguish from a second, described in a famous pun as a ‘cooling’ (psychō) of the original ardor of their contemplation, viz., the ‘cooling’ which follows a decline in the fervor of their love and their contemplation of the Word, the Christ, by which he may have understood the Intelligences became the souls of terrestrial bodies. [386]
Here it should be kept in view that Origen well understood sin to have no prior cause such as the Gnostic and near-Gnostic speculation supposed. He knew sin as such to be the mystery of iniquity and therefore incapable of explanation. As a matter of definition it has no prior cause, no excuse and, finally no significance. Origen’s association of koros and psychos with the fall are descriptive; an analytic reading of them is false to his entire theological project.
However described, the sinful fall of the noes is their ex nihilo degradation in being, a fall from primordial integrity. The fallen Intelligences do not lose their creation in the image of God, but their created likeness to God is diminished, to the point, in extreme cases, of their becoming demonic.[387] However, Origen’s concern is for those who fell to the point of becoming the terrestrial souls of men. The degree of their “satiation” or “cooling” is responsible for the inequalities which, as fallen, they encounter. Thus, it is not a defect in their creation that accounts for their affliction by historical evil, but their own free choice, their personal freedom, by which, even as fallen they freely choose salvation or damnation. This assertion of fallen human freedom before God, and the consequent moral responsibility of every human being, was controverted by the determinism of the Gnostic and quasi-Gnostic sects as well as by the Greek philosophies generally, whose dualism placed the cause of evil in material finitude.
Origen’s interest in positing the pre-existence of the Intelligences, it would seem, is rather to defend the goodness of the Creator against Marcian and the Gnostics, in that the fall of the noes is due, not to the materiality of a creation which, as material, the Gnostics and the philosophers insist cannot be good, but rather to a common sin in which all the created and hence material noes participate, but which remains unstated other than as κὁρος, i.e., satiation, accidie: terms rather descriptive than explicative of that failure of fervor. Only the pre-existent Christ, i.e., the primordial Henōsis of the eternal Son with the created nous of the Christ, is without personal responsibility for the fall―although here exceptions must be made for some unfallen noes, such as angels, whom Origen supposes to have been active in the Old Covenant, preparing it for the redemptive entry of the Christ into the fallen flesh: here Origen’s views are hardly clear.
Crouzel points out that, with the exception of the intelligence who from the Beginning is the human nous, i.e., the Person of Jesus the Christ by whom all things will be restored, the fall should be as universal as the final restoration of all things. However we have seen that Origen is willing to make exceptions, viz., not only the angels who are unfallen but have been incarnated to serve the Christ’s redemptive mission, but also: John the Baptist and the prophets and patriarchs of the Old Covenant. On the other hand, from a viewpoint of later speculation, within the context of creation as viewed in the Peri Archon, wherein the creation of the utterly equal noes embraces all finite Intelligences, the difference in rank among angels can be accounted for only in terms of a fallen variation in merit, whether with respect to the degree of fallenness, or meritorious deeds thereafter. This cannot apply to angels serving a redemptive mission, for they are not fallen. The resulting problem is left unresolved.
Origen knows the fallen world to be within the good creation, to be included in the divine creative decision of the Father which is at one with his primordial Mission of the Word to give the Spirit. In the fallen world, this Mission must be redemptive, for it is the Mission of the head, the source of the free unity of the created universe by the restoration of its lost pneuma. This restoration is the Gift of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus the Lord poured out upon the Church and, through her, upon the world, through his Sacrificial institution of the New Creation, the One Flesh that is the New Covenant. Thus the material creation is good simply as created and redeemed: it follows that the terrestrial or sarkic materiality of the fallen souls of men is not for Origen as it was for Plato, a principle antagonistic to the ideal unity, truth and goodness of being. The resurrection of the dead is physical and real, despite the misgivings of Peter Martyr and Methodius.
Later, in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, an essentially pagan dualism does enter into Origen’s understanding of the fall for, with the exception of the soul of Jesus, the fallen human persons, as fallen, are feminine in their relation to their head, Jesus the Christ. This is incompatible with the Pauline doctrine of headship (I Cor. 11:3) but that difficulty, and the others inherent in this dualism, have not been much addressed by the current studies of Origen.[388] It is evident that for Paul, headship is a masculine office for he ascribes it to the Father, to the Christ, and to the husband I Cor. 11:3). Origen uses it with reference to the primordial Jesus, who is the head of the noes, whose unity is that of the Church. This unity was lost in the fall, to be restored in the redemption worked by the Christ’s One Sacrifice, his institution of the New Covenant, the New Creation, whose unity images that of the Trinity, the Personal consubstantiality of whose Members bars all subordination.
Origen’s ascription of femininity to fallenness, and masculinity to unfallen integrity, supposes a feminine subordination of the fallen noes to their head that entirely false to the nuptial freedom that is constitutive of the One Flesh and which is mediated by the Church’s sacramental worship. Paul’s assertion of the headship of the husband with respect to his wife bars such inference, for it rests upon the primary Headship of the Father. Just as his consubstantiality with the Son and the Spirit bars any Trinitarian subordination, and just as the Son’s consubstantiality with us in the New Covenant bars any subordination of those whom he has redeemed, so also does the husband’s headship of his wife bar her subordination to him.
Origen ignores these considerations in the development of his spirituality in the Commentary on the Song of Songs, and in the two homilies on the Song of Songs which supplement that extended work, of which less than half survives. The anti-sacramental portent of this dualistic spirituality has been pointed out; see Vol. III, endnotes 52, 120, 252. It can only support the anti-sacramentality which is powerfully effective in the contemporary assault upon the liturgical significance of masculinity and femininity which is inseparable from the Church’s Eucharistic worship, her celebration of Christ’s victory over death by his institution of the One Flesh of the Bridegroom and the bridal Church, the New Covenant.
In sum, the union of Christ with his bridal Church in One Flesh suffices to dismiss the notion of a multiplicity of brides of Christ latent in the ‘secondary’ attribution of that nuptial standing to the pious fallen human soul. The immediate intimacy of the Church’s union with her Lord has its analogue in sacramental marriage, but the One Flesh permits no comparatives. The Christ has but one Bride, the Church. His defined consubstantiality “with us” (ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν) [389], is alone consistent with Origen’s Christology of Christ the Head; it bars the subordinationism inherent in the masculine-feminine dualism of the Commentary on the Song of Songs. That pagan interpretation of the masculine-feminine relation as mutually antagonistic was transcended in the good creation, in the One Flesh of the New Covenant. Unfortunately, it still distorts Catholic spirituality. Because Origen developed the dualism which his Commentary on the Song of Songs reads into nuptial symbolism of the Church’s liturgy ten or a dozen years after his composition of the Peri Archon, that dualism does not enter into the major themes of that work’s theology, paramount among them the goodness of the substantial and accidental orders of the Father’s ktisis, i.e., the generation of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit, and the primordial creation in Christ of the physical universe.
As created good and very good, the physical world images its Trinitarian source, the Father’s Mission of the Son to give the Spiritus Creator. Man’s trial on earth is to remember always not only that the creatures which compose it image their Creator, but to remember as well that their goodness and truth is precisely their imaging of their creator. It is the continuing temptation of fallen humanity to seek the goods of creation as though they possess an independent or autonomous significance and value. This quest isolates both the seeker and the sought from their actual significance and value, the love of God which gave both their enduring truth and goodness. It is in this moral context that the fallen world is a testing ground. The primordial fall was not the Creator’s abandonment the good creation, for the Lord is with us until the end of the world, as its Beginning and its End. Because he is thus present to us, we have the opportunity, the freedom in Christ, in the Church, to return to that unity with the Father, the Son and the Spirit that is the fulfillment of our creation, viz., our return to the Father, to our Source.
The free refusal of this transcendent unity and truth is the meaning of sin for Origen. This moral doctrine presupposes the sacramentality of history and of the physical universe for, as freely created, it has a free intelligibility, a free beauty, whose personal appropriation is personal entry into the uniquely salvific because sacramental significance of the fallen creation, which has no other.
Origen famously described this union by comparing it to the union of fire and metal in incandescent iron, thus imaging a permanent union (Henōsis) of the human Jesus with the divine Logos, of which he offered no account. For Origen to have entered upon such a project would have been to put in issue the reality, unity and truth of the primordial union of the fullness of divinity and of humanity in Jesus the Lord, the Word made flesh, and the unity of the life-giving Spirit, the risen Lord, the Alpha and the Omega.
In their pre-existence the other noes, like their head, (for their unity is that of the pre-existent Church) are freely fixed in an adoring contemplation of the divine Logos, which has prompted the further adoptionist inference that the nous in union with the Logos can be so only by an ardor more fervent than the other noes attained. But again, Origen says nothing of this: its discussion would enter into that ultimately cosmological inquiry whose presupposition is the prior possibility of the Incarnation, which is obviously incompatible with the Mysterium that is Jesus the Lord.
Each of the Intelligences, including the human nous in primordial union with the Logos, the pre-existent Jesus, has an “ethereal” body, i.e. an integral corporeality, not subject to the conditions of fallenness, such as mortality, nor, as we have seen, sexuality, although the primordial Jesus is the head of the bridal Church, hence the Bridegroom. . Origen assigned corporeality to creatures as creatures, but their primordial or pre-existent corporeality is qualitatively different from, although personally identical with the terrestrial bodies of the fallen noes, whose fall Origen described in the aforementioned famous pun, as a cooling of the ardor of their contemplation of the Logos in such wise as to lower their dignity from nous to psyche by way of “psychō” (cooling). It is possible that Origen held the “cooling” of the original ardor of their contemplation of the Word to have forced the falling of the Intelligences to become the souls of terrestrial bodies. On the other hand, Origen’s interest in positing the pre-existence of the Intelligences, it would appear, was not to account for the occurrence of the “cooling” occurrence but to describe it, quite as his heated iron image of the Henōsis is a description, not an explanation. He is here intent upon defending the goodness of the Creator and his creation against the dualism of Marcian and the Gnostics, by stressing that the fall of the noes is not due to the materiality of a creation which dualists understand to be the principle of evil, concluding on that basis that creation insofar as material cannot be good. Origen rejects this dualist inference, insisting that their fall, however described, is due to the personal misuse of free responsibility, a sin common sin to all the noes, but the character of which remains obscure. It is evidently simultaneous, for it amounts to the fall and fragmentation of the primordial Church without remainder. The possible exceptions to the fall which Simonetti has proposed pertain to non-human logika, for the noes are the Church, and their fall is the fall of the Church, qua tale.
As Origen reconsiders all this later on, in the Commentary on the Song of Songs, the fall of the noes will become a fall of their immaterial souls into femininity and into a consequently bridal relation to their Redeemer. The resulting incongruities have been sufficiently remarked. Origen supposes some unfallen Intelligences, such as angels, to have been active in the Old Covenant, preparing it for the redemptive entry of the Christ into the fallen flesh. Origen’s view of them is hardly clear, for only the pre-existent Christ, the primordial Henōsis of the Son with his human nous, is without personal responsibility for the fall.
If we take Origen’s undoubted genius seriously, it is evident that his theology of the Incarnation rests upon his recognition of the communication of idioms implicit in the Church’s faith in the Christ: viz., in Jesus the Lord, in whom the divine and the human are at one.[390] This was an Alexandrine emphasis well before the outbreak of the Arian heresy, in the hymnody and preaching which gave Mary the title of Theotokos.[391] Origen understood, as had the Apostolic Fathers, that Jesus pre-exists his kenōsis, his becoming “flesh” in Mary’s conception of her Lord; this is the integrally free union in One Flesh of the primordial Church with her Lord that initiates the economy of our salvation. His pre-existence is primordial, that of the head of the primordial Church, which requires her primordial pre-existence as well.
Origen insisted on the distinction between the humanity and the divinity of Christ “after” the kenōsis -Incarnation, which rules out any monophysism in his Christology. As Tertullian had done, he maintains that Jesus’ humanity and his divinity are distinct; however, for Origen, they are distinct as hypostases, not as “natures,” although as first deployed in the Apologeticus, the “duae naturae” in the “una Persona” of the Christ have the substantiality of the “una natura, tres personae” of the Trinitas. In the Apologeticus, Tertullian does not understand the “natures” of Christ to be abstract: as historical, they cannot but be Personal.
For Origen, the divine and a human hypostases of the Lord, while remaining distinct, are joined in the Henōsis, the Personal subsisting unity that is Jesus. Origen did not attempt to explain this unity. He simply termed it a union, Henōsis. It is clearly not a moral union; Origen does not envision Jesus’ unity as a koinonia, a community of hypostases. Neither does he understand the human hypostasis of the Christ to be dominated by the Logos (i.e. by the Logos acting in the Henōsis as the divine Hegemonikon supplanting the human hegemonikon, the soul of Christ) whereby the Logos would be the real mediator between the Father and humanity. This is the error of the Apollinarian monophysism which rejects the distinction between the Son and the primordial human nous of Jesus upon which Origen insists. There are passages in Origen which may be appear to regard Christ’s humanity as nearly if not quite divinized by its union with the Logos, so as to make person of Christ to be simply the Logos, no longer a man, but once again this monophysite dehumanization of the Christ is barred by Origen’s basic and normative hypothesis of Christ’s Henōsis, the hypostatic Personal unity wherein his hypostatic divinity and humanity remain distinct, unmixed, and continue to be distinct within his subsistent Henōsis before and after his Ascension.
It is not surprising that Origen’s Christology should occasionally exhibit a tension between his faith in Jesus the Lord, and the influence upon him of the cosmological postulates common to the pre-Nicene theology. Nonetheless, the articulation of the “connected body of doctrine” which his theology intends is normed always by the faith that Jesus is the Lord. Such obscurities as it contains are clarified only by reference to that criterion. Critical recourse to the influence of Platonism upon his theology is of course warranted, but that influence can not be read as decisive apart from abandoning the communication of idioms, the Henosis, upon which he grounds theology. He is not a “Platonist manqué,” as Augustine has mistakenly been described.
As with Tertullian’s, Origen’s Christology is criticized for the subordinationism long read into his Trinitarian theology, as it has been read into practically all pre-Nicene theology. However, Origen insisted upon the substantial divinity of each of the Trinitarian Persons. His inability to decide upon mode of the Spirit’s origin from the Father did not arise out of subordinationist considerations, but out of the dearth of information in the tradition available to him. However he is clear that Father’s “creation” of the Spirit is also a relation of the Spirit to the Son. Crouzel points out that more than a century elapsed after Origen’s death before the Pneumatomachian heresy forced the development of the doctrine of the divinity of the Spirit. Even at I Constantinople the Holy Spirit was not affirmed to be homoousios with the Father, although this omission was without doctrinal significance, given that Council’s definition of the Holy Spirit’s full divinity.
The reputation of Origen, beyond question the greatest of the pre-Nicene theologians, has suffered from the bowdlerization of his Peri Archon by Eusebius of Caesarea, who deformed that brilliant speculative integration of the apostolic tradition of the Church’s faith into a pedestrian conformity to his own inability to assimilate Origen’s systematic rejection of cosmological rationality.
A century after Origen’s death ca. 254, the monastic exploitation of Eusebius’ reduction of Origen’s historical speculation to a trite subordinationism, notably by Evagrius of Pontus, developed into the “Origenism,” whose errors, falsely attributed to Origen, were condemned in the sixth century by a Synod of Constantinople (543), and a decade later by the Second Council of Constantinople (553) .[392].
Eusebius of Caesarea was born “shortly after 260, about a decade after Origen died.”[393]. In his youth he was one of a group of young men whose devotion to theology of Origen had gathered them around Pamphilus, a learned priest of Caesarea, the son of a wealthy family, whose wealth had permitted him to spend some years in Alexandria, studying under Pierius, who was then directing the School of Alexandria. There Pamphilus became a disciple of Origen, and remained one to his death. Pamphilus was ordained to the priesthood on his return to Caesarea, and undertook the task which would occupy him until his death. His wealth permitted him to acquire, and greatly to enlarge, the library Origen had established in Caesarea. It contained Origen’s Tetrapla as well as his vast Hexapla, probably the only manuscript of that enormous exegetical achievement. These works were the basis of Pamphilus’ life work: the copying of Scriptural texts, largely from the Heptateuch, and the copying as well of many of Origen’s works. He distributed these to biblical students such as Eusebius, who had gathered around him in what amounted to a revival of the Didaskaleon which Origen had founded in Caesarea, and of which we know largely through the Gregory Thaumaturgus who, fascinated by Origen’ eloquence, learning and faith, studied under him at Caesarea for seven or eight years. Under Pamphilus, Caesarea became once again a center of biblical scholarship and of the study of Origen’s theology, in both of which Eusebius was happily engaged. Sometime during this period he was ordained to the priesthood.
This pleasant association of scholars was broken by the Diocletian persecution, which had begun in 303. Late in 307, Pamphilus was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. During the less than two years of his imprisonment, with the assistance of Eusebius, he wrote his defense of Origen’s orthodoxy, the five volumes of the Apology for Origen, to which Eusebius later added a sixth. Early in 309, during the continuation of the Diocletian persecution under Galerius, Pamphilus was executed, together with the men of his household who had been imprisoned with him. Pamphilus left his library and, in effect, the direction of the school he had founded, to Eusebius, his devoted disciple and collaborator, who took his name, to become Eusebius Pamphili, possibly because of his legal adoption by Pamphilus.[394]
As a disciple of the martyred Pamphilus and, at one remove, a disciple of Origen, Eusebius continued his study of Origen’s theology and, at about the same time, began the composition of the Ecclesiastical History, which he probably finished in the last decade of the third century, before the Diocletian persecution began.[395] Our concern here is rather with his Platonizing distortion of Origen’s theology than with his historical work, although that made his reputation, and contributed powerfully to his theological and personal authority. Its success may well have accounted for his appointment to the See of Caesarea at the end of the Diocletian persecution, when its succession was contested.
Eusebius possessed at once an extraordinary energy and the best library in the Orient. He read omnivorously, and wrote voluminously. While his Greek style was not much admired, his academic diligence soon left him without peers in learning in the Orient. However, he had little imagination, and less speculative talent. He was unable to enter into Origen’s frame of reference, so completely alien to the ‘commonsense’ cosmological rationality of the Middle Platonism which he had internalized uncritically as the single and sole possible criterion of what can be true and real.
It is likely that Pamphilus’ study of Origen’s works under Pierius had so focused upon his exegesis and his spirituality as to have left Pierius also with little or no grasp of theology of the Peri Archon. It is possible that Pamphilus absorbed an unreflective subordinationism from his study under Pierius, but there is no evidence of it and considerable reason to doubt it.[396] Eusebius’ cosmological orientation is not the product of study and reflection; its presentation in his works is spontaneous and entirely uncritical. But however this may be, as Kelly and Hanson have shown, Eusebius trimmed the Church’s doctrinal tradition to fit the cloth of the dogmatic monism of the Middle Platonic cosmology. While Origen had rejected Platonism as no wisdom at all, rather an obstacle than an aid to his theology, Eusebius held it to be the sole criterion of reality and truth as such, and imposed it upon Origen’s theology.
Middle Platonism forbade as irrational what Origen, following the apostolic tradition, affirmed as indispensable: i.e., the absolute, unqualified unity of the Trinitarian God, the community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Origen had termed this unity substantial, “mia ousia ,” but Eusebius knew better. His Platonism required that the Father be the one God in the sense of constituting the divine unity. Thus for Eusebius, the Father is God as the absolute Monas, not as Origen taught, the eternal Begetter of the consequently eternal Only-Begotten Son, and the eternal Source of the consequently eternal Holy Spirit. For Origen the Father is Father simply by his eternal begetting of the Son, as the Son and is Named by his eternal begetting, and the Spirit is Named by his eternal procession from the Father, his eternal Source. Origen was uncertain whether or not the eternal Procession of the Spirit is a begetting, but he had no doubt of the eternity of his Procession, nor of his consequent divinity. The Father, as the immanent Head of the Trinity, is indeed the Godhead, but only in the sense of I Cor. 11:3, viz., as the Head of the Triune God, the Trinity. It is thus that the Father is the etermal Source of its free unity, in which He subsists. Thus also Jesus, the Son, is the primordial (not eternal) Source of the “One Flesh,” the free unity of the creation in which he subsists at once as its Beginning, its End, and its Head, for as Personally human he is the source of the free unity of his nuptial union with his Bridal Church, i.e. the New Covenant, in which, One Flesh with her, he subsists (I Cor. 11:3).
Eusebius’ uncritical cosmological identification of the Father with the divine unity, the One God which could not but be substantial, forced his subordinationist interpretation of the Trinity, primarily of the Son, but yet more so of the Holy Spirit, whose reality he held to be less than that of the Son. Thereby Eusebius read Origen’s treis hypostaseis, by which Origen designated the divine Members of the substantial Trinity— as treis ousia, which is to say, as three distinct substances, linked by a order (ταχἱς) of subordination.
For Eusebius, the Son had a positive relation to the Father simply as begotten, but not as eternally begotten. Origen had thrice denied of the Son that “there was when he was not,” but that made no sense to Eusebius for whom the Son must be less than his Source, less than divine. There could be no question of accepting the substantial unity of the Trinity which Origen had taught, nor the consequent consubstantiality of the Son and of the Spirit with the Father which Origen had also taught. Eusebius regarded the Holy Spirit as thus further subordinate, i.e., as thus subordinate to the Father by way of his subordination to the Son, as to approximate a creaturely standing. Origen had hesitated over the manner of the Spirit’s “production” (ktisis) by the Father, but he was very clear that the Father is the eternal Source, with the Son, of the Spirit.
Whatever excellence might attend the being of the Son, whatever historical titles might be given him, Eusebius was certain that he could not be divine for, as begotten, he was distinct from the divine substance, the Father. This conviction barred Eusebius’s acceptance of Origen’s doctrine of the Father’s eternal begetting of the eternal Son, for only God, i.e., the divine substance who is the Father, is substantially divine, substantially eternal. Where Origen had attributed substantial reality, i.e., divinity, to the distinct hypostases of the Son and the Spirit because of their eternal “production” by the Father, Eusebius, as a devout Middle Platonist, refused this attribution. Once the divine substance is identified with the Father, it must follow that what is not the Father is not divine.
This subordinationism left Eusebius with an aberrant, dehistoricized Christology, together with an inability to account for the divinity of the Spirit. Given his dogmatic monism, it could not be otherwise. From that stance, no historical title can then apply to the object of the Church’s faith. Its assertion that Jesus Christ is Lord is acceptable to Eusebius only if Jesus is understood not be divine. Having denied the eternal generation of the Son, Eusebius had already radically dehistoricized the titles of Jesus. The truth of the ascription to him of such terms as Son, Anointed (King), Lord, even his Personal name, “Jesus,” depends on his being substantially distinct from, other than, less than, divine, for the divine is the absolute and ineffable divine Monas, the Absolute, to whom no historical title can apply.[397] When “Father” is no longer a relative Name, designating his Personal relation to the eternal Son, the title has no historical content; it becomes mythical, patriarchal in the henotheistic sense of the stories recited of Zeus or Jupiter, which could not survive the “discovery of mind” by the sixth century Eleatics. Their logic, perhaps anticipated by ‘Pythagoras,’ revealed what the myths had obscured, the problem of the one and the many, the irresolvable tension between the monad and the dyad, the divine and the demonic. The henotheistic myths had recognized the same tension, but as between the sexes, and between the greater and the lesser divinities, e.g., between Zeus and the Titan Prometheus. The former tension was liturgically resolved by marriage,[398] the latter knew no resolution other than a flight from history.
This failure of the myths to resolve the radical tension between the one and the many is repeated by the Eleatic cosmology and its later variants. The absolute unity of the cosmological divinity, the Monas, cannot survive an extrinsic relation. This the Middle- and Neoplatonic divinity is the absolute, ineffable and unique divine Self, locked in immanence, impervious to communication, incapable of any contact with history. Eusebius’ as-of- course commitment to Middle Platonism requires that the eternal Son, the subject of the Incarnation, be subordinate to the divine substance, the Father-Monas, and consequently not divine, and not eternal: thus Eusebius understood the Son to have had a beginning. Here Eusebius deliberately “corrected” Origen’s theology, in which the Son is begotten ab aeterno by the Father, by which eternal begetting the Son is consubstantially divine, and “Father” becomes a relative Name, that of the Head of the Trinitarian Substance, and therefore a Member of the Trinity. Origen’s grasp of this Pauline insight is the measure of his genius. Eusebius obscured it for all of his disciples: i.e., for most of the Oriental bishops of the fourth century.
By reason of his close association with the martyred Pamphilus, by his own unrivalled exegetical learning, by the publishing of his invaluable and finally by becoming the bishop of Caesarea ca. 313, Eusebius, the unquestioned authority on Origen, particularly his exegesis, but also his theology, was able to impose his subordinationism upon the other Oriental bishops. His reputation as the primary authority on Origen’s works permitted him to corrupt Origen’s foundational Trinitarian insight, viz., that the divine unity, substantial and absolute, mia ousia , is the Trinitarian Community of the treis hypostaseis, Father, Son and Spirit. Eusebius subordinated this free truth, simply that of the apostolic tradition of the One God and three divine Persons, to the cosmological determinism of his Middle Platonism.
This cosmology admits no concrete distinction between ‘person’ and ‘substance,’ and consequently cannot reconcile Origen’s designation of the Father, the Son and the Spirit as “treis hypostaseis” with his affirmation of the substantial unity, “mia ousia ,” of the Trinitarian Godhead. Henceforth, the Oriental bishops under Eusebian influence would understand the “treis hypostases” as three distinct substances, tres ousias. In this subordinationist format, the Son became a substance distinct from and less than the Father, no longer eternally generated by the Father, thus not eternal, not substantially divine.
Under the same auspices, Origen’s third Trinitarian “hypostasis,” the Spirit, also ceased to be divine. Transformed from a consubstantial Member of the Trinity, the Spirit became a yet more subordinate substance. He does not proceed eternally from the Father, thus his Personal relation to the Father fails, whereby either he becomes identical with the Father (who as God is ‘Spirit’) or becomes simply a creature. On either option, the binitarianism with which Eusebius has been charged was certainly waiting in the wings.
Eusebius’ major impact upon theology was so to have corrupted Origen’s treis hypostases, mia ousia vocabulary as to make it unusable for orthodox purposes. Once Origen’s “treis hypostases” became commonly deployed within the subordinationist context imposed upon it by Eusebius, its corollary, Origen’s affirmation of the substantial unity of the Trinity, “mia ousia ,” could only be read as a rejection of the subordinationist Eusebian orthodoxy and, in that context, only as a Sabellian denial of the Personal distinctions within the Trinity. Although at the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius reluctantly accepted the Nicene Creed rather than be condemned for failing to do so, it contradicted his basic convictions. He was soon able to convince Constantine of Arius’ orthodoxy, and to persuade him to seek Athanasius’ agreement. This he failed to obtain, but Athanasius’ refusal of the imperial request established a tension between him and Constanmtine of which Eusebius of Caesarea and his namesake of Nicomedia took full advantage.
Thus reinforced, Eusebius, his minions and his disciples, proceeded to persecute as “Sabellians” such Nicene loyalists as Eustathius of Antioch, Athanasius and particularly Marcellus of Ancyra, whose “Spirit Christology” Eusebius bitterly condemned and entirely misunderstood. Marcellus, condemned in 336, was succeeded by Basil, henceforth Basil of Ancyra. Eusebius’ success in deposing Eustathius and Marcellus had established that subordinationist reading of Origen which would prevent Basil of Ancyra from understanding the Nicene Creed and which, after his meliorist “homoiousian” revision of the Eusebian subordinationism at the quasi-Council of Ancyra in 358, would continue to bar any acceptance of the Nicene Creed by his followers. Their condemnation of the Creed rested invariably upon an uncritical commitment to the Trinitarian subordinationism inculcated by Eusebius, whose identification of the Father with the divine substance forced the homoiousian interpretation of the Creed as Sabellian, for within the Eusebian cosmological context the divine unity was otherwise unintelligible. Basil of Ancyra fell afoul of the imperial theology pronounced at Constantinople in 360, was deposed and exiled; during his exile, he fell into the hands of emperor Julian the Apostate, who executed him in 362.
Basil of Caesarea, consecrated bishop of Cappadocian Caesarea in 370 at the age of forty, had by 363 become a leader of the homoiousian party under Meletius in Antioch, evidently overriding the influence of Diodore upon Meletius. for it would be another fifteen years before Meletius, as bishop of Antioch, would appoint Diodore to the See of Tarsus.
Basil of Caesarea’s approval of the melding of the Nicene definition of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. with the hommoiousian subordination of the Son to the Father, as asserted by Meletius’ Council of Antioch in 363, conforms to his rejection of the Nicene doctrine of the substantial unity of the Trinity, and therefore is consistent with his avoidance of any assertion of the Personal homoousion of the Son and, consequently, of the Holy Spirit.. Basil’s acceptance of this incoherence witnesses to the continuing influence of the Eusebian subordinationism upon Basil’s theology. Throughout his life he remained loyal to Basil of Ancyra’s homoiousian compromise with the Arian homoean doctrine.[399] His undertaking, spelled out in his Letter 38― whether he or his brother Gregory of Nyssa wrote it―to refine and re-establish the Trinitarian usage of “mia ousia ” and “treis hypostases,” could not but fail. Having never grasped the Trinitarian corollary of the Nicene “homoousios,” viz., the substantial unity of the Trinity, he was never in a position to understand that the Council of Nicaea had used “ousia ” and “hypostasis” as equivalent designations of the substantial Trinitarian unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Consequently he was unable to understand that Athanasius’ long insistence upon “mia hypostasis” and the equivalent insistence by Eustathius of Antioch upon “mia ousia,” upheld precisely the same Nicene orthodoxy, the Son’s Personal homoousion with the Father.
Basil never grasped this precision; his finally subordinationist homoiousian theology had always read the Nicene homoiousion of the Son with the Father as substantial rather than Personal―which is to say, as consistent with the subordinationism exemplified by Arianism, which the Council of Nicaea had condemned in toto.[400]
Eustathius, formerly the bishop of Boroea, was appointed early in 325 to the Metropolitan See of Antioch, by a Council presided over by Constantine’s advisor, Ossius of Cordoba, then nearly sixty years of age. At that time, Ossius was Constantine’s entirely anti-Arian theological advisor. He drew up a credal document for the Council, and required that the 59 bishops present subscribe to it. Three, including Eusebius of Caesarea, refused and were provisionally excommunicated, a sentence subject to confirmation by the Council of Nicaea, which met three months later, in June, 325. Eusebius remained unpersuaded by the Conciliar refusal to be bound by that determinism, as is revealed in the Letter he sent to the people of his diocese of Caesarea after the Council; it sets out a most evasive reading of the Nicene Creed.[401]
After the Council closed, Emperor Constantine deposed and exiled Eusebius for his refusal to join in the condemnation of Arius. However, within two years the Emperor returned him to his favor as a trusted theological advisor, a replacement of Ossius revealing Eusebius’ success in persuading Constantine of the injustice done the Arians at Nicaea. . Thereafter, Eusebius spent his life imposing his subordinationist corruption of Origen’s mia ousia, treis hypostaseis upon the Oriental Church, failing only in the great diocese of Alexandria, whose bishop Athanasius opposed him à outrance and, after Eusebius death in 339, continued to oppose his allies and his disciples until his own death in 373.
Eusebius’ subversive “Origenism” so obscured the Trinitarian and Christological doctrine of Origen’s Peri Archon as to make it nearly irretrievable. As has been seen, finally even Crouzel, while entirely sympathetic to Origen’s foundation of his theology upon the communication of idioms in Jesus, nonetheless reveals a systematic opposition to it, thinking to have found a latent diophysism in Origen’s hypothesis of the Henōsis of Personal divinity and Personal humanity in Jesus the Lord. In this interpretation of the Henōsis Crouzel reveals own implicit dehistoricization of Christology, for it presupposes the subject of the Incarnation to be the disincarnate “immanent Logos,” in whom no communication of idioms is conceivable. This supposition is entirely alien to the Personal communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ which, precisely as Personal, is a communication of divine and human Names, not of impersonal “natures.”
The cosmological dehistoricization of Origen’s assertion of the Henōsis of the Son and the Christ, and the consequent disintegration of the Trinity, follows upon the cosmological identification of the divine substance with the Father, which identification must subordinate the distinct and therefore necessarily lesser substance that is the Son to the divine Substance of the Father. There follows upon the subordination of the Son a difficulty in accounting for the divinity of the Holy Spirit. This would trouble the homoiousian followers of Basil of Ancyra, notably Eustathius of Sebaste, for the Holy Spirit must be a still lesser substance than the substance of the Son if He is to be distinct at once from the Substance of the Father and the substance of the Son. Eusebius of Caesarea was perhaps the first to understand that, within the subordinationist format which he had made his own, the Holy Spirit cannot be divine.
This theological application of the pantheistic notion of a “great chain of being” denies what Origen, following the apostolic tradition, affirmed, viz., the substantial divinity of the Trinity of Father, the Son and the Spirit. Thereby Eusebius of Caesarea found himself so in agreement with Arius’ contemporaneous denial of the divinity of the Son that he was unable to assimilate the Nicene affirmation of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father; because it was false to his cosmology and therefore false absolutely. He fought it until he died, fourteen years after the Nicene Council. His theological monism places him firmly in the Arian camp. Defeated at Nicaea, and having signed its Creed with great reluctance, explaining it to his people in Caesarea in terms which refused its import, he was thereafter intent upon its obliteration.
In these circumstances, in which the every Oriental diocese except Alexandria had rejected Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine and his Christology in favor of the Eusebian subordinationism, it is well to recall Origen’s contribution to the Alexandrine tradition, essentially the foundational communication of idioms, confirmed at Nicaea,[402]: from which Athanasius never departed and which he refused to negotiate. His immunity to political persuasion cost him more than seventeen years in exile.
In 268, Malchion, a priest of Antioch and probably the head of a rhetorical didaskaleion in that city,[403] was chosen to lead the prosecution of Paul of Samosata, the senior bishop of Antioch since 260, in his second trial for heresy. Paul’s basic heresy appears to have been a Monarchian refusal of the Trinity, with modalist and adoptionist corollaries, the latter entailing the reduction of Jesus to a ‘merely human’ standing: psylanthrōpos (ψῖλάνθρωπος).
Paul’s adoptionist denial of Jesus’ divinity had led to his first trial by a council of Antioch called in 265, eleven years after Origen’s death. The eminence of Dionysius of Alexandria in the Orient is manifest in his invitation to attend this signal event, the first of the Councils of Antioch. Paul was able to avoid condemnation by this Council: his theology of the Trinity was exceedingly obscure, and remains so. However, this first Council of Antioch was followed by another, in 268, in which the bishops, apart from Dionysius, who had died in the interim, agreed that Paul’s doctrine was a denial of Jesus’ divinity. They chose Malchion to vindicate the Council’s condemnation of Paul of Samosata Schooled in the forensics proper to the rhetorical tradition founded by Xenophon rather than in the analytics of the dialectical or speculative tradition perfected by Aristotle, Malchion accepted the false, (cosmological) card presented by Paul’s adoptionism: i.e., he undertook the impossible task of reconstituting a priori what Paul had rejected, the apostolic Spirit Christology which affirmed without question the full humanity and full divinity of Jesus the Lord, in that unity of his Name which comprises the mystery of the faith. This was common doctrine from Justin, Theophilus, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Hippolytus and Irenaeus in the latter half of the second century; in the third Origen gave it a brilliant systematic expression. Paul’s rejection of it in the last half of that century shocked the bishops of the ancient apostolic See of Antioch which Peter had founded, and whose third Bishop, Ignatius Martyr, had died for the apostolic faith in Rome, as his seven Letters testify so nobly.
Malchion is the first to have undertaken this reconstruction for, prior to Paul of Samosata, while the monarchianism of Pope Callistus had challenged by Tertullian been condemned by Hippolytus’ Refutatio omnium haeresium ca. 335, it had raised little theological curiosity in the Orient. In the Latin West it had become a preoccupation of Tertullian during his Montanist period. His Adversus Praxean, finely edited by Ernest Evans, has already received a sufficient attention in this volume.
There is a probable link between Malchion’s rhetorical prosecution of Paul’s adoptionism and the later rejection by Logos-sarx theologians of the presence of a soul in Christ, for the Logos-sarx formula similarly barred an adoptionist Christology, although itself burdened with an inherent monophysism later to be developed by Apollinarius. However, that error should not be attributed to Malchion, who was no theologian, and simply adopted a current terminology.[404]
It must be kept in view that Malchion’s immersion in the rhetorical tradition equipped him for forensic persuasion, not for speculative inquiry; he had no systematic competence. Faced with the task of reestablishing the communication of idioms in Jesus which Paul of Samosata had undone, he attempted the impossible, viz., a re-integration of Jesus’ Personal union of the concrete fullness of humanity and of divinity, using the only terms available, sarx and Logos. Quite as has Tertullian’s musings on the same problem of accounting for the Personal unity of Jesus never put that unity in question, as Ernest Evans has insisted, [405], so also there is no reason to suppose that Malchion ever doubted the apostolic tradition that it is Jesus who is the Lord. Nonetheless, his use of an unfamiliar Logos-sarx idiom, with its implicit dehistorization of the Personal unity of Jesus, underlay his untutored effort to repair the damage done by Paul of Samosata’s refusal of the apostolic Spirit Christology. Paul denied the Mysterium fidei; Malchion, loyal to the Spirit Christology, naively undertook its reconstruction on an a priori basis, which was of course impossible. He used the term “hypostasis” to designate what is one in Christ. The notion of a hypostatic or Personal unity of Christ became the hallmark of the Logos-sarx Christology which in the fifth century would be centered in Alexandria, over against the Logos-anthrōpos formula of the Antiochene theologians, which affirmed the full humanity of Jesus, over against the reluctance of the Alexandrine upholders of the Logos-sarx formula to admit the Lord’s possession of a human soul. . The “Son-Man” formula of the Latin theologians did not enter into the fifth-century Christological controversy until deployed in the Tome of Leo to Flavian in 449; there Leo simply affirmed the apostolic doctrine of the full humanity, the full divinity and the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, making attempt to provide for its antecedent possibility.
After Paul of Samosata’s conviction by the Synod held in Antioch in 268, one of his adoptionist followers, Lucian of Antioch, a “Paulician,” as Paul’s supporters were called, who, like Malchion, appears to have led a didaskaleon in Antioch, had been condemned with Paul but, after living as an excommunicate under three bishops, finally joined the orthodox party, and is usually identified with the Lucian Martyr (d. 315), who founded the Catechetical School (didaskaleon) of Antioch. From its outset, this school, in which Arius, Asterius the Sophist, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Leontius of Antioch would study, was concerned for the scholarly and quite literal interpretation of the biblical text, and not, in its early years, with metaphysical or systematic issues. The literalism of this Antiochene exegesis opposes the allegorical exegesis developed particularly by Origen in the much older Catechetical School of Alexandria, generally held to have been founded by Pantaenus, ca. 180. Pantaenus had been succeeded as the head of the school by Clement of Alexandria until 200 when, under threat of the same persecution which martyred Origen’s father, Clement fled from Alexandria. After him the Catecheticl School was led by Origen until to 231 when, banished from Alexandria by Bishop Demetrius, he was briefly succeeded by Heraclas. Upon Heraclas’ succeeding Demetrius ca. 233, the direction of the School was taken over Dionysius the Great, who succeeded Heraclas as Bishop of Alexandria in 248, and reputedly maintained the direction of the School during his episcopacy.
The application of allegorical exegesis to the New Testament is warranted by the famous text (Gal. 4.24) in which Paul distinguished between the two wives of Moses as allegories, respectively, of the Old and the New Covenant. A non-historical allegorical exegesis had much earlier been developed by Greek philosophers to satisfy a clear need for a meliorative exegesis of the Greek mythology. This exegesis was applied to the Hebrew Scriptures in the first century AD by Philo Judaeus, whose abstract use of it, in line with the Greek philosophical exegesis of the mythologies of Homer and Hesiod, issued in a dehistoricized interpretation of Genesis. Such dismissal of history for exegetical purposes is obviously incompatible with the historical Judaeo-Christian tradition, but it has long been a temptation to systematic exegesis, Catholic as well as Protestant, and ceases so to be only insofar as allegory is understood as Paul used it in his Letter to the Galatians, historically, i.e., typologically, as a means of entering into the deeper historical meaning of Scripture.
The subsequent tension between the two schools of exegesis. Alexandrine and Antiochene, is in part systematic, as between the Antiochene commitment to the Aristotelian logical analysis and the Alexandrine commitment to Origen’s allegorical exegesis. The tension is due also to the perceived openness of allegory to fanciful, nonhistorical interpretations of the historical revelation on the one hand, over against the perceived sterility of a merely literal reading of the text, when submitted to an inherently sceptical rational analysis tempted to substitute “narrative” for history. Newman’s criticism of Theodore of Mopsuestia as an anticipation of the liberal exegesis he had encountered at Oxford is well known.[406] Early in the fourth century, Eustathius, later Bishop of Antioch, assailed Origen’s allegorization of the meeting of Saul and the Witch of Endor in I Samuel 28:3-25.[407].
Origen’s doctrine of the creation of the preexistent “souls” (for Origen, the preexistent Church) who, with the exception of the soul of Jesus and of the unfallen angels, would lose their original fervor and thereby fall into a variety of bodies was found shocking by his contemporaries, for he had ignored, as obviously false, the alternatives which had been proposed, the traducianism favored by Tertullian, and the immediate creation of individual souls without reference to their solidarity with the fallen Adam and with Christ. Origen’s critics also read the fire-iron imagery Origen had used to describe the union of the divine or “substantial” Logos with the created and therefore corporeal nous of Jesus as forcing an adoption of Jesus by the Logos.[408] Origen could have made this mistake only if he had accepted the task of demonstrating the prior possibility of the Henōsis of divinity and humanity in Christ. He did not in fact undertake that task, although it is commonly read into his Christological doctrine by his “Origenist” disciples and interpreters. Origen’s hypothesis of a union (Henōsis) of the Logos with Jesus’ ensouled humanity was thought by later critics of his Christology to require a “two sons” doctrine entirely inconsistent with his continual stress upon the communication of idioms in Jesus. Unlike his critics, Origen understood “Logos” as an epinoia, a title, of Jesus the Lord, who is, precisely, the subject of divine and human attributes, the subject then of the “communication of idioms;” Origen spoke concretely of a communication of Names, which is to say, a communication of Persons: the Personal divinity of the eternal Logos, and the Personal humanity of the historical Christ, the subject of the henōsis. The accusation of adoptionism may have been prompted by the renewal of that heresy by Paul of Samosata in the decade following Origen’s death. However, Origen had himself twice corrected an outbreak of the adoptionist corollary of the Monarchian heresy.[409] A more unlikely adoptionist than Origen would be hard to find. As with the Tome of Leo, he had no interest in an antecedent justification of the union (henōsis) of divinity and humanity in Jesus the Lord.
From the latter part of the third century to the middle of the fourth, only the Logos-sarx Christological formula was in use in the East. This analysis presumed, uncritically, that the subject of the Incarnation is the eternal pre-human Logos. This supposition held the field, even in Antioch where from the end of the Nicene Council to the Council of Ephesus, the insistence of Eustathius of Antioch and, following him, of Diodore of Tarsus, upon the full humanity of the Christ would be taken up by St. John Chrysostom, at the beginning of the fifth century, to underwrite the Logos-anthrōpos Christology of the fifth-century Antiochenes. The problem inherent in its Diophysism was the “two sons” Christology of which in the middle of the fourth century Diodore of Tarsus had been accused by Julian the Apostate for reasons having nothing to do with a defense of the faith of the Church. Nonetheless Julian had touched a nerve. The survival of his indictment was largely due to the condemnation of Paul of Samosata’s adoptionism at the Council of Antioch in 268 and a consequent alertness to any prospect of its recurrence. In fact, the distinction Origen had made between “person” (hypostasis) and “nature” (ousia) by which Diodore might have defended his orthodoxy was no longer available in the middle of the fourth century; Eusebius of Caesarea’s subordinationist reading of Origen had triumphed in the Orient apart from Alexandria. The solution of Diodore’s problem waited upon a rediscovery of the historical ousia–hypostasis distinction made by Origen. Its restatement was attempted in Basil’s supposed 38th Letter, now generally accepted as written by his brother, Gregory of Nyssa. By then, Origen’s refusal to permit the cosmological wisdom of Greek metaphysics to guide his theology had been discounted by the literal interpretation of his theological use of Stoic and Aristotelian terminology, as illustrated by David Robertson’s exposition of the incongruity of that usage by Basil of Caesarea, who has substance subsisting in three hypostases: see endnote 454.
The failure of the systematic development of either formula, whether Logos-sarx or Logos-anthrōpos, followed upon the cosmological dehistoricization of the Johannine logos sarx egeneto, and thus of the primitive and apostolic “Spirit Christology” found explicitly in Ignatius Martyr’s Letter to the Ephesians, as in the other Apostolic Fathers. The Spirit Christology understood the Incarnation as the Apostles had: i.e., as the historical manifestation of the preexistent “Spirit,” the primordial Christ, in the “flesh” of Jesus the Lord, which “flesh” Ignatius and the Apostolic Fathers following him understood to be precisely the historical Jesus the Lord, the manifestation of the primordial second Adam, who from the Beginning, was One Flesh with the primordial second Eve.
The Antiochenes with and after Diodore hesitated before this identification, for its assumption of the communication of idioms in Jesus seemed to them to assert the rationally impossible identity of the human and the divine natures in the manner of Apollinarius. They preferred to avoid the Personal unity of Jesus, stressing rather the distinction of and division between his humanity and his divinity, very nearly to the point of treating them as distinct agents in our redemption.
This dissociation of the human and the divine in the Lord tempted Origen, it troubled the ardently pro-Nicene Gregory of Nazianzen, as earlier, here and there, it had troubled Athanasius. There are echoes of it in the homilies of Leo the Great,[410] all of whom upheld the Nicene Creed, and therefore the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, but when a theological preoccupation forgets its foundation, the revelation who is Jesus Christ the Lord, it cannot but go astray.
At the Council of Ephesus, in 431, Nestorius, as the Bishop of Constantinople, was finally to deny that Jesus is the Lord, while Cyril, as Bishop of Alexandria, was able to defend his concession to the Antiochene bishops’ insistence upon the two natures in Christ only by dropping, to the fury of Dioscorus, his earlier theological insistence upon the disincarnate Logos as the single subject of the Incarnation.
The radically Diophysite party at Ephesus, led by the archbishop Nestorius of Constantinople, and the radically Monophysite opposition led by Dioscorus and Eutyches of Alexandria, were intent upon the abstract, nonhistorical divinity of the Logos, which prevented either from satisfying the emphases of the other, or of the doctrinal tradition that Jesus is the Lord. However, with the defeat and finally the exile of Nestorius, a measure of peace was maintained by Cyril’s concession to the full humanity of Jesus the Lord in the Formula of Union; this continued until his death in 444. Thereafter, under Dioscorus, who succeeded him in the See of Alexandria, and his ally, the archabbot Eutyches, the Alexandrine resentment of the concession at Ephesus to the Antiochene Christology, and of Cyril’s underwriting that Council’s affirmation of the full, ensouled humanity of Jesus by the definition of Mary’s motherhood of God, broke out in a pseudo-council called in 449. There Dioscorus and Eutyches upheld, against the Council of Ephesus, an implicitly Apollinarian interpretation of Cyril’s Christology. The “Robber Council,” as it was dubbed by Pope Leo the Great, after his attempt to intervene in it had failed, attempted to reestablish as doctrinal a radical Logos-sarx Christology. This quasi-official attempt to establish a Monophysite faith set the stage for the Council of Chalcedon, whose Symbol rejected both the Diophysite Antiochene Christology and the Monophysite Alexandrine Christology in a definitive affirmation of the full humanity, the full divinity, and the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, entirely ignoring the pre-occupation of both theological schools with the impossible hominization of their absolute Logos.
The Logos-sarx formula was already in use in the early third century. Hippolytus, a student of Irenaeus and, like him, an anti-docetist in the Joannine tradition, insisted that, in the Incarnation, the divine Logos became everything that a man is, sin excepted. More primitive in theology than his contemporary, Tertullian, Hippolytus, like Irenaeus and Tertullian, felt no need to theologize the Incarnation in terms of Greek metaphysics. Although Irenaeus and Tertullian had in a manner toyed with what Grillmeier has labeled the “two-stage” account of the Incarnation, which envisions the divine Logos as passing from a nonhistorical, eternal pre-existence into human history, both clearly rejected that dehistoricized version of Christological speculation; it waited upon the cosmologizing perversion of Origen’s theology into “Origenism,” and the consequent Arian controversy, which J. N. D. Kelly has aptly summarized as between a cosmological and a soteriological Origenism, the former an Arian corruption of Origen’s theology, the latter its orthodox expression.[411]
The Christological doctrine of Irenaeus, as of Tertullian, Hippolytus and Origen, has its foundation in a their common rejection of cosmological rationality in favor of its historical conversion: i.e., to faith in the historical Jesus. None of them had any interest in providing an antecedently impossible explanation of how the Logos, understood as the nonhistorical, eternal Son of the Father, might become historical. That way lies, if not madness, then the unending and futile controversy between dehistoricized Christologies whose abstractions cannot accept the communication of idioms by which it is Jesus who is the Lord, and by which Mary is his mother, the Theotokos. Origen affirmd the Theotokos of our Lady; Tertullian had affirmed its equivalent in De Carne Christi; the fragments available from Hippolytus’ works offer no reason to suppose him to think otherwise of her: his theology is as apostolic as theirs.
However, even at the Council of Nicaea, only Eustathius of Antioch (d. before 337)[412] appears to have realized that Arius’ rationalist, dehistoricizing version of the Logos-sarx Christology had reduced “sarx” to mere unsouled corporeality, an abstraction which, incapable of realization as a man, entailed a denial of the humanity of Christ as well as the more obvious, specifically Arian, denial of his divinity. Eustathius’ affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus (mia ousia) was no less clear than Arius’ denial of Jesus’ humanity as well as of his divinity, precisely by arranging a pre-Apollinarian synthesis of Jesus’ created, quasi-angelic “logos” with a human nature of which the “logos” would be the ruling principle, whether as the Aristotelian ‘morphē’ or the Stoic ‘hegemonikon,’ thus replacing his human soul.
Apollinarius was a strong opponent of Arianism, a firm upholder of Jesus’ Personal unity, and not only of his consubstantiality with the Father but also―incongruously―of his consubstantiality with humanity, given the deformed, impersonal, soulless human nature that he allowed to Jesus, but incongruous also by reason of the abstract character of the human nature which Apollinarius’ Logos supposedly had assumed, a humanity which, as concrete could not but be Personal but which, as abstract, could only be conceptualist or “notional,” as Cyril of Alexandria’s Christology would have it. Enough attention had been paid Eustathius’ early insistence upon the full humanity of Jesus to induce the condemnation, by the First Council of Constantinople (381), of Apollonarius’ Monophysite Christology which resembles that of Arius in its substitution of the divine Logos for Jesus’ rational soul.
The fourth century adaptation by Athanasius, and further by Gregory of Nazianzen, of the formula proposed by Anselm in Cur Deus Homo, “quod non assumptum non sanatum” entailed its reformulation: “quod non assumptum non sanatum” became “quod non assumptum a Deo non sanatum,” in order to affirm its full implication, the Personal divinity of Jesus the Lord.
The Antiochene Christology was received its definitive statement two years after the Council of Ephesus in the Formula of Union, with its dogmatic underwriting of Jesus’ Personal unity by the definition of the Virgin Mary as the Theotokos. The human consubstantiality of Christ as the corollary of his historical and therefore Personal humanity was affirmed again at Chalcedon, seventy years after the condemnation of Apollinarianism at I Constantinople. .
Even before the Council of Nicaea, the concrete, historical interpretation of “sarx” which we find in the “Spirit Christology” of Ignatius Martyr and in the early use of the Logos-sarx formula by Hippolytus, had fallen prey to the cosmologically inclined speculation of such “Origenists” as Eusebius of Caesarea, Arius and Eusebius of Nicomedia, to the point that on the one hand “flesh” could mean either what it had meant for Ignatius and Hippolytus, and later for Athanasius and Cyril: viz., the full Personal humanity of Jesus the Lord, or on the other hand, it could mean what it meant for Arius: that abstraction, a soulless “body,” whose hegemonikon, proxy for the human soul in Jesus, is the “Logos,” whether understood to be a creature, as by Arius or, by Apollinarius, as the immanent divine Son.
This confusion over the meaning of “sarx” has led historians to suppose Athanasius’ use of the Logos-sarx idiom to have so influenced his Christology as to permit no redemptive role for the soul of Christ. The fact that Athanasius understood “flesh” as the Old Testament does, and as Paul does, is little noted, although it is a commonplace that Athanasius used “sarx” and “anthrōpos” as interchangeable terms. Athanasius’ early concern for the communication of idioms is inexplicable apart from his recognition of the full humanity of Jesus, which is inseparable from understanding him to be the subject of the Incarnation, and therefore to exist primordially, as Jesus the Lord. Beyond question, Athanasius embodies the Alexandrine tradition, which knew our Lady as the Theotokos in the third century.
After Nicaea, more than forty years would elapse before the Cappadocian custodians of the Antiochene tradition, by condemning Apollinarius’ error at I Constantinople, would confirm Eustathius’ insistence upon the Christ’s possession of a human soul. Even so, the Logos-sarx formula retained its ambiguity on this point down to the time of the Nestorian controversy, when Cyril, thinking a text of Apollinarius to have been written by Athanasius, used it without intending its Monophysite implication. His subscription, in Laetentur Coeli, to the Formula of Union (433) removes all doubt on that point. Here it is well to note that inasmuch as Cyril, qua theologian, understood the nonhistorical, nonprimordial, eternal Logos to be the Personal subject of the Incarnation, his doctrinal assertion of Mary’s title of Theotokos reflects his faith rather than his participation in the cosmological confusion in which all Christology was then enmired until delivered from it by the refusal of the Symbol of Chalcedon to speak of any Son but Jesus, the historical “one and the same Son” whose full humanity Irenaeus was the first clearly to recognize “one and the same Son” of the Father and of Our Lady.
It has been noted that the implication of an Incarnation anima mediante in Origen’s Peri Archon, whose imagery assimilated the relation of the Christ to the Logos to that of iron to the fire by which it is incandescent, left in prospective metaphysical ambiguity the compatibility of full humanity with full divinity in the unity of Jesus the Lord. This imagery suggests to the cosmological imagination that Christ’s unity must be a unity of nature, forcing a choice between a Monophysite or a Diophysite Christological resolution.
The cosmological supposition that the unity of the Lord Jesus can only be on the level of nature, whether ensouled, by reason of an Incarnation anima mediante, with the implication of a “two sons” adoptionism, or as unsouled, with the consequent problem of a deficient humanity in the Lord, was universal in the East. However, Origen’s fire-iron imagery was precisely imaginative, not analytic: he had no interest in the cosmological ambition to explain the Incarnation, an ambition which in any case invariably left that unity unexplained and unexplainable. So must any such attempt rationally to transcend the mystery of the concrete Personal unity of divinity and humanity in the Lord Jesus, the Christ. As Crouzel has shown, Origen had from the outset transcended that confusion, for his acceptance of the communication of idioms in Jesus is explicit.[413]
This cosmological puzzlement over the false problem of arranging for the prior possibility of the Incarnation had inspired the Christological controversy leading to the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. Unhappily, despite its Chalcedonian resolution, it continues to dominate Christological speculation down to the present day. Neither Irenaeus’ theology of Jesus as the second Adam, nor his insistence upon Jesus’ Personal unity as the “one and the same Son,” nor his recognition of Mary as the Second Eve as the corollary of his stress upon Jesus as the second Adam, met any recognition prior to the Council of Ephesus, nor did Tertullian’s assertion of the Personal unity of divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ. Even after the Councils of Ephesus and of Chalcedon, the Eastern as well as the Western Christological speculation remained intent upon a unity of nature in the Christ rather than of Person which, if it no longer divided their respective Christologies between Monophysism and Diophysism, nonetheless prevented their “reception” of Symbol of Chalcedon.
This fixation, cosmological rather than soteriological at its root as J. N. D. Kelly has remarked, fails to understand the concretely Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father and his personal consubstantiality with us, by which he is Jesus the Lord. Such cosmologized Christological theology remains abstractly oriented, rather than focusing its inquiry upon the historical revelation, and probing its implications. Only as soteriologally-oriented does Catholic theology exist, intent upon the historical truth revealed in the rationally impossible mystery of Christ, and eschewing any attempt to fit the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord into what is already known or knowable, resisting all temptation to reducing the Mysterium fidei to an antecedent possibility, for the grace of Christ is given ex nihilo sui et subjecti; without antecedent possibility.
The information concerning Pope Clement set out in this summary is for the most part taken from Johannes Quasten, Patrology I, pp. 40-51.
Clement was the third successor of St. Peter in Rome, and may have been ordained by him. According to the Church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, Clement became the bishop of Rome in 96 A.D. and died in 102. As has been pointed out in endnote 63, supra, Msgr. Jurgens refuses this dating, maintaining the Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians must have been written about 80 A.D, in which case the date of Clement’s papacy must be accommodated to that of his Letter to the Corinthians..
Irenaeus states that Clement was personally acquainted with St. Peter and St. Paul. Little is known of his early life. Quasten thinks it likely that he was a convert from Judaism, inasmuch as his references to the Old Testament are more numerous than those to the New Testament, although this may be due to the undeveloped canon of the New Testament ca. 95 or 96 A.D when it is generally held that Clement wrote his Letter to the Corinthians. Quasten notes that the Apostolic Fathers relied largely upon the epistles of the Apostles, the foremost of whom were of course Peter and Paul .
In his Letter to the Corinthians, Clement of Rome wrote of One God, One Christ, One Holy Spirit, taking for granted, as did all the Apostolic Fathers, the primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Christ, whom Clement calls the High Priest, whose One Sacrifice is offered to the Father. He understood the Holy Spirit to be the inspirer of the prophets. Clement made no attempt to account for the unity within the one God of Father, Son, and Spirit which the liturgy presupposes. Using the New Testament’s naming of the Father as God, he simply affirms the faith of the primitive Church in the Trinity, whose liturgical expression in the Eucharist and in baptism is normative.
The Letter to the Corinthians was prompted by news coming to Rome of a radical disestablishment of the Corinthian hierarchy by an insurgent group which had succeeded in reducing to a small minority those Catholics who remained loyal to the hierarchical governance of the Church of Corinth. This scandalous assumption of ecclesial authority by men standing outside the apostolic succession required of Clement a clear and definitive affirmation of the hierarchical unity of the Church by the successsor to the plenary authority of Peter, the Bishop of Rome,
Clement’s Letter is authoritative from the outset. He takes for granted the primacy of his standing as the bishop of Rome, the successor to the universal authority of Peter. He affirms also the succession to apostolic authority of those Corinthian bishops whom insurgent party in Corinth had summarily deposed while lacking all authority to do so. In thus rebuking the Corinthian contempt for the hierarchy, Clement asserts and exercises the unchallengeable authority of his office as the Bishop of Rome, and his responsibility for the Church of Corinth, which are finally liturgical; his Letter is a doctrinal statement; Clement is not writing theology.
First, the Letter is well described by Quasten:
The document is precious from the dogmatic viewpoint. It may well be called the manifesto of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Here for the first time we find a clear and explicit declaration of the doctrine of apostolic succession. The fact is stressed that the presbyters cannot be deposed by the members of the community because authority is not bestowed upon them. The right to rule derives from the Apostles, who exercised their power in obedience to Christ, who in turn was sent byGod:
The apostles preached to us the Gospel received from Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ was God’s Ambassador. Christ, in other words, comes with a message from God and the Apostles with a message from Christ. Both of these arrangements, therefore, originate from the will of God. And so, after receiving their instructions and being fully assured through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, as well as confirmed in faith by the word of God, they went forth, equipped with the fullness of the Holy Spirit, to preach the good news that the Kingdom of God was close at hand. From land to land, accordingly, and from city to city they preached, and from the earliest converts appointed men whom they had tested by the Spirit to act as bishops and deacons for the future believers. And this was no innovation, for, a long time before the Scripture had spoken about bishops and deacons; for somewhere it says, I will establish their overseers in the observance of the law and their ministers in fidelity. Our Apostles, too, were given to understand by our Lord Jesus Christ that the office of bishop would give rise to intrigues. For this reason, equipped as they were with perfect foreknowledge, they appointed the men mentioned before, and afterwards laid down a rule once and for all to this effect: when these men die, other approved men shall succeed to their sacred ministry. Consequently, we deem it an injustice to eject from the sacred ministry the persons who were appointed either by them, or later, with the consent of the whole Church, by other men in high repute.
Quasten, op. cit., 45-46.
Quasten notes that the Letter to the Corinthians affirms another point of supreme importance, the primacy of the Roman Church:
That it contains no categorical assertion of the primacy of the Roman See is undeniable. The writer nowhere states expressly that his intervention binds and obligates by law the Christian community of Corinth. Nevertheless the very existence of the Epistle is a testimony of great moment to the authority of the Roman Bishop. The Church of Rome speaks to the Church of Corinth as a uperior speaks to a subject. In the first chapter the author apologizes forthwith that he had been unable to devote his attention earlier to the irregularities existing in far-off Corinth. This clearly proves that primitive Christian vigilance and solicitude of community for community did not alone inspire the composition of the letter. Had this been the case an apology for meddling in the controversy would have been in order. But the Bishop of Rome regards it as a duty to take the matter in hand he considers it sinful on their part if they do not render obedience to him: ‘But if someone be disobedient to the words which have been spoken by him through us, let them understand that they will entangle themselves in transgression and no little danger but we shall be guiltless of this sin (59:1-2). Such an authoritative tone cannot be adequately accoounted for on the ground of close cultural relations existing bet ween Corinth and Rome. The writer is convinced that his acrtions are prompted by the Holy Spirit: ‘For you will give us joy and gladness, if you render obedience to the things written by us through the Holy Spirit (63,2).
Ibid., 46-47.
Ignatius of Antioch, by his Seven Letters to the Churches, is the major witness to the faith and the practice of the Church at the beginning of the second century. According to the traditional dating, he died at Rome in the Coliseum in 107, ten or eleven years after Clement wrote his Letter to the Corinthians.
Ignatius centered his doctrine upon the Christ, though he assigns a place and role to the Holy Spirit. Triadic formulae appear in his writing: Christ is the Father’s thought, God Incarnate. He preexists as “ingenerate,” and as “in Spirit.” As would Justin, Ignatius understood Christ’s Sonship to date from the Incarnation. This confusion continued well into the fourth century, despite its resolution by Irenaeus’ repeated insistence upon the identity of the eternal Son and the Lord Jesus as “one and the same Son.”
TIt follows that the identification by Ignatius Martyr of the begetting of the eternal Son with his conception by the Virgin Mary does not involve what Harnack referred to as “economic Trinitarianism,” i.e., the Trinitarian modalism that understands the Triad as the One God who becomes Triune with the economy of salvation, but in the eschaton resumes the essentially monadic condition that is His ab aeterno. Rather, inasmuch as Ignatius and the Apologists who after him made comparable statements had already affirmed the pre-existence of the Christ as eternally inseparable from the Father, their failure to distinguish the eternal generation of the Son from the historical Sonship of the Lord Jesus is not a defect in their Trinitarian faith but in the sophistication of its expression. No vocabulary then existed adequate to the doctrinal expression of the distinction placed by the developed Trinitarian doctrine between the eternal “Procession” of the Son, i.e., his eternal generation by the Father, and the historical “Mission” of the primordial Jesus the Christ whereby he becomes flesh, Personally immanent on our fallen humanity. This distinction would require centuries to attain clear expression, but its foundation is evident in Ignatius’ Christology, and particularly in his insistence on the full divinity and full humanity of the Lord: in brief, in his free use of the communication of idioms when speaking of the Christ.
Ignatius’ Christology, as has been seen, is of “Spirit-flesh” type, in that he uses “Spirit” to name the primordially preexistent Christ, the Lord Jesus, whose Incarnation is his becoming “flesh” in the kenotic sense of entering into our fallenness, his “assuming the form of a slave,” as taught by Paul in Phil. 2:5-11, well before John the Evangelist, in the Prologue, taught the same doctrine. The erroneous but perennial supposition that Jesus’ Incarnation is his “becoming man,” which has even entered into the editio typica of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, has no scriptural or doctrinal support. Jesus’ beoming flesh does not mean his becoming man for he is man “in the Beginning,” in fact, he is the Beginning, the Head, the Source, of the bridal Church and, through her, of humanity and of the whole of the good creation, whose goodness is its creation in him. The importance of this distinction can hardly be exaggerated. To neglect it is to neglect its corollary, the communication of idioms by which the Church affirms that it is Jesus who is the Lord, at once the Son of the Father and the Son of Mary. That Jesus is the Lord is the adequate summary of the faith of Ignatius and of the Apologists: it is the primitive affirmation of the faith of the Church, and it forces the communication of idioms and thereby the homoousion of the Son with the Father and with the humanity of which he is the head.
In the fifth chapter of his classic Early Christian Doctrines (1978), entitled “The Beginnings of Christology,” J. N. D. Kelly, in his discussion of Christianity in the third century, makes the following prefatory observation:
In this book we are primarily concerned with the progress of doctrine within the central Christian Tradition, i.e., in the Catholic Church. Here the double premiss of apostolic Christology, viz., that Christ as a Person was indivisibly one, and that He was simultaneously fully divine and fully human, was taken as the staring-point, the task of theology being to show how its two aspects could be held together in synthesis (138-39).
Kelly, Doctrines, at 138-39.
A few pages further on, following a discussion of the defeat of Gnosticism, we read:
These were tendencies on the fringe, yet Gnosticism at any rate came within an ace of swamping the central Tradition. The fact that it did not do so was in large measure due (apart from an astonishing feat of pastoral care on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities) to the unwavering insistence in the rule of faith, as expressed in the liturgy, catechetical teaching and preaching, that the Son of God had really become man. (142)
As concerns the task of Christology, Kelly here subscribes to a time-honored error. Were that task as he supposes, i.e., a continuing effort to “show how the two aspects could be held together in a synthesis,” Christology would never have been a Catholic enterprise for, so understood, it puts the truth of the faith in abeyance until it can be seen to conform to that higher criterion of truth which requires the explanation of Personal unity of Jesus Christ.[414] Insofar as the Catholic faith is concerned, the Lordship of Jesus waits upon no prior rational synthesis. The historical fact of his Lordship constitutes the foundational Mysterium fidei whose objective truth is the foundation upon which all theological inquiry rests. As Paul has insisted, if Jesus is not the risen Lord our faith is a sad futility. It is not the task of theology to support the faith; rather, the reverse is true. Theology is a free inquiry into a historical Truth whose rationality theology can no more question than a physicist can question the intrinsic coherence of the historical data his research produces It is an ancient dictum that no science transcends its object, which is always a historical given, never to be transcended by or submitted to theory.
The Catholic theologian’s quaerens intellectum proceeds from the faith, and has as its single object the historically concrete mystery revealed by and in Jesus the Lord. The understanding sought is in fact a synthesis, but not of the revelation who is Jesus the Lord, whose unity transcends all synthesis. The synthesis that constitutes the questioner’s understanding of the Mysterium fidei is his quaerens intellectum, the hypothetical integration of what he has so far grasped of the inexhaustible truth of the mystery, as revealed in and constituted by the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ. Summarily, theologian‘s quaerens intellectum is a question directed to the Church. In asking it, theologian does not put that truth of the faith in abeyance until its intrinsic coherence is comprehended. Were that the case, Catholic theology would have ceased to be Catholic; it would be instead that search for “necessary reasons” which quest, ironically enough was taken for granted by the founder of medieval theology, Anselm of Bec. His definition of theology, fides quaerens intellectum, had been anticipated by Augustine’s consideration of time in the Book Eleven of the Confessions, In that struggle to understand, in an intensely personal prayer, Augustine came to realize that belief in God is prerequisite to understanding: “crede, ut intelligas,”(believe, in order that you may understand). with which Anselm entirely agreed. However,writing in the eleventh century, when a properly theological hermeneutic did not yet exist, Anselm still thought in cosmological terms of “necessary reasons,” and naively identified fides quaerens intellectum with a quest for a rational proof of the truth of the Catholic faith. Nonetheless, like Augustine six centuries earlier, his theology was driven by a longing for union with God. Karl Barth thinks Anselm’s quest had always been subordinated to his faith: see Covenantal Theology, vol. I, p. 289, endnotes 71-74.
J. N. D. Kelly’s identification of the rule of faith with the affirmation “that the Son of God had really become man” is another inevitable product of supposing theology to be a search for necessary reasons. That search is always abstract, always finally a quest for the ideal unity underlying an unintelligible multiplicity, a quest for the synthesis of the one and the many whose futility has been recognized from remote antiquity, and was underscored for the physical sciences by Kurt Gödel over eighty years ago. Its Christological version has long since encountered that irreducible enigma in the flat impossibility of providing for the historicity, the Personal unity, of the Son of God. The solutions proposed have always been dehistoricizations of Jesus the Lord: of these, Nestorianism and Eutychianism are the best-known, but they rest on a more ancient error, the pagan reduction of soteriology to a flight from history.
This dehistoricization has touched Kelly’s discussion of Ignatius’ understanding of the Holy Spirit:
The center of Ignatius’ thinking was Christ. It is true that he assigned a proper place to the Holy Spirit. He was the principle of the Lord’s virginal conception;4
4 Ignatius’ Ltr to the Ephesians, 18, 2.
Kelly, Doctrines, at 92.
Kelly’s reference to the Holy Spirit as the “principle of the Lord’s virginal conception” is at odds with his subsequent discussion of Ignatius’ Spirit Christology (141ff.). There Kelly has described as “nearly universal” the primitive exegesis of Lk. 1:35, which he believes to have persisted into the fifth century. This exegesis understood the descent of “Holy Spirit:” (without the article, viz., πνεῦμα ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπὶ σέ “Holy Spirit will descend upon you”,) of Gabriel’s response to Mary’s “How shall this be?), to refer to the primordially preexisting Jesus who is manifest in fallen history as her Son.
Kelly here melds two quite distinct primitive understandings of “Holy Spirit,” whose confusion by the Apologists, writing a few decades later than Ignatius, he has recognized, as he also has recognized the exegesis of Lk. 1:35 as a reference to the preexistent Jesus Christ. Kelly refers to this use of “spirit” a few sentences later on the same page. For further discussion of this point, see endnote 326, infra.
Kelly then continues:
It was by Him (the Holy Spirit) that Christ established and confirmed the Church’s officers; He was the gift sent by the Savior, and spoke through Ignatius himself. Further, the triadic formula occurs thrice at least in his letters, the most notable example being a picturesque simile comparing the faithful to the stones forming a temple built by God the Father; the Cross of Jesus Christ is the crane by which they are hoisted up, and the Holy Spirit the hawser.
Ibid.
The Apostolic tradition of Trinitarian faith as represented by Ignatius Martyr, as a decade earlier by Clement of Rome, is simply liturgical, governed by the sacramental mediation, the worship, of the primitive Church, including always the Apostolic preaching. The stress placed by Ignatius Martyr on the unity of God, of Jesus, of the Church, and of the faith, did no more than express the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth, the revelation who is the Lord Jesus. The coherent unity of the doctrinal tradition, the comprehensive synthesis in mysterio later labeled the analogia fidei, was presupposed and preached, but as proclamation rather than as apologetics, as the affirmation rather than the explanation of the Revelation given in Jesus the Lord. The coherence of each element of this Revelation with all the others was not in question: its expression, as liturgical, invoked adoration, not inquiry. The fides quaerens intellectum was still at the level of prayer, of adoration, praise and thanksgiving for the gift of eternal life, concrete in the Eucharist. The Trinity was worshiped, not questioned. The Church’s historical worship in truth, of the Personal Truth, the Lord Jesus, had and has no modalist moment: Jesus is the Lord, the Son of the Father.
The author of the mid-second century homily known as II Clement emphasizes the divinity of Jesus Christ and distinguishes him from the Father. In this he does no more than attribute to Jesus the Lord the communication of idioms inseparable from the Christ of the apostolic tradition. Jesus’ distinction from the Father is that of being his eternal Son. The author of II Clement affirms Jesus’ primordial pre-existence, referring to it as ‘spirit,” and affirms also the distinct “spiritual” pre-existence of the Church, whom Kelly understands him to identify with the Holy Spirit, but this identification is hardly clear, as Johannes Quasten’s translation of an excerpt from the Letter indicates:
Thus brethren, if we do the will of God our Father we shall be of the first Church, the spiritual, which was created before the sun and the moon;. . . Therefore let us choose to belong to the Church of life, that we may be saved. But I do not think that you are ignorant that the living Church is the body of Christ. For the Scriptures say: ‘God made them male and female.’ The male is Christ, the female is the Church. And moreover the Books and the Apostles say that the Church is not of the present but has been from the beginning For she was spiritual, as was also our Jesus but he was manifested in the last days that he might save us. Now the Church, being spiritual, was manifested in the flesh of Christ, thereby showing us that if any of us shall guard her in the flesh and defile her not, he shall receive her back again in the Holy Spirit. For this flesh itself is an anti-type of the spirit; no man, therefore who has defiled the anti-type shall receive the real. This, therefore, is what he means, brethren: Guard the flesh that you may partake of the Spirit. Now if we say that the flesh is the Church and the Spirit is Christ then verily he who has dishonored the flesh has dishonored the Church. Such a one, therefore, shall not partake of the Spirit, which is Christ.
Quasten, Patrology I, 55-56.
It is evident, as Quasten observes, that this passage was written under the influence of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. It offers clear witness to the Spirit Christology which distinguishes the preexistent Jesus, as “spirit,” from the “flesh” of his manifestation “in the last days that he might save us.” The mention of “the Spirit” in last sentence of the excerpt follows Paul’s identification of Jesus as the “last Adam, the “life-giving spirit” of I Cor. 15:45, than of the Holy Spirit he was sent to give. It is not at all evident that any of the uses of “spirit” in this text refers to the Holy Spirit. The hortatory interest of the author of II Clement was clearly the salvation of his auditors, their union with the risen Lord who, as risen, is “holy spirit.” Apart from the clear affirmation of the divinity of Jesus as the Son, distinct from the Father, II Clement presents no Trinitarian doctrine beyond that implicit in the author’s emphasis upon the necessity of baptism: by the middle of the second century, the explicitly Trinitarian formula Mt. 28:19 was in general use.
Kelly describes the unknown author of the Epistle of Barnabas, written sometime before 138, as an exponent of an atypical version of the Spirit Christology whose typical exponent he considers to be Ignatius Martyr. For ‘Barnabas,’ Jesus is God; Judge; Savior; preexistent as Spirit, a term used to name the preexistent Christ and also the Holy Spirit: there is thus some confusion of Spirit with Christ, sometimes with the Church with which the Spirit is intimately connected. Here we have the same confusion which the early Spirit Christology usually evokes among patristic scholars. Barnabas also stresses the pre-existence of the Christ as Creator. The author of the Epistle of Barnabas is definitely not the Barnabas who accompanied Paul on his missionary journeys, for the Epistle’s anti-Semitism, and condemnation of the Old Testament, bars that identification. Beyond that, nothing can be affirmed of the author although his use of allegorism suggests an Alexandrine influence, probably from Philo.
Hermas, in that curious work, The Shepherd, is heavily monotheist and moralist; he mentions Christ only twice in its nine “Similitudes. In the first Similitude, he refers to Jesus in a parable taken from Gospel account of owner of vineyard sending his Son as servant.’ But there the “beloved Son” is the Holy Spirit who “indwells” the servant, making him Son. He appears to understand the distinction between Son and Spirit to date from the Incarnation, but the Spirit is preexistent. In the second Similitude, a similar linguistic confusion appears.
The Apologists, under the influence of the Greek philosophical tradition, for which the absolute unity of a substance as such was not open to question save at the price of contradiction, understood the unity of the one God as unqualified. This absolute monotheism accorded with the Old Testament tradition, which affirmed a divine creation ex nihilo (thus barring out of hand the dualism of the pagan theologies). The Jewish tradition understood the Creator God to be the Lord of history, the God of the Covenant, who revealed himself to his Chosen People in their history, making it to be a covenanted history of salvation, but without ceasing to be the One God, the jealous God who brooks no rivals. While there are intimations of a plurality of persons in the one God, as in the creation narrative of Gen. 1 and 2, and in the references to God’s spirit (ruach) and word (dabar), these found hypostatic (i.e., Trinitarian) development only in Christianity. For Judaism, the one God has one Name, the Tetragrammaton which is all-holy, not to be taken in vain, not to be profaned by common use.
The Church’s liturgical mediation of her faith in the absolute substantial unity of God, received from the Jewish texts to which Paul had referred as the “old covenant” (2 Cor. 3:14), understood that unity as compatible with the divinity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit . Clearly this was in need of explanation. Those who undertook the explanation are named the Apologists, the Explainers. Without going into details, they were primarily concerned to account for the unity of the Son with the Father, indispensable if his divinity were to be affirmed, and at the same time, to affirm his distinction from the Father, indispensable to his having been sent by the Father.
Their explanations were elaborated in the metaphysical presuppositions of the ambient Middle Platonism, which made nearly inevitable the identification of the Father with the divine substance, of which the Son was an emanation or utterance, distinct from the Father, but always with the Father, usually as his Thought, his Logos. This level of explanation, in which the Son and the Spirit, as having their origin in the Father, are conceived, necessarily, as subordinate to him, was of course unsatisfactory but, lacking a vocabulary apart from that of the traditional cosmology, impossible entirely to avoid.
The Apologists are Aristides, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, and Theophilus of Antioch; it is difficult to exclude from their ranks the author of the Apologeticus, Tertullian, and Irenaeus, whose Adversus Haereses is his continuation of a lost work of the same title by Justin. These men began to work out a paradigm for explaining to a critical audience of educated pagans and Jews, the relation of the Word to the Father within the monotheism of the Church’s faith. Even Irenaeus, whose Naming of Jesus as “one and the same Son (of the Father and of Our Lady) became the keynote of the Symbol of Chalcedon, could on occasion use Stoic and Platonic sources for the exposition of his understanding of the Word. For the rest, they understood the Word as the Thought or the Mind of the Father, and so as inseparable from him and in that sense preexistent, and in some manner instrumental in creation. Even Justin at one point distinguished the eternal Logos, the eternal Mind of the Father, from the “real Logos,” the historical Jesus the Christ, whom he knew to replace the impersonal Stoic Logos as the Personal free font of the intelligibility of the universe,. The Apologists understood the pre-existence of the Logos who is Jesus as the Spirit Christology of Ignatius Martyr had understood that pre-existence, viz., as identically that of the Lord Jesus. The Apologists, with the exception of Justin, who could not avoid treating the Incarnation, and who may have been ignorant of the Trinity, were concerned to uphold the substantial unity of God and the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Specifically, the Apologists understood the Logos in terms of the Prologue of the Johannine Gospel. For John, as for Paul and the Synoptics before him, “Logos” is a title of the historical and human Christ, the Lord Jesus of Phil. 2:4-12,:. For that apostolic tradition, Logos sarx egeneto means “the Word (Jesus) became flesh” i.e., became fallen, subject to death, like us in all but sin. They did not interpret Jn. 1:14 as “the Word became man.” That reading of the Prologue deprived Logos” of his humanity in service of the cosmological imagination, while the only Logos with whom the Apologists were concerned is that of Catholic liturgical, scriptural and doctrinal tradition, viz., historical Logos, the Incarnate Son. The Incarnation is his passage from primordiality (as second Adam) into history: he is the “man from heaven.”. The Apologists refused to dehistoricize the Logos: they upheld the apostolic tradition, concretely the faith in the Trinity and in the divinity of Jesus the Lord. They recognized the paganism of the conviction that history cannot mediate truth, and knew that the Christian faith is a conversion from that paganism.
For Justin Martyr, the Word (Logos) is the preexistent Thought of the Father, the Father’s Nous or Mind; he is also the Father’s offspring, his child, his only Son. Primarily however, Justin’s is a Stoic account of the Incarnation. The Stoic philosophy is a primitive dualism. Its principle, the immanent Logos (as Logos endiathetos) is simply fire: material, as Stoicism requires, but as wholly rarified. Over the course of an indeterminate period, a temporal cycle, the Logos endiathetos utters himself (as the Logos prophorikos) into the preexisting matter which he thereby informs as the intelligible principle of every material reality, its “germinal logos” (the Logos spermatikos) by whose immanence in them material realities are at once open to being categorized because there are individuated and in indefinitely various ways are similar..
The Stoic dualism is a cyclic diffusion into matter of the primordial unity and purity of the Logos: this period of diffusion terminates in an ekpyrosis, a universal conflagration in which the Logos is restored to its primordial purity, and materiality is reduced to its primordial formlessness and irrationality, after which the process cyclically repeats. As a philosophy, Stoicism has clear religious implications, which may be summed up as a pre-Christian natural law: its ethical requirement, basically a conformity to rational conduct, is elaborated by Stoic philosophers such as Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Boethius; it influenced St. Thomas Aquinas’ development of moral theology.
In Justin’s thought, Stoicism is of course converted to Christianity, made at once amenable to the distinction of the Son from the Father as taught in the baptismal and Eucharistic liturgy, and to the doctrine of the Incarnation. Justin used and was influenced by Stoicism, but he was not a Stoic. He argued for a numerical distinction of the Logos from the Father, as shown by OT theophanies as in Gen. 18; by Abram and Sara at the tree of Mamre; by Moses at the burning bush in Ex. 3:14; by the use of the plural in the Genesis creation accounts; finally, by Wisdom texts, such as Proverbs 8:31.
Justin understands the Logos to be Son only after being Named, and thereby begotten, by the absolute God, the Father, in order that he be his agent in creation, and the revealer, but this with an economic emphasis, for the Justin did not understand the begetting or putting forth of the Word by the Father to be ab aeterno, but as economic or historical-salvific, thus as dependent upon Father’s Naming him as Son. At the same time, the Logos, as eternal, as the Fatther’s Nous, preexists this economic “begetting,” which Justin identifies with his Mission from the Father. Justin knows that, prior to the “begetting of the Son, the Father is never without his Word. As with the Apologists generally, Justin found Stoicism less useful in accounting for the Holy Spirit. He understands the Holy Spirit to be the inspirer of the prophets, and the sanctifier of men. but provides no account of the Spirit’s Personal divinity which, like all the Apologists, he takes for granted as inherent in the Church’s liturgy.
There is an latent subordinationism in Justin’s account of the Trinity and, for that matter, in that of all the Apologists. They tend uncritically to assume the Father to be the divine Substance. As we shall see, although Origen’s is often regarded as a subordinationist, in fact he affirmed the consubstantiality and the co-eternity of the Son and the Spirit with the Father. He understood the Names of Father and Son to be mutually implicatory, and was the first to do so. As for the second century Apologists, notably Theophilus, the bishop of Antioch, and Athenagoras, an Athenian philosopher and a convert to Christianity, J. N. D. Kelly has pointed out that their lack of a vocabulary to deal with the unity-plurality dilemma in God did not affect their common faith in the divinity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit in the substantial unity of the One God. Insofar as Trinitarian subordinationism is an explicit denial of the full divinity of the Son or the Spirit, it did not manifest itself prior to the fourth century, and then waited upon Arius and the “wo Eusebii,” of Nicomedia and of Caesarea.
Tatian, a native of Assyria, was repelled by paganis, became Justin’s student. He understood the Logos as had Justin:, i.e., as immanent in the Father from eternity, and to have been generated by an act of the Father’s will after eternal pre-existence, as Mind or Nous, while remaining in essential unity with the Father. He links the Father’s generation of the Logos, as Son, to creation. Tatian supposed that before creation, the Word or Nous is immanent in the absolute Father’s omnipotence as a potentiality. At creation, he is the Father’s primordial work, ergon prototokon, who is instrumental in creation and in the making man in the divine image, which Tatian understood to be his rationality. Tatian has less to say on the Holy Spirit, simply following the economic role of the Spirit as inspiring prophecy, the interpretation of Scripture, and the Christian’s recognition of his adoption in Christ by the Father. The Holy Spirit’s divinity is not in issue, but Tatian does not discuss his relation to the Father and the Son. After the death of Justin in 155, Tatian left Rome; his history thereafter is quite confused, but as the author of the Diatessaron his influence, particularly in Syria, is undoubted. This work is a harmonization of the four Gospels, and was widely distributed well into the fifth century. It was finally replaced by the Peshitta, the “Syrian Vulgate”
J. N. D. Kelly has excerpted from Irenaeus’ Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching a summary statement of the Church’s Trinitarian faith at the end of the second century, whose clarity and conciseness cannot be surpassed:
This, then, is the order of the rule of our faith . . . God the Father, not made, not material, invisible; one God, the creator of all things: this is the first point of our faith. The second point is this: the Word of God, Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, who was manifested to the prophets according to the form of their prophesying and according to the method of the Father’s dispensation: through Whom (i.e., the Word) all things were made; Who also, at the end of the age, to complete and gather up all things, was made man among men, visible and tangible, in order to abolish death and show forth life and produce perfect reconciliation between God and man. And the third point is: the Holy Spirit, through Whom the prophets prophesied, and the fathers learned the things of God, and the righteous were led into the way of righteousnesss; Who at the end of the age was poured out in a new way upon mankind in all the earth, renewing man to God.[415]
Irenaeus’ understanding of the unity of God is that of the Apologists, who, while literally identifying the Father with the divine unity, at the same time understood the full divinity of the Son and the Spirit to be distinct from that of the Father. This is not subordinationism. The Naming of the Father as God is the commonplace of the New Testament, as Karl Rahner has long since shown. On this firm triadic foundation the Western Trinitarian theology was constructed. Irenaeus’ contribution to its development was chiefly a matter of emphasis and clarification, not speculation. He grounded his refusal to speculate upon the generation of the Son as had Justin, in reliance upon Isaiah 53:8: “Who shall explain his generation?”[416] The refusal to speculate upon the origin of the Son was perhaps in function of his historical concern: for Irenaeus understood Jesus to the second Adam in whom all humanity is recapitulated, His most enduring doctrine, the leitmotif of the Symbol of Chalcedon, is that Jesus is “one and the same Son” of the Father and of the Virgin Mary. His theology typically reflects the Roman tradition in being historical, concerned for the Lord Jesus, his revelation of the Father as the Son, and his Gift of the Spirit. Irenaeus was not given to abstract speculation.
Hippolytus developed his Trinitarian doctrine in attacking the contemporary Modalists (Noetus, Epigonus, Cleomenes, Sabellius), and is particularly identified by his condemnation of Pope Zephyrinus and his successor, the deacon Callistus, for their refusal of the objective distinction between the Father and the Son within the divine Substance, for the teaching of which he was in turn was accused of ditheism by Callistus, who, as a deacon, had been Zephyrinus’ theological advisor, and after his death succeeded him in the papacy.
Zephyrinus had refused to condemn Modalism as a heresy, due to a perceived ambiguity in the positions taken by its exponents. Hippolytus charged him with incompetence, but blamed Callistus, as his advisor, for that papal indecision. Callistus had so stressed the unity of the Father and the Son as to have denied, in Hippolytus’ eyes, their real difference: Hippolytus, a moral rigorist like Tertullian, also accused Callistus of having abandoned the moral doctrine of the Church by his encouraging the relaxation of its penitential discipline under Zephorinus and confirmed during his own papacy. Hippolytus also condemned the papal condonation of the quasi-morganatic marriages of upper-class women with men of a lower class. The Roman law reduced such women to the social standing of their husbands. Callistus recognized the legitimacy of those marriages which, by remaining unpublished, allowed the wives to retain their original social standing . Hippolytus appears to have been outraged by this papal complicity with their avoidance of the legal effects of such marriages. His condemnations were overdrawn and Callistus’ mitigation of that juridical rigorism triumphed over it. .
Hippolytus’ importance in the development of Trinitarian doctrine is his unvarying insistence upon the irreducible distinction between the Father and Son,[417] but while recognizing the Holy Spirit’s distinction from the Father and the Son, he did not stress it. Although his concern for the Trinitarian tradition is apparent in his emphasis upon the liturgically explicit apostolic recognition of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, he did not theologize upon the Holy Spirit whether in terms of his origin from the Father or of the distinction between the Father and the Son. His stress upon the distinction between the Father and the Son as distinct prosōpa was sufficient to warrant opposition from the conservative Roman theologians of the time, such as Pope Callistus, whose focus upon the Monarchy, the substantial unity of God as God, made him suspect the flat assertion by Tertullian and Hippolytus of the real distinction in God between the Father and the Son. Hippolytus’ explanation of their unity has been charged with implying subordination of the Son to the Father, but this he explicitly denied. The quasi-Monarchian concern for the absolute unity of the one God, common to the Roman Church but already qualified by the Apologists, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and finally systematized by Origen, would be confirmed at the Council of Nicaea.[418]
Despite a literary output which has been compared to that of Origen, Hippolytus’ influence upon Roman theology soon evanesced. Greek had been the common language of the learned in Rome until the latter half of the third century, but thereafter Latin displaced Greek, and the ability to read Hippolytus’ writings sharply diminished. His major work, the Philosopheumena, was soon lost to sight, to be rediscovered only in 1842, in a monastery on Mount Athos in Greece. Western theology was Latin.from the fourth century.
Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine is integral with and effectively indissociable from his Christology. Together with his Christology it is set out in his Adversus Praxean 2, 1-4, written about 213. Tertullian’s rejection of Praxeas’ modalism in this work.[419] is written in the context of a view of the divine substance which Tertullian is the first to call a Trinitas, although Theophilus had introduced the Greek equivalent, Тρίας, (Trias) a decade earlier than its appearace in the Apologeticus. Tertullian’s Trinitas is the substantial unity constituted by the distinct Persons of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, who differ from each other: ”una substantia in tribus cohaerentibus” (Adv. Prax. 8). In the translation of Adversus Praxean 2 provided by Jurgens we read:
We do indeed believe that there is only one God; but we believe that under this dispensation, or, as we say, οικονομία, there is also a Son of this only God, his Word [Sermo], who proceeded from him, and through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made. (1) We believe that he was sent by the Father into a Virgin and was born of her, God and man, Son of Man and Son of God, and was called by the name Jesus Christ. We believe that he suffered and that, according to the Scriptures, He died and was buried, and that he was raised again by the Father to resume His place in heaven, sitting at the right hand of the Father, and that he will come to judge the living and the dead. We believe that he sent down from the Father, in accord with His own promise, the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the Sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father and in the Son and in the Holy Spirit.
[2] That this rule of faith has been current since the Beginniung of the Gospel, before even the earlier heretics. . . In this we have a presumptive principle against all heresies: whatever is first is true, whatever is late is spurious.
[3]And at the same time the mystery (2) of the οικοnomία is safeguarded, for the Unity is distributed in a Trinity (3). Placed in order, the Three are Father, Son, and Spirit. They are Three, however, not in condition, but in degree (4), not in substance, but in form (5), not in power, but in kind (6); of one substance however, and one power, because He is one God of whom these degrees and forms and kinds are taken into account in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
1 Jn. 1:1
2 sacramentum.
3 This is the first usage of the Latin word Trinitas in respect to the Godhead. The corresponding Greek term, Тρίας, had already been used by Theophilus of Antioch (§ 180 above).
4 non statu sed gradu.
5 nec substantia sed forma.
6 nec potestate sed specie.
Whether or not Tertullian is entirely free of Subordinationism can be debated; but he certainly gives us no cause to think him in any way a Modalist. In fact, it is Modalism that he is here arguing against. Nevertheless, in putting the passage into English, it is difficult to find any translation of specie that will be entirely free of modalist overtones. We are conscious of the fact that, after giving the matter much thought and finally settling for ‘kind,’ we have not done him a perfect service.
Adversus Praxean 2; translation and notes by W. A. Jurgens, The Early Fathers, I, 154, § 371;. see also Ernest Evans, Tertullian’s Treatise Against Praxeas, [hereafter, Against Praxeas] 50. For the Latin text as well as for a more extended commentary on the difficulties of its translation, see Against Praxeas, Commentary and Notes, pp. 181-231. The Introduction, pp. 38-58, provides a detailed discussion of Tertullian’s theological vocabulary.
Jurgens, Early Fathers, vol. I, text at 154, §371, 2, 4; notes at 157,
This language implies if not asserts the equal divinity of the Persons, .and the unity of the divine substance which they constitute, the Trinitas. It follows that his theology is not cosmological, therefore not monadic, and thus incapable of being read as subordinationist. Subordinationism supposes an emanationism and, at bottom, the division of the divine substance which Tertullian refused; he also refused the correlative denial of the full divinity of Jesus. For Tertullian, it is the Trinitas which is substantial, not the Father.
The Apologeticus is an explanation, thus an affirmation of the intrinsically free truth of the historical Christian tradition; Tertullian had no other interest in writing it. He accepted no challenges to its legitimacy, for they could not but beg the question, presupposing as they do a higher truth than that of Jesus the Lord, an absurdity which merited no response. The Christian faith that Jesus is Lord stood on its own as an inexhaustible mystery whose truth is the light of the world.
Tertullian’s intellectual formation was Stoic and hence materialist, but he was also well acquainted with the Middle Platonism of the time, and was perhaps the best-educated citizen, as well as the most brilliant, of a city renowned for its culture. Further, as would Origen, he refused to permit philosophy to govern his faith in Jesus the Lord, sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit. In Adversus Praxean, 27 he used indutus carnem (clothed with flesh) to describe the kenōsis of the Sermo, the primordial Jesus; he did not intend in that discussion to account for the for the Personal unity of Christ; his musing in that passage, is analogous to the “moment of reason” which Crouzel has noted in Origen’s Peri Archon II, 6, 3.[420] As is the case with Origen, Tertullian’s comparable “moment of reason’ is easily misunderstood as a departure from the apostolic rule of faith, which he nonetheless defends it within that chapter. Contending with the Monarchian Patripassionists, he writes:
Learn therefore with Nicodemus that what is born of the flesh is flesh and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.7 Flesh does not become spirit nor spirit flesh’ evidently they can <both> be one <person>. Of these Jesus is composed, of flesh as Man and of spirit as God; and on that occasion the angel, in respect of that part in which he was spirit, pronounced him the Son of God, reserving for the flesh the designation Son of Man. Thus also the apostle, in calling him even the mediator of God and of man,8 confirms <the fact that he isof both substances. Lastly, you who interpret “Son of God” as the flesh, show me who the Son of Man may be. Or is he to be the Spirit? But you wish the Spirit to be taken to be the Father himself, since God is spirit; as though, just as the Word is God, God’s Spirit might not also be God’s Word.
7. John 3. 6
8. I Tim. 3. 5.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 174-75.
Stoicism, unlike Platonism, was unable to represent or imagine reality other than as corporeal, and Tertullian often speaks in that sense of the divine substance, “Spirit,” as a concrete actuality which he regards as “corporeal,” maintaining that corpus and corporealis no more imply substantial divisibility than do materia, materialis. Both must be said of God, for whatever is real, is corporeal. As Spirit, as divine, the substantial is eternal, unchanging, indivisible―and “corporeal.” The single divine substantia, the corporeal Trinitas, is indivisible.
Tertullian understands the three Trinitarian Persons to differ by their order in the Trinity (gradus), not by greater or lesser substance. The divine substance is ‘Spirit,’ which each Person possesses and by that possession is divine. The Father has immanent within Him the Son and the Holy Spirit, proceeding from him without division yet as Personally distinct from Him and from each other. Tertullian understands that, by their proceeding from him, they are of a lower gradus, but for Tertullian, gradus implies position within an order of procession, and consequently implies an origin, a census. Daniélou shows that the linkage between Tertullian’s use of census and of gradus is of the first importance for the understanding of his Trinitarian thought.[421]
Following R. Braun, Daniélou rejects Evans’ supposition that Tertullian’s use of “substantia” is Aristotelian: rather, he considers it to derive from common non-philosophical usage. For example, he thinks Tertullian to have avoided the common Latin equivalent of substantia, viz., essentia, due to its long technical use and consequent ambiguity. Although Tertullian’s theological use of persona and substantia is consistent with the later Greek distinction between hypostasis and ousia first used theologically by Origen, whom Tertullian, by way of Hippolytus’ rendition of Persona as «Prosōpon» (Πρόσωπον), is unlikely to have influenced by his use of that terminology, which he did not derive from Greek philosophy. Tertullian uses status in a sense more abstract than substantia: it approximates the sense of nature, the congeries of characteristics which are proper to the existing substantial reality. This is particularly significant in describing the status of God the Father, whose characteristic reality is the lack of any origin. It is then tempting to identify the unbegotten Father with the unbegotten divine substantia, the Trinitarian Godhead as unbegotten, eternal, in contrast to all that is created. Tertullian rejects this consequence by placing the Father within the Trinity as its source. In this, he accepts the insight of Theophilus of Antioch, who first used trias of the divine substance.
The status of the divine Persons is Spiritus: as proceeding from the Father, both the Son and the Spirit possess the same divine status as their source, their census. This bars their subordination, their lesser degree of divinity, for Tertullian distinguishes them from the Father by their gradus, their order of their procession from Him as their source: thus the Persons are distinct by gradus, not by any differentiation in their divine status.
Consequently, Tertullian’s contribution to the development of the Trinitarian doctrine of Nicaea must be regarded as positive. He provided the vocabulary of substantial divine Unity and Personal divine diversity which satisfied the non-speculative dogmatic realism of the Roman tradition, and in that sense warranted its unconcern for and consequent ignorance of the cosmologically-grounded controversies in which the Greek Church would be entangled. The Latins had little interest in such abstract discussions: their intellectual mentors were the later Stoic moralists: Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
In short, the Western theology was content to upheld both ends of the doctrinal dilemma of one God and three divine Persons which from the second century would trouble the East and would finally force the calling of the Council of Nicaea. The doctrinal stability of the Western Church in the face of this dilemma owed much to the clarity of Tertullian’s Trinitarian formula, but nonetheless failed to persuade Zephyrinus and Callistus of its congruence with the divine Monarchy, which they continued to defend as though the divine Monarchia required a monadic divine substance: this while rejecting the Sabellian modalism, for neither was in doubt of the distinction between the divine Names which the liturgy affirmed.
Tertullian appears to have to developed his Trinitarian theology prior to Hippolytus; however, as Marcel Richard has pointed out, very little information regarding the Greek period of Roman Christianity remains. The Roman conversion to Latinity during the third century made Greek documents increasingly inaccessible and little attention was given to their preservation; they survived only insofar as influential in the Orient. While remote from each other in location, Tertullian and Hippolytus were capable of communicating in Greek, and the similarity of their Trinitarian theology is evident. The question of which most influenced the other is debatable: Evans supposes Tertullian to have influenced Hippolytus (Against Praxeas, 19, 24), while Prestige suggests the reverse.[422] Both were suspect of tritheism in Rome, by Popes resolutely intent upon upholding the substantial unity of God. However, it is the Modalists and the Subordinationists whom Callistus and Dionysius finally condemned, not the Trinitarians. Hippolytus and Tertullian have an equal claim to that title.
Novatian is the second anti-pope after Hippolytus, if we suppose Hippolytus to have been one, which M. Richard denies on solid grounds. In 251 Novatian separated himself from what he considered to be the lax moral doctrine of Pope Cornelius. Claiming the authority of the papacy, he later passed from schism to heresy by denying the authority of the Church to forgive the grave sins of sinners who had repented only at death. His schism was widely accepted by Christians who shared his rigorism; and for a brief time it seriously threatened the unity of the Church. However, Cyprian of Carthage and Dionysius of Alexandria supported Pope Cornelius; they were followed by the majority of Greek as well as Latin bishops. Novationism then ceased to be a danger to the Church.
Novation is the author of a De trinitate whose interpretation is contested. Although, following Hippolytus and Tertullian he affirmed the Personal distinction of the Father and the Son, his understanding of their distinction was clearly subordinationist and susceptible to the tritheist interpretation given the Trinitarian doctrine of Hippolytus and Tertullian. However, in defense of his orthodoxy, Novatian affirms the ineffable unity of God from whom the Son proceeds as a distinct Person (substantia prolata) who, as eternally in the Father, makes the Father eternally to be the Father. In this schema, the Son, at least by inference, would also eternal. Novation held the Son’s procession from the Father at creation to be distinct from and dependent upon his Personal generation by the Father as Son, whose Personal generation Novatian holds to exist before the foundation of the world.
Novatian identifies the Father as the source of the Son, but also as the one God. His Trinitarianism thus remains within the subordinationist format, while at the same time it asserts a clear and perhaps eternal personal distinction between the Father and the Son. J. N. D. Kelly denies that Novatian knew any eternal generation of the Son, inasmuch as he often speaks of the Son’s union with the Father as moral rather than substantial,[423] in which case, Origen would be the first to arrive at this crucial insight.
Novation devotes a chapter to the Holy Spirit, whom he does not understand to be a divine Person, but rather looks upon as divine grace. His subordinationism is not mitigated by distinguishing between a substantial divine Trinitas, the one God, and the Personal distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Novatian knows no Trinity of Persons. Kelly describes Novatian as an archaic thinker, influenced by Tertullian and Hippolytus, but one whose triadic thought is generally closer to that of the Apologists, well short of Tertullian’s recognition of the one God as Trinitas (Kelly’s criticism of the Apologists (Justin, Athenagoras, and Theophilus) is inconsistent. Novatian’s De trinitate is a meld of the triadism of the Apologists, the adoptionism of the dynamic monarchians, the modalism of Sabellius, and the monarchian stress of Roman orthodoxy. The influence of Tertullian and Hippolytus upon him is limited to his acceptance of the distinctio personalis of the Father and the Son, but his view of their consubstantiality is close to the Monarchianism of Callistus, whose initial reluctance to condemn Sabellius had roused the anger of Hippolytus.
Dionysius, a Roman priest who had been active in upholding the Roman baptismal practice against the rigorism urged by Cyprian of Carthage, succeeded to the papacy in 259, a year after the martyrdom of his predecessor, Sixtus II. With the remission of the Valerian persecution which had martyred Cyprian as well as Pope Sixtus II, Dionysius of Rome was able to resume the neglected administration of the Church. This included occasional correspondence with his namesake of Alexandria. From the late fifties of the third century, the Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria had been troubled by an outbreak of Sabellianism in the far western reaches of his diocese, the Libyan Pentapolis (Cyrene, Arsinoe, Berenice, Belagre, and Barcia). Around 260 he addressed a letter to two of his suffragan Libyan bishops, Ammonius and Euphranor, in which, he so stressed against their Sabellian error the Personal distinctions of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as, in their opinion, to open himself to a charge of tritheism, of which they promptly accused him in letters to Pope Dionysius of Rome.
The substance of their accusation appears to be that in the correspondence rebuking their Sabellianism the Bishop of Alexandria, had either failed or refused to accept their Sabellian reading of “homoousios.” It appears that they were convinced that the only alternative to its Sabellian reading was tri-theistic. The reverse of this reasoning will be made sixty-five years later by Eusebius of Caesarea against the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father: viz., that in refusing the inherently tritheist subordinationism which Eusebius had read into Origen’s theology, the upholders of the Nicene Creed must be Sabellians.
Here it should be noted that all we know of the use the homoousion by “The two Dionysii” is what is passed on to us by Athanasius, in his De sententia Dionysii and De decretis Nicaenae synodi, with some fragments from Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History and Preparatio Evangelica, together with three letters of Basil of Caesarea who, with the Council of Antioch in 363, was unwilling to distinguish clearly the meaning of homoousios from that of the Semi-Arian homoiousios. His initial criticism of Dionysius of Alexandria in his Ninth Letter is uninformed at best.
When Dionysius of Alexandria’s Sabellian suffragans in Libya appealed to Rome, accusing him of tritheism on the basis of his correspondence with two of them, Dionysius of Rome called a Roman synod to deal with the accusation. His Roman synod issued a dogmatic letter, signed by the members of the synod and by himself as Pope, condemning first the Sabellian denial of Personal distinctions within the one God, and then proceeding to condemn as well that division of the one God, as though material, which had begun with Marcian in the second century and would continue, under homoiousian auspices, into the last decades of the fourth.
Dionysius of Rome’s dogmatic condemnation of any division of the one God, sent to the Libyan Sabellians as well as to the See of Alexandria, may be thought to have personal reference to Dionysius of Alexandria, although it was sent simply to the metropolitan See. Dionysius of Alexandria was a disciple of Origen, who had died in 254 and whose Trinitarian orthodoxy, summed up in mia ousia, treis hupostaseis, was still unchallenged and would remain so for another half-century. The notion that Dionysius of Alexandria, surnamed “The Great,” could have taught tritheism is merely absurd. Even given that the charge rests solely on a Sabellian interpretation of his admonitory letter to Ammonius and Euphranor, Sabellian bishops in Libya, it can be read in the Pope’s dogmatic letter to the See of Alexandria as charging its Bishop with a denial of the Church’s faith in the divine unity. While the Pope’s dogmatic letter does not name Dionysius of Alexandria, it was accompanied by a personal letter to him, which is now lost. However, we may infer, from Dionysius’reply to it in the Refutatio et Apologia (Ἔλεγχος καὶ Ἂπολογία), that this personal letter taxed him with explaining his Trinitarian doctrine and specifically chided him for not having used the term “homoousios” in that connection. The Pope found Dionysius of Alexandria’s emphasis upon the Personal distinctions in God reminiscent of Marcion’s division of the divine unity into the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament, which was hardly just to Dionysius of Alexandria. In the Pope’s view, the Bishop of Alexandria had also appeared to have made the Son into a creature.[424]
It is evident that the Bishop of Rome, having condemned Sabellianism, did not understand “homoousios” as Sabellius had done and as Paul of Samosata was about to be condemned for doing, i.e., as a rejection of all Personal distinctions within the unity of the divine substance. Thus Pope Dionysius of Rome, in warranting the Trinitarian use of “homoousios” to denote the consubstantiality of the divine Persons with the divine Substance, while not understanding consubstantiality as had Sabellius, held the “homoousion“ of the Son to be sufficiently crucial to Catholic orthodoxy as to question Dionysius of Alexandria’s failure to use it. The only alternative to the condemned Sabellian interpretation of “homoousios” as substantial is its Personal application, by which the irreducibly distinct divine Persons are understood to be consubstantial with each other, rather than with the divine Substance, in which case those Personal distinctions would cease to exist: this is Sabellianism.
This Personal application of the “homoousios” entails dropping the monadic reduction of the unity of the divine substance to a single divine self, a “Monas” who is the Father. This eliminates at once Sabellianism and subordinationism for, as Arius would insist, subordinate Persons could not be divine, and thus could not be consubstantial with their source, the Father. As Athanasius would recognize, Pope Dionysius’ letter to his Alexandrine namesake anticipates the condemnation of Arianism.
The Pope’s stress upon the “homoousios” in his letter to the See of Alexandria may thus be thought to anticipate the definition of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father at the Council of Nicaea. However, there is a fairly widespread persuasion that the Nicene understanding of the Son’s consubstantiality as historical, i.e., as pertaining to the Person of the Father, rather than to the impersonal divine Substance, has no historical anticipation, that it was utterly novel with Nicaea, and so with Athanasius.[425] The crucial issue then is whether in fact the Pope, Dionysius of Rome, so understood it. There is reason to suppose that he may have. As reported by Athanasius, the personal letter sent by the Pope to Dionysius of Alexandria referred to the Son and the Spirit as “summed up” (συγκεφαλαιοῦσθαι) and “gathered together” (συνάvγεσθαι) into the Almighty Father.[426] This is not an assertion of the Tri-Personality of the divine substance, but the Pope certainly did not understand the unity of the One God in Sabellian or in subordinationist terms, inasmuch as his Roman council, called to deal with the Libyan indictment of Dionysius of Alexandria, had condemned both of those errors. These being the only Trinitarian heresies applicable apart from Arianism, it follows that while the Trinitarian doctrine of Dionysius of Rome may not anticipate the Nicene Creed, his emphasis upon the homoousion of the Son is the rejection of all the alternatives to it. The Pope’s letter to the Alexandrine clergy cannot be read to import the subordinationism which his Roman council had rejected. J. N. D. Kelly thinks this letter rather to have been influenced by Novatian, whose theological abreaction to subordinationism Kelly thinks to have laid so heavy a stress upon the unity of God as to approach Sabellianism. However, such an influence by Novatian upon the Pope’s letter is inconsistent with the Pope’s condemnation of Sabellius in his Council’s dogmatic letter as the preliminary to his condemnation of tritheism, and with his insistence upon the “homoousion” as prerequisite to a properly Trinitarian orthodoxy. Given Novatian’s archaic view of the Trinity, his assertion of the “homoousion” of the Son with the Father is ambivalent, for it denotes at once consubstantiality with the Person of the Father and with the divine Substance, whom Novatian understands the Father to personify. Pope Dionysius’ ascription to the Son of Personal consubstantiality with the Father is not ambivalent; having condemned subordinationism and Sabellianism, his use of “homoousios” forces the identification of the divine Substance with the Trinity of divine Persons.
The Council of Chalcedon explicitly affirms, over and again, Irenaeus’ Christology of “the one and the same Son,” with its imputation of Jesus’ subsistence in the divine Substance. He subsists in the Trinity as Personally consubsubstantial with the Father. This Nicene doctrine entails the Father’s subsistence in the divine Trinitarian Substance as its Head, the immanent Source of the free substantial unity with Him of the Son and the Spirit. The Son and the Holy Spirit, with the Father, constitute the Trinity, the One God, whose free dynamic intercommunion (perichōresis) displaces the solitary “Self-awareness” hitherto assigned the monadic interpretation of the divine Substance.
Thus at Chalcedon the dogmatic tradition has attained to the insight of I Cor. 11:3, in which Paul affirms the Trinitarian headship of the Father. It may be worth noting that another ambiguity arises from that definition: the commonplace reference to the divine Substance as the “Godhead” has a monadic implication incompatible with the headship of the Father. He alone is the head, (Ἀρχή), the source, (Πηγή), of the Trinity. This is a matter of the faith of the Church, which the antique designation of the Trinitarian Substance as the “Godhead” cannot but obscure.
Only the recognition and doctrinal affirmation of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father instead of with the Trinitarian “Godhead” resolves the speculative dilemma of the preceding centuries, wherein theologians were caught between two contradictory and equally impossible cosmological concepts of the one God as monadic―the one implicitly Sabellian, the other subordinationist and implicitly tritheist. In neither case were these implications accepted by the orthodox bishops, who were orthodox simply as guided by the rule of faith, not by the implications of their cosmological imaginations.
The Pope, Dionysius of Rome, forced the conversion of theological rationality from cosmological necessity to historical freedom by affirming, against those who would conform to that rationalism, the faith of the Church in the unity of God and the divinity of the Father, Son, and Spirit. The necessity of this conversion would become apparent at Nicaea, whose definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, which Dionysius of Rome anticipated: it would be accepted without hesitation by his correspondent, Dionysius of Alexandria.
Theology of Dionysius of Alexandria, dubbed “the Great” by the Alexandrine tradition, is presented at this point simply because his contribution to the development of Trinitarian doctrine is inseparable from that of his namesake of Rome. Together they prepared the Church to resist the Arian rationalization of the basic Mysterium fidei, the Lordship of Jesus the Christ. Their common refusal to submit the faith to any rationale supposedly superior to the Church’s radically liturgical proclamation of the faith led to a development of the doctrinal tradition: the concern of both men was for doctrine, not theology, and no theology emerged from their interchange.
The Pope’s dogmatic letter, composed in response to the allegation of tritheism in Dionysius of Alexandria’s correspondence with his errant Libyan bishops, had condemned first the Sabellian denial of Personal distinctions in God and then the subordinationist implication of a division in the One God. His accompanying personal letter to Dionysius of Alexandria stressed the doctrinal indispensability of the homoousion of the Trinitarian Persons, an emphasis that at once underwrote the unity of God and the full divinity of distinct Persons of the Father, Son and Spirit. Dionysius of Rome wrote as the successor of Peter, charged with confirming the faith of his brother bishops: Dionysius of Alexandria did not contest his responsibility and authority to do so.
In reply to this Roman admonition Dionysius of Alexandria composed his Refutation and Defense (Ἔλεγχος καὶ Ἀπολογία), which became part of the tradition of the School of Alexandria: it survives only in excerpts, notably those in Athanasius’ De sententia Dionysii. Dionysius had been the director of the School of Alexandria when he was elevated to the See of Alexandria, and appears to have continued to direct it until his death.
Burdened by the inadequate conceptuality of the third century, Dionysius of Alexandria defended his orthodoxy and affirmed his faith in the full divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and in the absolute unity of God. In his time, the increasingly problematic necessity of distinguishing between the unity of the divine Persons and the unity of the divine Substance had began to embarrass the doctrinal tradition, and much of the criticism which a century later Basil of Caesarea[427] and others directed at Dionysius of Alexandria consists in an anachronistic failure to recognize in his literal statements, as when he referred to Jesus as a creature, expressions of the same failure to resolve the one-many dilemma posed by the Church’s faith that “Jesus Christ is Lord” which, a century later, would prompt Julian the Apostate to accuse Diodore of Tarsus, then the director of the School of Antioch, of holding a “two sons” doctrine.[428] Neither Dionysius of Alexandria, in the middle of the third century, nor Diodore in the mid-fourth, knew a concept of human nature distinct from that of the human person: Athanasius points out that the same is true of the New Testament authors, whose many references to Jesus as a man are open to the same literalist misreading. While this sancta simplicitas is easy to attack, a century later Basil of Caesarea would find it difficult to correct.
We have seen that a coherent theological account of the Chalcedonian definition of Jesus’ consubstantiality “with us” requires the recognition of the multi-personal unity of the human substance. This in turn requires the rejection of the cosmological anthropology which makes each person a distinct substance. The failure of such theologians as Lonergan and Meyendorff to accept the implication of Chalcedon’s definition of Jesus’ subsistence in the human substance exhibits the same cosmological mind-set which underlay the Arian refusal to accept his subsistence in the divine substance: viz., the uncritical insistence that intellectual substance is monadic per se.
But the task of theology, as the Council of Nicaea made clear, is not to conform the faith of the Church to cosmological rationality, but to convert that timeless illusion to the concrete historicity of the Lord Jesus Christ who, in revealing the Father, revealed his own divinity, his own humanity, and his Personal unity. The task of Christology, the task of the fides quaerens intellectum, proceeds only from the faith that Jesus is Lord, as this faith is mediated by the Church’s worship of him—in sum, by her liturgy.: The Nicene definition of the substantial unity of God and the homoousion of the Son with the Father had confronted the same problem of the substantial unity, for the Tri-Personality of the divine Substance, the divine Unity, was inconceivable to scholars locked into the Greek philosophical tradition. At the same time, the ecclesial tradition—i.e., the Church’s worship in truth of the One God and the three divine Persons―was clear. The bishops who met in council at Nicaea did so to exercise that liturgical teaching authority apart from which cosmological fog which for nearly two hundred years had obscured fides quaerens intellectum inherent in the Church’s worship would continue to do so. They asserted the Church’s independence of any authority over her worship than her own. This was not an entirely novel assertion, for bishops had met in council since the end of the second century at the provincial council of Elvira to deal with issues then troubling the Church in Spain, and would continue to do so. The Council of Nicaea, however, was the first Council to speak ecumenically, for the entire household of the Church. The radical character of the Conciliar assertion of the Church’s independence of the plenary cosmological authority claimed by the Roman emperors was not immediately apparent, but it became so with the accession of Constantius II to the sole rule of the Roman empire in 353, when he defeated the final claimant to the throne. While yet the Augustus of the East, sharing authority with Constans, then the Augustus of the West, he had begun a campaign to submit the Church in the West to the Arianism which Eusebius of Nicomedia had persuaded him to adopt as the religion of the empire. In his eyes, the Western bishops were in rebellion until converted to the official Arianism. By 352, he had installed the Arian Saturninus as the Bishop of Arles; in 356 he called a council at Biterrae (Béziers) at which he condemned Hilary of Poitiers, a powerful opponent of Arianism and particularly of Saturninus, and exiled him to Phrygia, but permitted his return to Poitiers in 360.
By this time, Constantius had about a year to live. He had appointed his cousin Julian, later named the Apostate, to be his Caesar, i.e., his deputy/ However Julian’s army, which he had led skillfully in the west, rebelled against Constantius’ order to Julian to send reinforcements to aid him in an eastern campaign. Julian’s army proclaimed Julian Augustus, an endorsement that Julian used to assert an authority equal to that of Constantius, forcing a conflict between them. In the midst of it Constantius fell ill. Knowing his death to be imminent, he appointed Julian his successor, and died. Julian then then began the campaign to return the empire to a Neoplatonic paganism, which earned him the title, “apostate.” His influence was minor: he disappeared in battle at Adrianople a year later, to be succeeded by the Arian Valens who, for the fourteen years of his reign showed himself to be a barely competent ruler, but also as a bitter enemy of the Church.
Although the homoousion of the Son with the Father was defined at Nicaea, dissent to its suspected implications continued throughout much of the fourth century. Finally, Athanasius, at the provincial Council of Alexandria in 362, undertook the task of persuading the homoiousians in Antioch of the doctrinal necessity of the homoousion of the Son with the Father. He assumed that the Antiochene homoiousians shared his interest in ecclesial unity, but in this was entirely mistaken. It was only in 381 at the First Council of Constantinople that the full divinity of the Holy Spirit was definitively affirmed against the “Pneumomachian” element of the homoiousion party which, as to the Holy Spirit, had become Arian, unable to accept the Holy Spirit’s Personal divinity... An unwillingness to affirm the homoouson of the Holy Spirit is evident in Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto, in which the divinity of the Holy Spirit is elaborated, but without the attribution to Him of consubstantiality with the Father and the Son, thus as Personally divine,. Even the proclamation of the divinity of the Holy Spirit at I Constantinople exhibits the same reluctance to affirm His homoousion with the Father and the Son: Gregory of Nazianzen, while President of the Council, was unable to persuade a majority of its members to affirm the Holy Spirit’s consubstantiality with the Father and the Son. The inability of Basil of Ancyra’s ὁμοιος κατ’ οὐσιαν (homoios kat’ ousian) to assign this “single concept of likeness” to the Holy Spirit did not deny the Spirit’s divinity, but barred it from being hypostatic, i.e., Personal. The homoiousian doctrine was binitarian: it reduced the Holy Spirit to the impersonal Trinity.
In the West, these controversies were rendered largely moot by Tertullian’s brilliant intuition of the “substantia” versus “persona” distinction to account for the unity of God―the substantial “Trinitas”―constituted by the concretely distinct Persons of Father, Son, and Spirit, and, at the same time to account for the unity of Jesus the Christ as Personal:―a unity transcending the irreducible distinction between his divine and human “substances.”
Critics such as Jean Daniélou have found Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine open to a subordinationist interpretation. [429] However, Tertullian’s Christology and Trinitarian theology are untroubled by any concern to provide a systematically coherent account of the substantial unity of God and the divinity of the Personal divinity of the Names constituting the Trinitas, for the good and sufficient reason that he refused to subordinate the apostolic tradition to a higher wisdom,. Critics such as Daniélou, accustomed to the Thomist version of systematic theology, suppose the mystery of the Incarnation of Jesus the Lord to have an antecedent possibility open to explanation, an account of its necessary causes which they suppose to be theological. The explanation sought could proceed only by subordinating the faith of the Church to a cosmology as though prerequisite to its intelligibility.
The great third century theologians, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen, regarded such deference to cosmological wisdom as always and inevitably the abdication of the apostolic faith. Their theologies reject it root and branch. Entirely distinct in interest and talent, each constructed a novel historical metaphysics upon the secure foundation of the indefeasible mystery that Jesus is the Lord, while seeking to express modo suo the free coherence intrinsic to the mystery itself. This quest, anticipating by a millennium the Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum, focuses upon the transcendently free truth of the Revelation who is Jesus, sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit. In consequence of the fall, the Gift of the Spiritus Creator is Given by the One Sacrifice of the Son, whereby the human habitat, the universe that is created in Christ, is restored to the primordially free integrity from which it fell by reason of the sin of the first Adam and the first Eve. The loyalty to the apostolic tradition of the Truth of Christ upon which theology of Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen is intent permitted no other inquiry than that which is freed to be free in Christ.
Thus Tertullian converted such cosmologically-derived terms as substantia and persona from abstractions to concrete historicity in view of using them to assert the historical truth of the Christian revelation. In this he succeeded; his Christology has entered into the dogmatic tradition, while his Trinitarian doctrine, together with that of Hippolytus, liberated the third century Church from the Monarchian confusion which had briefly troubled it.
Origen’s comparable affirmation, in the Peri Archon, of the one divine Ousia that is the Trinity, comprising the three divine Hypostases of the Father, Son and Spirit, revealed in the Event of the Mission of Jesus the Lord, was a yet more radical rejection of cosmological oversight as such in that he undertook the systematization of the good creation that is in Christ, antecedent to its fall: the free union, Έν or Ένωσις, of the primordial Jesus the Lord with the eternal Son, the Logos as the Event of the Good Creation, the Beginning.
For a brief half-century after Origen’s death, theology of the Peri Archon earned the praise of Pamphilus, which was echoed five hundred years later by Photius, but nonetheless his theology was attacked with sufficient vigor and authority to draw from Pamphilus that Defense of Origen which Photius would praise. Crouzel has detailed the misunderstanding on which this criticism was based. The influence of Origen’s famous pupil, Dionysius the Great, may account for Bishop Alexander’s reception of Alexandria of Origen’s theology, despite the opposition of Alexander’s predecessor, Peter Martyr. By way of Alexander, Origen’s theology contributed powerfully to the defeat of Arianism and sub-Arian subordinationism of Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia at the Council of Nicaea; its proclamation of the substantial unity, mia ousia , mia hypostasis, of the Trinity, and the consequent consubstantiality of the Son with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the treis hypostaseis whom Origen knew to constitute the Trinity.
The Nicene use of hypostasis and ousia as equivalent terms opened the door to an ambiguity which very soon the opponents of the Council would exploit. Two years after the Council of Nicaea, having regained their former influence upon Constantine, the “two Eusebii,” of Caesarea and Nicomedia, began to impose upon the Oriental bishops a subordinationist reading of Origen’s doctrine of the “three hypostases” which constitute the Trinitarian Ousia. Within two or three years of the close of the Council of Nicaea, they had persuaded Constantine to accept the orthodoxy of Arius and, of course, to accept as orthodox their own sympathy with Arianism. They then used his influence to impose on the Oriental bishops its corollary: viz., the Sabellianism inherent in any resistance to their subordinationism. Their program of ridding the Orient of pro-Nicene bishops had by 335 succeeded in the Orient apart from the great Diocese of Alexandria, to which Athanasius had been elected in 328. He would soon discover that his magisterial insistence upon the substantial unity, mia hypostasis, of the Trinity placed him in an implicitly treasonous opposition to the Arianism which Emperor Constantine had been persuaded to accept, albeit half-heartedly. Athanasius also soon learned that the assertion of three hypostases in the Trinity was immediately, and nearly universally, heard as subordinationist. There was no longer any authentic Greek expression for what is three in God, for Origen’s assertion of three hypostases in the Trinity was now heard as subordinationist. This somewhat simplified the controversy between those who recognized the ecclesial authority of Nicaea, and those who place that authority in the Emperor who, by 353, was Constantius. By 335 Athanasius had become the single effective pro-Nicene bishop; his simple insistence upon on the mia hypostasis of the Trinity entailed a flat denial of subordinationism. The open opposition to the imperial Arianism throughout his episcopacy earned him five exiles from his See, totaling more than seventeen years. The first, from July, 335 to November, 337, he spent in Trier (Treves) where he doubtless learned some Latin, inasmuch as that city was within a Roman province whose language was Latin. He spent his second exile, from April, 339 to October, 346, in Rome. By then he had an adequate command of Latin, as was evident in 343, when he attended the Council of Serdica and was domiinant among the Western bishops; Pope Julius had already endorsed his orthodoxy in 341. When two years later he called the Council of Serdica, Athanasius’s insistence upon the authority of the Council of Nicaea helped confirm the West in the pro-Nicene stance which confronted Constantius when, nearly a decade later, in 352, he undertook to compel the conversion of the Western Church to his homoean Arianism.
A full century after Dionysius of Alexandria, in the ”Refutation and Defense” replied to the letter of Dionysius of Rome to the See of Alexandria which effectively charged his Alexandrine namesake with a tritheism consequent upon his failure to use the “homoousios” of the Son, explaining his willingness to affirm the homoousion of the Son with the Father, accepting Origen’s Trinitarian terminology and, according to J. N. D. Kelly (Doctrines, 135-36), using it accurately, Basil of Caesarea’ reluctant recourse to the Aristotelian metaphysical analysis to distinguish “ousia” from “hypostasis” had fared no better.[430] The Trinitarian doctrine was now clear: the Council of Nicaea had established the unity in the One God of the concretely distinct Names, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The regnant cosmological metaphysics could not accommodate this doctrine. The efforts of its exponents to provide for its prior possibility of the Trinity were inevitably Sabellian or subordinationist. Both errors had already been condemned by the Church when, in 260, Pope Dionysius of Rome wrote a personal letter to Dionysius of Alexandria evidently rebuking the tritheism the Pope had read into his namesakes’ failure to use “homoousios” of the Son in his letter rebuking the Sabellianism of his suffragan bishops in the Libyan Pentapolis. Inasmuch as this personal letter is lost, we must rely on Dionysius of Alexandria’s “Refutation and Defense” (or “Apologia” (Ἐλενχος καὶ Ἀπολογία - Elenchos kai Apologia), to infer its content. Pope Dionysius also wrote a letter simply to the See of Alexandria, raising much the same difficulties.
In summary, Dionysius of Rome and Dionysius of Alexandria both affirmed the “homoousion” of the Son with the Father. Both rejected the Sabellian suppression of the divine Trias in favor of a divine Monas. Both upheld the full divinity of the Son. Neither of the two Dionysii attempted a theological resolution of the tension between the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father and the unqualified unity of God. Origen’s mia ousia, treis hypostaseis sufficed for Dionysius of Alexandria . The Pope stressed the indivisible unity of the one God while, by his reproof of Dionysius of Alexander’s failure to affirm the homoousion of the Son, imputing to him a tritheist interpretation of the Personal distinctions between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In his extended reply to the Pope, Dionysius of Alexandria upheld the Personal distinctions of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, while defending himself against accusations of having imperiled the divine unity.
He upheld the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father by the use of images, notably the sun and the light from the sun, and the relation of a son to his father as inherently consubstantial, which he understood to be loyal to his faith in the full Personal divinity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and in the absolute unity of God. However, the images he invokes are no more than illustrations. As images: they offer no theological explanation, nor do they seem to be intended to do so: they are presented as vindications of his orthodoxy. No third-century theologian supposed the one God to be divisible; it is idle to infer doctrinal error from these images. Dionysius of Alexandria had been a disciple of Origen, perhaps intent rather upon his exegesis than upon theological metaphysics of the Peri Archon, but certainly aware of and in agreement with Origen’s affirmation of substantial unity, mia ousia , of the one God. It is difficult to understand how Pope Dionysius could have been persuaded otherwise. His predecessor, Sixtus II, had been in correspondence with the Dionysius of Alexandria a few years earlier, and knew of his concern for the Sabellianism of the Libyan bishops. Nonetheless, although the successor of Pope Sixtus and certainly no Sabellian, Dionysius of Rome seems to have accepted the validity of the Libyan bishops’ interpretation of their metropolitan’s criticism of their Christological heresy: i.e., that it implied the tritheist subordinationism which they understood to be the single alternative to their Sabellian rejection of any distinction between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The reference in Dionysius of Alexandria’s Letter to Jesus the Son, the Lord, as created, challenged the Sabellian Libyan bishops’ dismissal of the Trinity and consequent disinterest in the Christ which had prompted the Letter from their metropolitan in the first place. Finding no mention of the “homoousios” of the Son in that reproof, the Libyan bishops read it as an attack upon their Sabellianism, for which, as J. N. D. Kelly remarks, “homoousios” had become a watch-word. They interpreted their metropolitan’s rejection of their Sabellianism to be his commitment to what they understood to be its single alternative, viz., the trithestic subordinationism of the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to the Son.
It is then likely that the Libyan bishops had shown Pope Dionysius the letter sent them by Dionysius of Alexander, and had used its reference to the created reality of Jesus the Son to persuade the Pope that Dionysius of Alexandria was a tritheistic subordinationist. In fact it was a reference to the Christ as having a Beginning: “In the beginning was the Word.” (Jn. 1:1); “he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead” (Col. 1:18). The point is evidently difficult to grasp, for Harnack has persuaded most church historians to accept his misreading of Dionysius of Alexandria’s reference to the humanity of Jesus the Lord as a reference to Jesus’ human nature, not to his human Person; see endnote 434.
Along with the rest of the third century theologians, Dionysius of Alexandria accepted the apostolic faith in the Personal unity of the Son of Mary who is the Son of God, and passed on that doctrinal tradition to the School of Alexandria, which he directed for more than twenty years. The issues raised by his rebuke of the Libyan bishops in a correspondence preserved by Athanasius, and by Refutation and Defense, were at once Trinitarian and Christological. In brief, Dionysius rebuked the Sabellian denial of the Trinity by the Libyan bishops in the Pentapolis, whose corollary was a reduction of Jesus to merely human standing. Dionysius had discussed the problem posed by the Libyan Sabellianism with Pope Sixtus a few years earlier; in his letters to the Libyan bishops, he rebuked them on Christo logical grounds, as Feltoe has admitted.
Theological resolution of both issues, Trinitarian and Christological, would turn upon a clarification of the mutual consubstantiality of the divine Persons as implicit in their divinity. W. Beinert has traced this language to Callistus’ condemnation of Sabellius,[431] where the divinity of the Son was first seen to be in tension with his Personal distinction, as Son, from the Father. Tertullian, Origen and Novatian had recognized the mutual interrelation of the Son and the Father implicit in their Names; it is evident that the Father could not be without a Son thus eternally distinct from the Father as to require his generation by the Father. Tertullian and Origen would understand this as the eternal generation of a Son whose Personal eternity is the evident implication of the Father’s eternity and whose divinity could be explained only by his consubstantiality with the source of his divinity, the Father. Hence the doctrinal information was already at hand, but with no evident reconciliation of the unity of the one God and the plurality of Persons who are divine. The contradiction between Christianity and Sabellianism became evident. Few Christian Sabellians remained after the condemnation of Paul of Samosata in 268 and his departure from the scene, but the meaning of the homoousion of the Son with the Father had been tainted, especially for the Syrian bishops, by Sabellius’ modalist perversion of its meaning and by Paul of Samosata’s adoptionist manipulation of it.
The pre-Nicene Western Trinitarian development did not advance beyond its stance in the late second century, when Tertullian proposed the formula, soon classic, of “three divine persons in one divine substance.” However, this synthesis of the unity and plurality of God in a substantial “Trinitas” remained theologically undeveloped: we have seen the tension in Tertullian’s “moment of reason” between cosmology and the Church’s faith in the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord. The Latin Church was little given to the speculation that had begun to preoccupy the Greek Apologists, while Tertullian had himself offered no solution to the metaphysical problem inherent in his formula. It was sufficient for orthodoxy that he had affirmed at once the substantial unity of the one God and the divinity of the personally distinct Father, Son and Spirit. Nonetheless, in the absence of a satisfactory account of his presentation of the unity of the one God as Trinitas, the Roman authorities read his drawing of personal distinctions between Father, Son and Spirit as a threat to the absolute unity of the divine Monarchia, the “Godhead” as monadically imagined, if not conceived. The problem they arose out of a too-easy identification of the Father, the Archē of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and so the Source of the Trinity, with the divine Unity. Taken literally, this implies either modalism or subordinationism, but the unsophisticated defense of Christian monotheism by early third century Popes, Zephyrinus and Callistus, who so outraged Hippolytus, was hardly at the cosmological level his indictments supposed.
The term “monarch,” whose concept underlies “Monarchianism,” refers to a single person’s possession of an indivisible authority: thus the equation of a king with a monarch.[432]. The postulate of indivisibile personal authority is not however linked to the cosmological monism underlying the Monarchian heresy, for all exercise of authority is personal, and is undivided. It remains so in the Catholic tradition, but with a Trinitarian transformation that underlies all personal freedom, whether in God or in the human imaging of God. All the obstacles to that freedom are founded on cosmological assumptions, which is to say, upon refusals of the free, substantial, Trinitarian unity of God, and, consequently, of its human imaging.
It is thus that the Trinitarianism developed by Hippolytus and Tertullian prompted a “Monarchian” reaction in Rome and in the West generally: the Personal distinctions betrween Father, Son and Holy Spirit which they asserted to exist within the one God were seen by conservative Western theologians to endanger the unity of God. J. N. D. Kelly considers that the Pope Dionysius of Rome’s mid-third century rebuke of Dionysius of Alexandria’s alleged tritheism was strongly influenced by Novatian, whose position oscillated between upholding a Personal distinction between the Father and the Son, and a near-Sabellianism collapse of that Personal distinction by reason of a fear of tritheism [433] At any rate, forty years after Tertullian and Hippolytus had accused Callistus of Sabellianism, the letter of Dionysius of Rome to Dionysius of Alexandria exhibits the same emphasis upon the Monarchy―understandably enough, for the Libyan reply to Dionysius of Alexandria’s rebuke was to read tritheism into his Christology: viz., into his assertion, against the Sabellian propensities of his monastic opponents in the Libyan Pentapolis, of the Personal distinctions of the Father, the Son and the Spirit within the context of that Christology. Unfortunately, the historians (Harnack, Feltoe, Kelly, Hanson) have uncritically ignored Basil of Caesarea’s admitted minimal acquaintance with theology of Dionysius, and as routinely have accepted his uninformed dismissal of it as the font of subordinationism. On that fragile foundation the historyical academy has simply dismissed Athanasius’ accurate recognition of the issue raised by Dionysius of Alexandria’s Letter to the Libyan bishops protesting their refusal of their metropolitan’s orthodox Christology.[434] However, even were his Trinitarian doctrine in issue, the Libyan charge of tritheism is merely the reverse of the Eusebian insistence in the next century that any rejection of their implicitly tritheist Trinitarian subordinationism could only be Sabellian. Either way, their indictment of the Bishop of Alexandria had no foundation.
Here, with respect to Hensen’s masterwork, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, much cited in these pages, a work highly critical of Athanasius, it must be kept in mind that Hanson dedicated it to Henri Crouzel in a Latin epigraph of surpassing poetic beauty. While no poetry can be translated adequately, when beyond praise it must be memorialized:
HENRICO CROUZEL
INTER DOCTOS GALLICAE NATIONIS EMINENTI
ORIGINIS ILLIUS CELEBERRIMI STRENUO DEFENSORI
AMICO MEO DIU FIDELI
which may be rendered as:
TO HENRI CROUZEL
EMINENT AMONG THE LEARNED OF THE NATION OF THE GAULS
THE MOST STRENUOUS DEFENDOR OF THE RENOWNED AND MOST CELEBRATED IGEN
MY LONG FAITHFUL FRIEND
●●●
:
The early third century Monarchians, intent on upholding the absolute unity of the divine Substance against the perceived threat to it by Tertullian and Hippolytus, could make no contribution to the development of Dionysius of Alexandria’s recognition of the substantial unity of the one God as a Trinity of Persons.[435] It is probable that this concern touched the papacy for, early in the third century, Hippolytus charged Popes Zephyrinus and Callistus with heresy in that connection. Tertullian was no admirer of Callistus; he not only agreed with Hippolytus’ attack upon Callistus monarchian objection to their Trinitarian doctrine, but agreed also with Hippolytus’ condemnation of Callistus’ refusal to accept their moral rigorism as the apostolic tradition they claimed for it.
“Dynamic monarchianism” considered accurately, is merely an adoptionism; it refers to the relation between the man who is Jesus, and God understood cosmologically as monadic, mono-Personal. Jesus, the Christ, is seen by the dynamic Monarchians to be a mere man (psilos anthrōpos) whose relation to God was moral, not eternal, hence,the label of “psilanthrōpist” sometimes given these heretics. Their error is primarily a Christological rather than an explicit Trinitarian heresy; however, dynamic Monarchianism is usually discussed, as here, in the context of anti-Trinitarian Monarchianism because, from the time of Novatian, it was seen rather as an attempt to uphold Christian monotheism, as supposedly endangered by the Trinitarian speculations of Tertullian and Hippolytus.
Dynamic monarchianism was promoted in Rome by Theodotus the Tanner, a wealthy merchant who brought it to Rome from Byzantium about 190. His heresy was condemned by Pope Victor who excommunicated the Tanner about 195. This adoptionism comes out of a generally rationalist and perhaps Aristotelian background. After the excommunication of Theodotus the Tanner, it was taken up by a lesser Theodotus, known as the Banker or money-changer, and by some other Romans in the next century. Pope Victor excommunicated Theodotus the Banker a few years after condemning Theodotus the Tanner.
Modal Monarchianism is the real Monarchianism, a Trinitarian heresy reducible to Unitarianism, in that it denies any constitutive (i.e., eternal) distinction between the three Persons of the Trinity. It was motivated by a firm belief in the unity of God and in the divinity of the Christ, which doctrines were thought to be endangered by the Trinitarian theology of Tertullian and Hippolytus, and earlier by men such as Justin and the other Apologists who also insisted upon a real distinction between Father and his Logos. The Logos-speculation of the Apologists, as also of Tertullian and Hippolytus, was anathema to the Monarchian modalists, who understood the one God to be simply the Father and could not accept his Personal distinction from the Son and the Holy Spirit. This heresy arises out of an attempt to retain the “economic” interpretation of the Trinity to the extent of refusing any eternal distinction between the Father, the Son and the Spirit. By this heresy the Son and Spirit are reduced to mere modalities of the one God, who is still thought of, archaically, as the Father. The modalist Monarchians did not understand “Father” to be a Personal Name, i.e., one stating an eternal relation (i.e., Paternity) to the Person of the Son. Consequently the assertion of a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, existing as Personally distinct in the one God, was considered by the modalists to be a tritheist heresy; insofar as Father, Son and Holy Spirit were understood as at once divine and irreducibly distinct, they were held to constitute three irreducible divinities, which amounts to a pagan polytheism.
The modal Monarchians consequently denied the concrete distinction between Father and the Son which had been held orthodox since Justin. It should be remembered that the meaning of “Person” was not yet clearly distinguished from the meaning of “Substance” in Trinitarian thinking. This distinction, first affirmed by Tertullian’s Apologeticus, would be vindicated only in the fifth century with Augustine’s recognition of the relational meaning of “person;”: Twenty years after Augustine’s death, Leo I, in his \dogmatic Letter to Flavian, will still use “substance’ in the sense of a Trinitarian “Person.” This antique usage was corrected at Chalcedon, whose Symbol used “ousia ” or substance, to designate the unity of he Godhead, and “hypostasis” to designat e the unity of the divine Persons, as had Origen long before.
The leading modal Monarchians were Noetus of Smyrna, Sabellius, and Praxeas, who is known only from the attack made on him by Tertullian in his Adversus Praxean. Praxeas was also a Patripassionist, a modalist, who identified Jesus as the human son in union with the Christ, whom he thought, as divine, to be identical with the Father. This notion is close to that of Theodotus the Tanner’s unitarian adoptionism, and to that of Paul of Samosata.
Paul of Samosata, the bishop of Antioch in the mid-sixties of the third century, when that city was under the governance of Zenobia, the queen of Palmyra, constitutes .a separate case. In the first place, he belongs to a time fifty years later than the Roman Monarchians. Further, as a native of Armenia and as the Bishop of Antioch, he is under Greek rather than Latin influence. His theology, while reminiscent of the dynamic monarchianism of Theodotus the Tanner, may reflect instead a Judaeo-Christian archaism, a reluctance to affirm anything capable of being understood to threaten the Judaic monotheism.[436] Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, was a Jewess, and Paul, as a political bishop, close to the court of the Queen, whose regent he was, may have simply wished to please her. In any case, he appears to have been a very worldly bishop.
Eusebius’ Church History records a lengthy document written by the bishops attending the final session of the Council which condemned Paul of Samosata not simply for heresy, but also for conduct which would be scandalous in a layman, and outrageous in the bishop of the ancient apostolic See of Antioch. Jerome thinks that document to have been written by Malchion. Its highly charged rhetoric, and prosecutorial forensics leaves little doubt that only such a master of language as Malchion, then reportedly the head of a school of rhetoric in Antioch, could have written so incisive and devastating an indictment of Paul. While there is some danger of circularity in the report that Malchion was the head of a school of rhetoric, inasmuch as it may well rest upon this document, in the end Jerome is right; it could hardly have been written by anyone but Malchion.[437]
Paul appears to have understood Jesus to be a mere man, and to have considered the Holy Spirit to be the grace of Jesus’ adoption. Consequently he appears to have been a unitarian, although later he is lumped with the modalists, who were the only real “economic” Trinitarians, since it is only they who made the Father, Son and Spirit to be distinct merely in terms of the economy of salvation, supposing there to be no eternal distinctions in the one God. It is possible that this was Paul’s opinion; he is reported to have also spoken of “modes” in the one God.
Whether unitarian or modalist, his identification of the divine substance as “Ousia,” together with his evidently unitarian use of “homoousios” (implying that the Father, the Son and the Spirit are one “same” Divine Substance and are therefore each identical with it) apparently led him to conclude that there is no distinction between the Father and His Word; this included the reduction of Jesus’s Sonship to merely human standing, that of a man adopted by reason of his virtue.
Paul was tried twice by Councils of Antioch (265, 268) convened by the bishops of the Orient.[438] . The first of these councils may have been presided over by Dionysius of Alexandria as well as by Gregory Thaumaturgus.[439] The Oriental bishops were facing a novel problem; one for which Origen had provided a resolution in his Peri Archon forty years earlier, but which was still both little known and yet less understood. Origen’s choice of “ousia” to designate the unity of the Trinity, and of “hypostasis” to designate the unity of each of the divine Names, was not available to the Fathers assembled at Antioch. Dionysius of Alexandria who, while he may have attended the first of these two Councils, is not remembered as having represented Origen’s theology. His invitation to the Council was honorific, a recognition of his stature as the Bishop of Alexandria, and perhaps of the quality of his Refutatio et Apologia. Consequently, The Fathers at the second of the two Councils held at Antioch to try Paul of Samosata could have supposed either “ousia” or “hypostasis” to stand indifferently for a divine Person, or for the divine unity, as would the Fathers convened at Nicaea almost sixty years later. Thus the bishops met in Antioch to try Paul of Samosata in 265 and 268 would have encountered as newly posed the semantic problem of distinguishing the unity of the Trinity from the distinct unities of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
In these circumstances, the resolution of this conundrum cannot be read into the condemnation of Paul of Samosata. His reported use of the “homoousios” to argue from the unity of God’s substance to the identification of the divine substance with a unique Person clearly contradicted the apostolic tradition as mediated by the Church’s liturgy. Its liturgical expression, as in the Sign of the Cross, in baptism and in the doxologies, not only distinguishes the Names of the divine Persons, but always recites them in the same order, importing a relational unity. It is unnecessary to seek further grounds for their condemnation of Paul’s unitarian doctrine. Nonetheless, the condemnation of Paul’s use of “homoousios” in defense of his doctrine appears to have been forgotten until revived by Basil of Ancyra in 358. Thereafter this recollection will serve to bolster the Antiochene (Syrian) bishops’ interpretation as Sabellian of the definition of the homoousios of the Son at the Council of Nicaea, although it had been implicit in the Trinitarian doctrine set out in Origen’s Peri Archon nearly a century earlier, and certainly was known to Dionysius of Rome, inasmuch as a failure to use it enters into his admonitory letter to Dionysius the Great of Alexandria in 260.
The Oriental bishops (Syrian, Cappadocian, Palestinian) subscribed to the subordinationism which Eusebius of Caesarea had read into the Peri Archon, and on that foundation understood the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father to imply the identification of the Son with the Father, because God is one Person and the Father is that Person. The Son (and the Holy Spirit), if distinct from the Father, would then be less than divine, and consequently merely creatures, as Arius had said. For this reason, they long associated the term homoousios with Sabellian modalism, and for that long struggled to find some means of avoiding their own implicit denial of the Son’s divinity; they were less concerned to defend the divinity of the Spirit.
The removal of Paul of Samosata from the exercise of his episcopacy and from the episcopal residence was delayed until Queen Zenobia ceased to rule Antioch, this when Palmyra fell under the rule of the Roman emperor Aurelian, in 272; thereafter Zenobia and Paul of Samosata vanish from history. He is remembered only for contaminating the orthodox use of “homoousios” by the Council of Nicaea. His modalist reading of that term might have it more than difficult for the conservative Antiochene bishops to understand its doctrinal significance for the Council of Nicaea, but in fact it seems first to have been recollected during the council called by Basil of Ancyra in 358, since the Letter of .George of Laodicea in which he summarizes his understanding of Basil of Ancyra’s council recalls its condemnation of Paul of Samosata.[440]
Sabellius was a native of Libya, who brought his doctrine to Rome, where Pope Callistus finally excommunicated him.[441] Sabellius had systematized modal Monarchianism, which thereafter came to be known by his name. This sophisticated modalism was an rationalist adaptation of the Apologists’ failure to distinguish between the eternal “processions” of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the Father, and their historical manifestation in the economy: Sabellian’s modalism was economic: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct only as economic functions of the one God, the Father; with the close of the economy, they return to their original eternal identity with the eternal Father.
This is the last version of anti-Trinitarian conservatism in the West. Sabellius wrote in Greek, and was soon anathematized in the East, where the Trinitarian theology began with the metaphysical distinction of Father, Son, and Spirit, to which Sabellianism was in obvious contradiction.
The modalist implications of the monadic or cosmological interpretation of substance which has been normative in Catholic theological metaphysics from the outset of such speculation were pointed out early in this volume.[442]
Justin intended a Christian apologia for the divinity of the Christ, which is to say, an apologia founded on the Church’s historical faith that he, Jesus, is the Lord. However, after Justin, the apologetic focus of the Apologists was thus influenced by Middle Platonism as to entail an unreflective dehistoricization of the Trinity by its lack of a specific reference to its revelation in Christ, although their affirmations of the inherent order in the divine Trinity [τρíας, τρíαδος, τάξις) were liturgically grounded.
Athenagoras is a mid-second century Athenian convert to Christianity, an author of apologetic works of which all that remain are an Apology or Embassy (Legatio) for the Christians ca. 177, and a Treatise on the Resurrection (De resurrectione).[443] The former work was directed to Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son, Commodus, some twenty years after Justin Martyr had directed his Apology to Emperor Antoninus Pius and his adopted sons, one of them Marcus Aurelius, at about 155. Athenagoras’ Embassy anticipates Tertullian’s Apologeticus by twenty years. His Treatise on the Resurrection extends the exposition and defense of Christian doctrine and morals in the Embassy by presenting this first reasoned exposition and defense of the doctrine of the Resurrection, both as an appropriate work of God and as befitting the human body.
Unlike Justin, who knew no Trinity, Athenagoras affirmed the Trinitarian character of the one God, but without explicitly resting his Trinitarian doctrine upon the free event of its revelation in Christ:
"Who, then, would not be astonished to hear men who speak of God the Father, and of God the Son, and of the Holy Spirit and who declare both their power in union and their distinction in order, called atheists?" (Plea 10).
Athenagoras. Legatio and De Resurrectione. Edited and translated by William R. Schoedel. Col. Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1972)
Athenagoras’ incisive defense of Christianity leaves unremarked the numerous ascriptions of primordiality to Jesus the Son in the New Testament; they did not fall under its purview, but would have been intelligible, even presupposed, as integral with the apostolic tradition, which at this time, ca. 177, was still liturgical; Justin’s Apologies and his Dialogue with Trypho had defended the Christian faith that Jesus is the Lord at that level, as did Athenagoras twenty years later, and Tertullian’s Apologeticus another twenty years after Justin’s martyrdom. Athenagoras also understands God as triadic: the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, one in power yet distinct in order. He was the first to recognize the liturgically-established intrinsic order, the τάξις, of the Trinitarian Names, which is invariable. This insight will be foundational for Trinitarian doctrine. Athenagoras goes beyond Theophilus of Antioch in asserting what Theophilus leaves implicit, the co-equality of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Father creates and governs the universe by his Word, his Son, who is immanent in the Father from eternity as his Word, so that the Word never came into being, but at creation “issued forth” (proelthon), an expression which avoids the Stoic notion of the Logos as uttered or spoken, viz., the Logos prophorikos, and was not influenced by it. The Stoic understanding of the Word, even as eternal, would entail the subordinationism inherent in the Stoic conceptuality, in which “Father” names not a relation to the Son, but the divine Substance, the one God. However Athenagoras rejected any inferiority between the Persons: rather, their “order” (τάξις) which is their manifestation in the economy as the Triad―equivalently, the Missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the Father. In a triadic formula, Athenagoras, identifies the Holy Spirit with Wisdom.
A Trinitarian understanding of the One God is emerging, for Athenagoras holds the Holy Spirit also to be divine, an effluence from God who himself is God. Athenagoras insists on the Three, whose Power is in union, whose distinction is in order, but this order (taxis) is not subordinationist, a novel notion which he explained by a psychological analogy that three centuries later Augustine would take up and state more formally. However with Athenagoras, already in the second century the essentially economic notion of real distinctions within an essential divine unity is already in possession.
Joseph Lienhard of Fordham University has pointed out to me that the Introduction to William R. Schoedel’s edition of Athenagoras’ Legatio and De Resurrectione notes Athenagorras’ departure from the Middle Platonic tradition of his time by deploying a doctrine of creation which contrasts the created to the uncreated as non-being is contrasted to Being. Athenagoras goes on to identify God with Being, as opposed to the Ideas of Middle Platonism. This insight is foundational for later refinement of the relation of God to the material world, which by its creation ceased to be a principle of negation.
Of Theophilus little is known other than that from about 180 he was the fifth bishop of Antioch, thus the third successor of Ignatius Martyr, and that he is the author of a three-volume work, the Ad Autolycum,[444] an apologia in which, using the Stoic Logos endiathetos, Logos prophorikos analysis, he affirms a Christian faith at once Christological and Trinitarian. He is the first Greek to use the Greek equivalent of ‘trinity’, i.e., τριάdoς (triados) in a Christian context, and thus the first to convert the Stoic-Middle Platonic quest for wisdom to the free quaerens intellectum of the Christian faith. Theophilus is a near contemporary of Tertullian, and arrived at a Trinitarian understanding of the divine substance at about the same time. He is also the author of a lost work against Marcion.
Origen’s Trinitarianism cannot be dealt with in separation from his Christology; it has already been discussed in that context in the present Volume IV. Here it must suffice to observe, following Crouzel, that the attribution of subordinationism to any theologian prior to the Council of Nicaea, where the unity of the Persons of the Trinity were first distinguished at the level of doctrine, from the Trinitarian unity of the divine Substance, cannot be justified. Of all the pre-Nicene theologians, Origen is the least suspect of that error for, although he is not the first to have taught the eternal begetting of the Son, and thus the relational meaning of the Trinitarian Names, he is the first to provided a coherent statement of their substantial unity and Personal distinction. He understands that from eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit co-exist in a dynamic substantial unity (mia ousia ) which anticipates the later recognition of the Trinitarian perichōresis, and therefore of the homoousion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is sufficient here to observe, with Crouzel, that Origen’s Trinitarian theology is a clear anticipation of the doctrine of the Council of Nicaea. The matter is further pursued in the section devoted to the discussion of his Christology in the preceding Volume III.
Gregory Thaumaturgus (ca. 213-263) was one of the most gifted Greek theologians of the latter third century. In his youth he dropped his intent to pursue a career in law to become a disciple of Origen, whom he encountered in Caesarea about the year 233, and whose teaching converted him to Christianity. He studied under Origen for some seven years.and wrote to him and for a famous panegyric, from which we learn most of what is known of Origen’s mode of instruction.[445] Gregory’s theology is loyal to his master’s teaching of the co-eternity of the Son. His Fidei expositio exhibits a grasp of the triadic unity of God effectively free of the latemt subordinationism marking theology of all Origen’s predecessors whether Greek or Latin, with the exception, as has been seen, of Tertullian. Grillmeier, in a discussion upon which this summary is dependent, observes that Gregory retains the tension between the unity and trinity of Persons by identifying the divine unity with the Triad.[446] However, inasmuch as it did not occur to Gregory to mention a Monad as in tension with the Triad, this omission is his recognition that the unity-plurality tension is intrinsic to the divine Substance, the one God, which is to say, to the Trinity, not to a divine substantial Self or Monas. In this, he simply follows his master, Origen, whose understanding of the divine Unity as Trinity marks a decisive departure from the Stoicism and Middle Platonism which, until its rejection by Council of Nicaea, contaminated theological imagination, confusing both Trinitarian theology and Christology by imposing upon the historical quaerens intellectum its own flight from history. This confusion, dispelled as to the Trinity by Origen’s anticipation of the Council of Nicaea, was removed from Christological speculation only through the doctrinal development achieved by the following three Councils, in which the Nicene-Constantinopolitan affirmation of the homoousios of the Son with the Father and of the full divinity―and implicit consubstantiality of the Spirit with the Father and the Son ---, was completed by the Ephesian confirmation of the Theotokos title given the Virgin Mary in Alexandria by the apostolic tradition and by popular piety centuries earlier. The implications of this clear affirmation of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ, were spelled out in detail at the Council of Chalcedon, whose Symbol affirmed the double consubstantiality of our Lord taught nearly two decades earlier by the Ephesian Formula of Union. Origen’s Peri Archon had taught the same Christology more than two centuries before the Council of Ephesus.
Gregory’s Expositio Fidei was written between 260 and 270: Grillmeier has provided Gregory’s Greek text, as recorded by Gregory of Nyssa, together with its French translation by J. Lebreton: we insert here the English translation provided by Jurgens:
Wherefore there is nothing either created or subservient in the Trinity nor anything caused to be brought about, as if formerly it did not exist and was afterwards introduced, wherefore neither was the Son ever lacking to the Father, nor the Spirit to the Son, but without variation and without change the same Trinity forever.
Jurgens, The Early Fathers, I, at 251.
H. Leclercq’s commentary deserves attention:
Such a formula, stating clearly the distinction between the Persons in the Trinity, and emphasizing the eternity, equality, immortality, and perfection, not only of the Father, but of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, proclaims a marked advance on theories of Origen.
Leclercq, “Gregory of NeoCaesarea,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vii, 15-16, at 16.
It may be observed that this assertion of Gregory’s “marked advance on theories of Origen” belies his entire reliance upon them. there is nothing in the “formula,” here excerpted from Jurgens’ translation of the text of the Fidei Expositio, that Crouzel has not shown to have also been affirmed by Origen. Here Leclerq echoes the Eusebian corruption of Origen’s theology.
Grillmeier has persuasively argued that Arius’ Thalia was written as a riposte to the Expositio Fidei, which Grillmeier believes would have become available to Arius when, after his exile, he was residing at Nicomedia with its bishop, Eusebius. Summarily, the points insisted upon by the Expositio are those which Arius was most concerned to controvert in the Thalia and in the half angry, half contemptuous letter he sent to Alexander of Alexandria after his exile from that See. These pre-Nicene documents do not mention the “homoousios,’ although Arius’ use of “anomoia” in his letter to Alexander of Alexandria, preserved by Athanasius in anticipated the view of the later radical Arianism, denies in advance what the “homoousios” would affirm, quite as Gregory’s Expositio anticipated the Trinitarian doctrine which “homoousios” would be chosen to uphold. J. N. D. Kelly notes that its first mention at the Nicene Council appears to have been a derogatory reference by Eusebius of Nicomedia.[447]
Some years before the Council of Nicaea, about 318, Arius, a native of Libya, was appointed the pastor of a church in the Alexandrine district of Baucalis, where he began to preach against the divinity of the Son. Although scholarship is divided on the matter, he appears to have arrived at this denial by forcing the logic of Origen’s alleged subordinationism. On whatever basis, he concluded to a variety of polytheism based on the hylemorphic dualism of Middle Platonism, in which matter (hyle) is the dialectic principle which distinguishes creatures from God, and from each other. Within this dualistic‘ context, Arius’ stress upon the concrete distinctions between the three hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit, and at the same time, his affirmation of the absolute unity of God, required that the Father be God absolutely, in the sense that He be the divine substance, absolute amd absolutely immaterial, with the consequent reduction of the Son and Spirit to realities materially distinct who would by definition be less than divine, and who would differ from each other as greater or lesser according to their degree of materiality, their degree of differentiation from the Father, and thus from each other. This is rather Origenism than theology of Origen, whose insistence upon the “substantial” being of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, is incompatible with the Son―or the Spirit―having the created beginning in time upon which Arius insisted.
In 321 Alexander, the archbishop of Alexandria, held a council which condemned Arius, excommunicated him, and forced him into exile. Arius went to Caesarea on the Palestinian coast, whose bishop, Eusebius, was a conservative but eclectic Origenist, who had dropped Origen’s insistence upon the co-eternity of the Father and the Son, and thus was sympathetic to Arius’s subordinationism without thereby subscribing to the whole of Arius’ doctrine.
From Caesarea Arius proceeded to the residence of another Eusebius, then the Bishop of Nicomedia and a former classmate of Arius at Lucian’s school in Antioch. At that time Nicomedia was the base from which Constantine was directing his campaign for the control of the Empire. After eliminating Licinus in 324: he would make Nicomedia the imperial capital for some six years before moving the capital to the renamed Byzantium, Constantinople, the city of Constantine.
Eusebius was the Bishop of Nicomedia well before the Council of Nicaea and, although condemned by the Council for refusing to condemn Arius, whom he had received in Nicomedia after his exile from Alexandria prior to the Council of Nicsaea, was within two years restored to the See of Nicomedia and once again sufficiently in Constantine’s confidence to persuade him to seek from Athanasius the restoration of Arius’ to communion in the See of Alexandria and thereby restore religious unity to the Empire. Athanasius refused the imperial request, the first instance of his forty years of solitary resistance to the submission of the ecclesial auctoritas sacerdotum, solemnly affirmed by the Council of Nicaea, to the potestas regalis of the emperors. Constantine was not amused; he consented to the exile of Athanasius, although not to his deposition, after the two Eusebii had rigged his condemnation at Tyre in 335 and at Constantinople a year later, for mismanaging his diocese by persecuting the Miletian schismatics, condemned at Nicaea, for challenging his authority to govern his See, although they failed to persuade Constantine to depose him.
Within the next year, Eusebius of Nicomedia and his close ally, Eusebius of Caesarea, had rid the rest of the Orient of those bishops who had most embarrased the two Eusebii at the Council of Nicaea, particularly Eustathius of Antioch and Marcellus of Ancyra. Eusebius of Nicomedia was an Arian for all practical purposes, and Eusebius of Caesarea, a committed subordinationist who who had never accepted the Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father, confusing it with Sabellianism, but they found Athanasius untouchable. Eusebius of Caesarea spent the remainder of his life condemning Marcellus as a Sabellian, while Eusebius of Nicomedia formed a sheerly political alliance with the disappointed Miletian schismatics who consented to the Arian heresy under the hope that the alliance might gain their ends, freedom from Athanasius’ authority over them.
This left Arius most favorably situated for the defense and promotion of his doctrine. He found refuge from Alexandria with Eusebius of Nicomedia, from which city he published a popularizing book entitled Thalia, full of jingles and rhymes summarizing his theology for popular consumption. This work shows him to be very much a Middle Platonist in his subordination of the Son, as Dyad, to Father as Monad. [448]
a. The Father is the agennetos Archē, the unbegotten-uncreated source of all being (his meaning is ambiguous, as between unbegotten and uncreated: the Greek language had not yet developed a semantic or orthographic distinction between “unbegotten” and “uncreated, between genetos and gennetos.
b. The Father’s being is incommunicable, indivisible, absolute, and thus incapable of emanation: he therefore cannot generate a Son.
c. The Son is the mediator for creation: the creation cannot bear contact with the Father;
d. The Son is gennetos, begotten-created, and therefore is not co-eternal with the Father;
e. The Son is anomoios to the Father; without similarity to him.
f. The Son is subject to change and to sin; he could have fallen but, by the grace of the Father, he did not.
g. The finite and created Son is only nominally called “Son of the Father;” this is a courtesy title, literally false.
Along with the variants upon the gennetos – genetos ambiguity, which melds generation with causation, Arius took advantage of the latent ambiguity of a number of other Greek terms, notably Ἀρχή (Archē) (source, origin), which he interpreted as unique to the Father, the “Monad,” in support of his denial of the Son’s divinity.
a. For Arius, gennetos, or begotten, means to have a created beginning, thus of the Only-begotten Son it must be said that “there was when he was not.” Here Arius, like his ally, Eusebius of Caesarea, contradicted Origen, who held the Son to be co-eternal with the Father. Origen was the first to recognize that for the Father to be eternally Father, he must have an eternal Son.
b. The term Agennetos, meaning unbegotten, without beginning, uncreated, is proper to the Father alone, and from this Arius concludes that it is the Father who alone is God
c. Genetos, i.e., created, has for Arius the same sense as gennetos, i.e., begotten, in that both words designate what is alien to God. That these terms were interchangeable in the early fourth century much facilitated Arius’ rationale. Understanding genetos to designate what is created, he held it to bes proper to the Son who, as begotten, has a beginning, and is a creature.
d. Gennetos, begotten, hence created, Arius affirms to be proper to what is not God:, and therefore is proper to the Son, who is the “perfect creature.”
e, Archē = Source, Beginning, Principle, First Cause, used indifferently by Arius to deny that the Father is a creature or that he is generated.
f. Anarchos consequently means without beginning, having no source in another. The term is ambiguous, for it can mean either or both ungenerate or uncreated. Arius makes these to be the same.
The rise of the Arian heresy was coincident with the rise of Constantine, the Augustus of the West who, from 310 to 324, defeated all his rivals for the Imperial throne. He executed the last of these, his quondam brother-in-law, Licinius, in 325. In 313, after his decisive victory over Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, a victory which he believed to be his by the grace of the risen Christ who had appeared to him in a vision, Constantine with his then ally, Licinius, issued the Edict of Milan, which ended the persecution of Christians, although Licinius, as Emperor of the East, renewed some feautures of it in 320, during his last decade-long effort,to overturn Constantine’s Christian polity. However, he was decisively defeated in 324, and executed by Constantine a year later.
In 324, once secure on the throne, Constantine made his capital in Nicomedia, which had been the provincial capital of Bithynia in northwestern Asia Minor. Nicomedia remained his capital until 330, when he moved his court to Constantinople. Eusebius of Nicomedia, in entire sympathy with Arius, was suddenly in a most influential position, the bishop of Constantine’s capital city, at first of Nicomedia, and later, of Constantinople, positions which he did not hesitate to exploit in favor of the Arian heresy.
The Arian heresy is an Eastern vintage, arising out of the Eastern emphasis, itself entirely legitimate, upon the distinction of Father, Son and Spirit, which is rooted in the rule of faith itself, i.e., in the baptismal liturgy. This Trinitarian emphasis, asserting the unity of God and the divinity of the divine Names, confronted the sophistication of the learned members of the Oriental clergy, whose education had included inculcation in the Middle and Neo-Platonism of the time. However firm their faith, these bishops’ theological grasp of the doctrine of the Trinity, and consequently their Christology as well, was imbued with an at least cultural Platonism, in terms of which they envisioned questions concerning the faith. This could not but lead to a tension between the systematic dualism inherent in Platonism as such, and the orthodox Christian faith that Jesus is Lord. This dualism was dehistoricizing as a matter of principle; failing always to find a necessary truth in history, it sought an ideal necessary truth as a matter of rational necessity. This quest for rationally necessary truth, unity and goodness constitutes the cosmological consciousness, then and now. Under its auspices, the Trinity is understood in an identification of the Father with the divine substance, and the consequent subordination and relativization of the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Conversion from the cosmological consciousness is its rejection in favor of the historical freedom of the good creation which is in Christ. Precisely as freely received, freedom can only be a gift from the free source of freedom, the head who is Christ the Lord.[449]. The acceptance and personal appropriation of his gift of free historical responsibility can only be liturgical, because the gift, simply as historical, can be appropriated only in the historical celebration of the gift, in such wise that a refusal of the gift connotes always a despair of historical existence and therefore persistence in the cosmological quest for a salvation which history cannot mediate. The despairing quest of the ideal, this dehistoricization of all that is concrete in history, typifies the cosmological consciousness.
Its Middle- or Neoplatonic versions, short of a full recognition of their intrinsic falsity as judged by the apostolic tradition that Jesus Christ is Lord, require as a rational necessity a metaphysical subordination of the Son and Spirit to the Father, and of the Spirit to the Son, while the regula fidei (the apostolic rule of faith) insists that the Son must be God if he is to be the Redeemer, and the Spirit must be God if he is to be the Sanctifier.
The sacramentally efficacious historicity of the fides quaerens intellectum of the Apostolic Fathers, their liturgically sustained faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, enabled them continually to transcend their immersion in the cultural dualism, the spontaneous docetism of the dualist imagination, which from the first century had become the single alternative to the faith of the primitive Church. Only thus could the Church progress continually toward the Nicene proclamation of the consubstantiality of the Father, Son and Spirit within the divine Tri-Unity, the Trinity, that is the One God.
Only when conversion to the concrete historicity of the apostolic tradition that Jesus Christ is Lord is only nominal, which is to say, only when the Platonic cosmology and its associated dualism continues to be regarded as normative for truth, as simply an inescapable necessity of thought, does the Arian heresy predominate over the faith of the Church.
These tensions are explicit in the thought of the greatest Christian theologian of the third century, Origen of Alexandria, later of Cesarea. He died a few years after a prolonged interrogation by persecutors whose tortures failed to extract from him a denial of his Catholic faith. He is then a martyr, an eloquent witness to the faith of the Church. There can be no question of his orthodoxy. He provides a classic representation of the tension between the Catholic faith and the cosmological rationality: his death witnesses to his personal commitment to the doctrinal tradition, and his scriptural commentaries, even tragically truncated as they have come down to us, have had an influence upon the Latin Church second only to Augustine’s. The condemnations of what was taken to be his systematic theology, not as it is set out in the Peri Archon, but as developed by his followers, bore not on Origen’s writings, but upon inferences drawn from them: inferences which were not his, as Crouzel has shown. Τhis “Origenism,” little more than a cosmological rationalization of his thought, had an enormous influence upon the East both before and after Origen’s death in the mid-third century; it provides the foundation for the fourth century struggle between orthodoxy and cosmology out of which grew the Arian controversy. Origen’s own doctrine and theology became so blurred by its cosmological interpretation, first by Eusebius of Caesarea, then by admirers of Origen similarly steeped in Middle Platonism, as to inspire “two Origenisms,” the one historical and orthodox, because soteriologically driven, the other nonhistorical and heterodox because normed by cosmological rationality rather than the Church’s apostolic-liturcial tradition celebrated and preached by the bishops holding exercising liturgical responsibility in the Eastern Church. Two of the latter, Peter of Alexandria and Methodius of Olympus, both maryred for their faith, misunderstood Origen’s theology and on that basis condemned it, as Crouzel has shown.
The Arian heresy arose out of the tendency, common among the more cosmologically commited theologians of the time, to impose their “common sense” interpretation of Origen’s theology; Eusebius of Caesarea exemplified this tendency,[450] both as to its naiveté and its obduracy. Arianism was an overt cosmologization and dehistoricization of the Christian faith in the risen Christ, largely in reliance upon a cosmologized Origenism, an insistent reading into theology of the Peri Archon a subordination of the Catholic faith to the Middle Platonism of the late classical tradition.
The alternative to this cosmological Origenism may be called conservative, in that it constitutes the mental furniture of most of the conservative Greek bishops of the latter half of the third century, loyal to Origen and to the Catholic tradition, distrustful of theological language not found in Scripture and, latterly, of the “homoousios” which had become associated with the unitarian heresy of Paul of Samosata after his condemnation in 268. We have seen that one of these, Dionysius of Alexandria, was the Bishop of Alexandria in the middle of the third century: he may have been present at the first trial of Paul of Samosata at Antioch in 265. His loyalty to Origen’s Spirit Christology and to his emphasis upon the Substantial unity of the Trinity and the hypostatic distinctions between the Father, Son and Spirit prompted him to rebuke several bishops in the Libyan outreaches of his vast diocese for their Sabellian sympathies; in reply they appealed to Bishop Dionysius of Rome, charging their own metropolitan with five heresies:[451] As summarized by Feltoe, they charge Dionysius of Alexandria with:
(1) separating the Father and the Son;
(2) denyimng the eternity of the Son;
(3) naming the Father without the Son and the Son without the Father;
(4) virtually rejecting the term ὁμοὐσιος as desccriptive of the Son
(5) speaking of the Son as a creature of the Father and using misleading illustrations of their relation.
Pope Dionysius of Rome had already condemned the subordinationist and Sabellian errors when, in 260, wrote a personal letter to bishop Dionysius of Alexandria evidently rebuking the tritheism which the Pope had read into the failure of his Alexandrine namesake to use “homoousios” of the Son: this in a letter rebuking the Sabellianism of his suffragan bishops in the Libyan Pentapolis. This personal letter, now lost, was accompanied by a letter to the diocese of Alexandria, making the same allegations, but more diplomatically, since it did not mention the name of Dionysius of Alexandria.
In his”Refutation and Defense” Dionysius of Alexandria replied to the letter the Pope had sent to the See of Alexandria effectively charging his Alexanrine namesake with the tritheism which the Pope thought to be implicit in his failure to use “homoousios” of the Son. As the bishop of that See, Dionysius of Alexandria affirmed his willingness to affirm the homoousion of the Son with the Father, accepting Origen’s Trinitarian terminogy and, according to J. N. D. Kelly (Doctrines, 135-36, using it accurately.
A century later, Basil of Caesarea’s reluctant recourse to the Aristotelian metaphysical analysis in order to distinguish “ousia” from “hypostasis” had fared no better.[452] By Basil’s time, the Church’s Trinitarian doctrine was clear: the Council of Nicaea had established the substantial unity in the One God of the concretely distinct Names, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. However, the cosmological metaphysics which, resting upon the very high academic authority of Eusebius of Caesarea, had become dominant in most of the Oriental dioceses, could not accept the Nicene doctrine. Eusebius had approved Origen’s “treis hypostaseis,” but rejected Origen’s ascription of substantial unity, “mia ousia,” to the Trinity. Rather, Eusebius assigned substantial unity to the Father, subordinating the Son to the Father, and effectively reducing the Holy Spirit to a creature—Eusebius had long since become an Arian. The Council of Antioch condemned him for that heresy early in 325, and the Council of Nicaea would confirm that judgment later in the year. Eusebius attended the Council of Nicaea as the bishop of Caesarea,, and nominally approved the Nicene Creed, but the letter he wrote to his diocese explained his approval of the Creed by interpreting it subordinationist. This prompted Eustathius of Antioch, a senior bishop at Nicaea, to charge him openly with heresy.
The determinist rationale of Eusebius and his followers found the single alternative to their doctrine to be Sabellianism. Thus they condemned as Sabellian the Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. This became the default doctrine of the Oriental bishops apart from the Alexandrines and the pro-Nicene Christians in Antioch who remained loyal to Eustathius, who had died in exile; they were loyal also to Origen’s “mia ousia, treis hypostaseis and, well into the fifth century, refused to recognize the Arian bishops who professed to succeed Eustathius.
These allegations were taken seriously by the Pope, Dionysius of Rome, who, after calling a council in Rome upon whose condemnations of Sabellianism and tritheism he relied, sent an admonitory letter to the Church of Alexandria. In it he criticized Dionysius’ handling of the problem posed by the Sabellianism of the Libyan bishops, but without naming Dionysius. He sent another personal letter to Dionysius; of we know nothing apart fwom what may be inferred from Dionysius of Alexandria’s Refutation and Apologia The letter sent to the Alexandrine clergy rebukes Dionysius of Alexandria on the basis of a rather complete misunderstanding of his Christology, and consequently of his Trinitarian doctrine.
As summarized by Feltoe, the five charges brought against Dionysius by his Libyan suffragans are simply a rejectioon of his Christology which, like that of the Alexandrine tradition and, in fact, of the third century generally, is the Spirit Christology of the Johannine Prologue, of Phil. 2:5-13. of the Apostolic Fathers, of Tertullian, Hippolytus, and of Origen. It treats of the union of God and man in Jesus as a primordial Event, the “Beginning,” the created union of the fullness of divinity and the fullness of humanity in Jesus Christ the Lord whose Personal humanity, in his primordial pre-existence, is integral, that free unity of which he emptied himself in his kenōsis, and which was restored to him upon his Resurrection, the integrity of a “life-giving Spirit” (I Cor. 15:45).
As to the first complaint “separating the Father and the Son,” the reprimand that Dionysius sent to his Libyan suffragans cannot avoid ‘separating’ the Father and the Son, for the Father sends the Son, whom Dionysius knows to be Jesus the Lord. His ‘separation’ from the Father is his redemptive immanence in history; with its accomplishment, he ascends to the Father, as the “life-giving Spirit” of I Cor. 15:45. The ‘separation” complained of is the economy of salvation whose “Beginning” is the Son, Jesus the Lord, who is also its End.[453] The references by Dionysius to Scripture are always historical; his references to the Son are always to Jesus.
As to the second complaint, that of ‘denying the eternity of the Son,’ it is evident that Jesus is “the Beginning;” thus Paul in Col. 1:17. This Beginning is Personal to him who is “the same yesterday, todaty, and forever:” (Heb. 13:8). As Irenaeus had already taught, and Origen after him, Jesus is at once a human and a divine Person, “one and the same son,” in Irenaeus’ famous phrase: the Son of the Father and of Mary: he is not “two sons.” The communication of idioms, stressed continually by Origen, certainly was known to and accepted by Dionysius, his disciple, for it is a summary statement of the Spirit Christology common to both. That Jesus is the eternal Son of the Father is not defeated by his “Beginning” to be Jesus the Lord.
As to the third complaint, the “naming the Father without the Son and the Son without the Father,” Dionysius is the disciple of Origen, the first theologian to declare formally what was obvious to the apostolic tradition; the apostolic Naming of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is the liturgical foundation of the Trinitarian doctrine of Nicaea and I Constantinople, viz., that one cannot say Father without reference to the Son, whose revelation of the Father eliminated the generic meaning given “Father” by the pagan pantheons, making it a specific relation to his Son, Jesus the Christ. In consequence, the Lord’s prayer, given in response to the apostles’ request, “Lord, teach us to pray,” does not mention the Son. Dionysius of Alexandria was a successor of the Apostles; it is obvious that his naming of the Father without naming the Son, and the Son without naming the Father, requires no firmer foundation than the earliest prayer of the Church.
The fourth complaint, that of “virtually rejecting the term ὁμοὑσιος as descriptive of the Son,” would impose upon Dionysius a word that the Oriental bishops would twice condemn within the decade, at the trials of Paul of Samosata in Councils held at Antioch, in 265 and 268. It is possible that Dionysius attended the first of these Councils; inasmuch as this time Alexandria held patriarchal precedence over Antioch. The Libyan invocation of ὁμοὐσιος was hardly innocent of the modalist reading of “same substance” that reduced the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to a single subject, a Monas. The evident Sabellianism of the Libyan bishops had prompted their Archbishop’s rebuke in the first place, for it entailed a rejection of the distinct divinity of the Son, and with this, a radical departure from the Eucharistic worship of the Church. Feltoe cites Bethune-Baker’s assertion that Dionysius of Alexandria had not internalized the Western Trinitarianism of a single divine Substance and three divine Persons, and that consequently he reads a subordinationism into ὁμοὐσιος. At this time, Origen had a much greater acceptance in the East than Tertullian had in the West; Tertullian had none in the east in the third century. It would be another fifty years before Origen would need Pamphilus’ Defense. No one taught by Origen would dream of supposing the divisibility of the mia ousia which subordinationism requires. That heresy waited upon the Eusebian distortion of Origen’s theology which flatly rejected the Nicene affirmation of the ὁμοὑσιος of the Son as Sabellian. It is remarkable that Feltoe’s willingness to read ubordinationism into Dionysius’ Refutatio should find no echo in his praise of the explicit subordinationism of Basil of Caesarea, whose criticism of Dionysius he approves without reservation, and whose understanding of the Trinitarian Persons is implicitly categorial., reflecting the materialism inherent in subordinationism as such.[454]
Feltoe’s last complaint, i.e., “speaking of the Son as a creature of the Father and using misleading illustrations of their relation” is puerile. Dismissed for that reason by Dionysius, his defense by Athansius has been summarily rejected by Feltoe and his affines, always without discussion, indeed as unworthy of discussion. This condescension to Athanasius as prejudiced in favor of the man he is defending and consequently talking nonsense is instinctive to those historians whose view of history relies upon the Reform’s reduction of the Christian tradition to subjectivity, to “narrative,” and historical scholarship to the radical empiricism of “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” the event whose documentation is ever incomplete and its verification ever postponed.
When history loses its free sacramental significance, which is so say, its freely intelligible continuity, it ceases to have any significance, any unity: these the historian must supply ab extra. Plato saw the problem long ago. Having found the flux and flow of historiy unintelligible, his reduction of its narrative to the insignificance of a “likely account” marked historical utterance as such. Paul agreed; apart from the transcendence of fallen and fragmented history by the historical immanence of the Eucharistic Lord, the Alpha and the Omega, history is meaningless. Inasmuch as the immanence of Jesus the Lord in history is free, from “in the Beginning,” the Alpha, to the Omega, his Second Coming, without antecedent possibility, the objectivity of the immanence of the risen Lord in history can only be sacramental, effected by Jesus’ instiution of the Eucharistic sacrifice, and the oral-liturgical tradition that mediates it throughout history, to the end of the world.
It would be difficult today to find a Catholic historian who would affirm the objective historicity of this Event, of this tradition, the Eucharistic offering in persona Christi of the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed.[455] J. A. T. Robinson’s But That I Can’t Believe! gives banal expression to the universal dissent of those whose ‘historical consciousness’ is the corollary of their refusal of the Eucharistic realism of the historical Catholic tradition.
Let it be said yet again, it is entirely correct to speak of the Son as a creature. The alternative is the rejection of the communication of idioms in him by denying that his created humanity is Personal―long since a Thomist commonplace but condemned by the Councils of Ephesus and of Chalcedon. Dionysius of Alexandria can hardly be expected to deny the central Mystery of the faith, that Jesus is the Lord; he affirmed the full divinity of the “one and the same Son”.
To avoid this consequence, there is much quibbling over the meaning of the Nicene use of ὁμοὑσιος. Athanasius seems to have ignored the term for some twenty years, i.e., until the middle fifties of the fourth century, preferring to insist upon the mia hypostasis of the Christ. He had until then defended the faith of Nicaea by denying the subordinationism of the Eusebians, making mia hypostasis of the Christ his watchword. It sufficed, for its corollary is the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. Athanasius’ insistence upon it aroused the permanent enmity of the Eusebians, always clients of Arianizing emperors who regarded Athanasius’ unwillingmness to compromise the faith of the Church as treason and who, given the opportunity, would have executed him.
As will be seen, scholars of the eminence of Lonergan, Bouyer, and Meyendorff have assumed without discussion that the Nicene use of ὁμοὑσιος cannot be also the Chalcedonian use. Relying upon the presumed rational necessity of identifying the human substance with the human person, they resist all suggestion of a Chalcedonian development of the latencies of the ὁμοὑσιος.; viz., of our consubstantiality with Jesus the Lord
It is enough here to note that Catholic theology exists to explore the doctrinal tradition of the historical Church, the authenticity and authority of whose radically liturgical worship is never in issue. When Church historians and theologians ignore this authority as alien to their inquiry, their ignorance of it is their rejection of it, by which ignorance they proceed to reduce Conciliar doctrine to theological propositions, rendering them debatable and consequently dismissing a priori the liturgical authority of the Councils. Thus persuaded, such historians cease to do history, for their rationale then rests upon dismissing the Church’s ancient oral tradition as arbitrary until verified ab extra by a higher criterion of truth, whose pursuit cannot but be abstract, a flight from history.
In his Refutation and Apologia, Dionysius set out his orthodox faith as clearly as the language of the time permitted, affirming the distinction of the Trinitarian Persons without providing a solution to the dilemma posed by their consubstantiality and the substantial unity of God―which he affirmed without reservation. He speaks of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit within the concrete context of their eternal interrelations as revealed in Christ. His acceptance of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father is a rejection at once of subordinationism and Sabellianism. His critics, of whom Feltoe is the best informed, alike dismiss as unwarranted his usage of ποιíημα wih respect to the Son.[456] Yet, writing almost a century after Dionysius, Diodore of Tarsus encountered the same semantic difficulty, the lack of a terminology capable of distinguishing in Jesus the Christ the Person of the eternal Son from his Personal, i.e., ensouled, humanity. As Dionysius contended in his Refutatio, there is ample Scriptural justification for his speaking of the Son as a ποιíημα, a creature, for he is Jesus, a man, even the Beginning, who cannot but have been created.
Finally, the lock-step preference for the untutored criticism of Dionysius’ orthodoxy, volunteered off-hand by an uninformed Basil of Caesarea in his Ninth Letter and confirmed in his De Spiritu Sancto, over that vindication of it provided by the well informed and orthodox Athanasiuis, is simply ridiculous. Basil remained a disciple of his Eusebian namesake of Ancyra all his life; his display of condescension if not contempt for Dionysius in his Ninth Letter is at best mere insolence. As that letter puts beyond dispute, at the time of its writing, ca. 361, at the age of about thirty-one, Basil did not understand the meaning of the ὁμοοὑσιος τῷ πατρἱ (homoiousios tō patri) taught at Nicaea thirty-five years earlier, nor did he understand it any better in 363. when the Council of Antioch, called by his much admired friend Meletius of Antioch, would attempt to identify the homoousion of the Son with the Father, defined at Nicaea, wtih to the ὁμοιοὑσιος (homoiousios) doctrine of his followers, despite their radical iuncompatibility. Basil’s Letters 67, 68, and, 69, written about 371, find him urging Athanasius to join him in the consolidation of the orthodox around Meletius. Athanasius did not deign to answer. He knew that any return to ecclesial communion required assent to the Nicene Creed. Given that consensus, ecclesial communion is achieved; lacking it, ecclesial communion has been rejected.; there remains only that political communion, the submission of the Church to the empire, upon which Basil was always intent..
About 318 Arius, an Alexandrine priest who had been excommunicated ca. 310, by Peter, the martyred bishop of Alexandria, but was restored to communion by Peter’s successor and by h im appointed pastor of the church in Baucalis, an Alexandrine suburb, began to deny the divinity of the Son of God, He was perhaps prompted to do so by a sermon in which Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, taught the divinity of Jesus Christ the Son. Arius held this to be impossible: arguing that what is begotten has a beginning, whereas what is divine is eternal. Bishop; Alexander, loyal to Origen’s Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, excommunicated him, as was Athanasius after him and Dionysius the Great before him, Alexander revered Origen as a martyr to the faith and as the greatest mind of the age, nor was he mistaken in doing so. Neither nor Ath;anasius who succeeded him wished to go beyond what Origen had taught.
However, early in the fourth century, Eusebius, who had been the student of the martyred Pamphilus, the head of the revived School which Origen had founded in Caesarea after his exile from Alexandria, achieved a transcendent scholarly standing. Self-styled “Eusebius Pamphilii” he was probably the heir of Pamphilius. At any rate, he possessed the library which Origen had collected after his exile from Alexandria, and which Pamphilius had enlarged. Eusebius had probably finished the Ecclesiastical History, the work which would make him famous, the before the turn of the century. By about 313 he had been appointed the Bishop of Caesarea. Thereupon, in close association with his namesake, Eusebius of Nicomedia, he proceeded to promote his subordinationist perversion of Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine of mia ousia , treis hypostaseis, whose τρεις ὑποστασεiς (three hypostases: i.e., the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit) Eusebius changed into τρεις οὐσίας, three substances. i.e., a divine Monas from which proceeds a first emanation, the logos, and, from the logos, a second, subordinate to the logos. Neither emanation is substantially divine and neither can but be creatures. The issues raised by this cosmology wouild trouble the Oriental Church, apart from Alexandria, throughout most of the fourth century
Eusebius offers a clear instance of that theological speculation which relies upon the authority of cosmological rationality rather than upon the soteriological tradition of the apostolic Church. That is to say, he was concerned for the cosmological coherence of doctrine, rather than for the soteriological consequences of our redemption in Christ. His subordinationism left him with little or no in Christology, but he was unable to accept the Nicene definition of the substantial unity of the Trinity which underlay the definition of the consubstantiality of Jesus with the Father. He could not accept Origen’s doctrine of the single divine substance and the three divine hypostases: mia ousia , treis hypostaseis. Eusebius was already an Arian by predilection, avoiding the label but not the reality. This had been apparent to the provincial Council of Antioch which chose Eustathius to be the Patriarch of Antioch, and which excommunicated Eusebius as an Arian, a judgement which the Council of Nicaea would confirm a few months later. After the Council his subordinationist perversion of Origen’s Christology and Trinitarian doctrion would within a decade persuade most of the Oriental bishops to follow him in denying the authority of the Council; a denial whos corollary was submssion to the ecclesial authority of the Emperor, to which the Orienal bishops—again, apart from Athanasius of Alexandria—had long been accustomed. This perverse simplification of Origen’s anticipation of the Trinitarian doctrine of Nicaea appealed to most of the old-fashioned clergy of Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine. Accustomed to regard the Emperor as responsible for the unity of the empire, they were reluctant to accept a religious authority which could not but displace the Emperor’s traditionally holistic authority, at once civil, military and religious. Prior to Constantine, the imperial religion had been pagan and, as a matter of policy, intent upon persecuting Christians qua tale as threat to thereligious unity of the Empire. The victory of Constantine and Licinus in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in Rome was followed by their issue of the Edict of Milan (313), which ended the persecutions initiated by Diocletian and pursued by Galerius and Maxaminus after his death, not only by establishing a policy of religious toleration, but also by ordering the restoration upon demand of the property of Christians which had been confiscated during the persecutions.
This Edict, based upon Constantine’s conviction that his military success had been achieved by the grace of Christ, appeared to combine the authority of Church and Emperor in a Christian princeps. While Eusebius’ unfinished panegyric, The Life of Constantine, is overdrawn, it yet celebrates a caesaropapism widely accepted by the oriental bishops, always with the exception of Athanasius, who from the outset of his reign over the diocese of Alexandria, denied all imperial authority over the Church. Eusebius’ last completed work, the Ecclesiatica theologia, developed the implications of the subordinationist interpretation of Nicaea which he had composed during the Council of Nicaea to provide his flock in Caesarea with the subordinationist reading of the Nicene Creed which might account for his reluctant subscription to the Creed at the Council. He recognized that Nicene homoousios of the Son with the Father contradicted the emanationist Middle Platonic cosmology that he looked upon as a necessity of thought, and was unable to accept it. Within his world view, the only alternative to his subordinationist Trinitarianism was a regression to Sabellianism; This is the obverse of the Sabellian indictment of the rebuke sent them by Dionysius the Great ca. 359..
In the third century, Western bishops such as Dionysius of Rome had been taught by Hippolytus, perhaps by Tertullian, and finally by Callistus, to reject the absolute Monarchianism of Sabellianism, but the traditional Roman emphasis upon the divine Unity left them uneasy before the outright assertion of the Personal, i.e., objective distinctions of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Marcel Richard has on firm grounds rejected the attribution to Hippolytus of the Traditio Apostolica. It is then likely that the Latin bishops learned this distinction from the exercise of their own liturgical office of preaching the apostolic faith that Jesus is the Lord.[457], as well as from the Trinitarian doctrine of Tertullian and Hippolytus, who taught that the Trinity is the substantial unity of the three Persons; however, under the continuing imperial persecution of Christianity in the third and fourth centuries, they had had little opportunity to undertake its theological investigation. In the East, the conservative ‘Origenists’ followed Eusebius of Caesarea in reading the Nicene Creed as Sabellian or unitarian, thus as a denial of the real distinction between the Father, the Son and the Spirit which Origen had upheld. Some of them would find themselves more comfortable with an alternative homoi-ousios, thinking to find in the “likeness” of the Son’s substance to the substance of the Father (homoios kat’ousian) a means of affirming at once the divinity of the Son and his distinction from the Father. The homoiousians persisted in this confusion well into the last quarter of the 4th century, although they do not do so out of any sympathy with Arius, whom most of them reject entirely. Generally, they insist that:
a. The Word or Son is a hypostasis, a distinct divine reality;
b. The Son mediates between God the Father and creation; [but not as Incarnate: they understand the Word to be the eternal Son, as Origen had taught, although unlike him finding in that an obstacle to the eternal Word’s created union with the material intelligence, the nous who, with the fall, would become flesh, Jesus the Christ. The homoiousians are first and foremost at once anti-Arian and anti-Nicene bishops; when drawn into controversy, they were seldom skilled in it: As a rule it is the apostolic preaching and the liturgy that are normative for their doctrine, not the nonhistorical or cosmological implications arising out of the Eusebian rationalization of Origen’s Peri Archon.
c. The Son is generated: he is really the Son of the Father; he is not adopted;
d. He is co-eternal with the Father, and is not generated by a choice of the Father: there was never a “when he was not”; here their loyalty to Origen separates them from Arius and Arian sympathizers such as Eusebius of Caesarea, with whose doctrine they broke in following Basil of Ancyra in 358..
e. The Son is the Image of the Father, and is distinct from the Father.
f. They hesitate to affirm the Personal consubstantiality of the Spirit,
The radical alternative to this conservative or soteriologically-normed Origenism is the academic, cosmologized Origenism of Eusebius of Caesarea. It is radical because it is less Christian than cosmological: i.e., it is concerned for developing an objective, i.e., extrinsic, speculative-philosophical oversight of the Church’s doctrine, on generally Middle- or Neoplatonic postulates, rather than for understanding the transcendent truth of the historical doctrinal tradition as simply immune to the nonhistorical cosmological critique.
Not all of the practitioners of that critique were equally intent upon its dehistoricizing latency, but all of them were affected by it. Eusebius of Caesarea is representative of these bishops. The author of the Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius of Caesarea is the first great Church historian, to whom much of our knowledge of the first three centuries is indebited, thus he is much more than a friend of Arius, but he is that also.
The cosmologized ‘Origenism’ of such a conservative as Eusebius of Caesarea is not yet Arianism, but it tends to become so when its logic is pushed and the desire to push it crops up frequently among this group. Its fundamental postulates are as follows:
a. The Son or Word is distinct from the Father, and is the mediator of all creation. Such a mediator is necessary, for creation could not bear contact with the Father.
b. The Son is perfect, only-begotten “before all ages;”
c. The Son is the Image of God, and may be said to be God;
d. The Son is not co-eternal with the Father; his existence is contingent upon the Father’s will (here is a departure from Origen’s doctrine, which sees the Son as co- eternal with the Father but who is not the Father and consequently does not generate a Son).
e. The Father is the Monad, the divine Substance eternal and unoriginate. He alone is anarchos, agennetos (without beginning, without generation), and is the cause of all things. (agam a departure from Origen’s doctrine, in which the Trinity is the divine Ousia or substance.
f. The Saints can possess the same kind of glory as the Son (this is a radical refusal of the keystone of Origen’s theology, the primordial Henōsis, in the Beginning of Jesus the Christ).
Thus Eusebius of Caesarea relied upon Origen’s theology, but he rationalized it into a subordinationism, rejecting the foundational assertion of Origen’s theology, which affirmed the co-eternity of the Father and the Son, while Eusebius’ cosmological rationalization of Origen’s theology required the dropping the Son’s eternal generation as inconsistent with the Son’s subordination to the Father. It is thus that Eusebius’ theology is a rationalization, a dehistoricization of Origen’s Trinitatian doctrine into a clear denial of the Son’s divinity: his divinity could not survive a denial of his eternity.
Origen, who died about 254 of injuries suffered in the Decian persecution, has been charged with responsibility for the Arian heresy, in that Arianism may be said to be no more than a development of his supposed subordination of the Son to the Father. There is a level at which this is true: one may deduce a denial of the divinity of the Son from elements in the Peri Archon, but to do so it is necessary to ignore Origen’s doctrine of Father, Son and Spirit. Origen was not a rigidly systematic thinker nor yet a metaphysician in the classic dualist tradition. He used the Middle or Neoplatonism he had learned from Ammonius Saccas to inquire into the doctrinal tradition, but in order to explore the Mysterium fidei, not to defeat it. Certainly he is the first seriously to undertake the task of systematic theology. Had he done this from a latently subordinationist―i.e., dualist―point d’appui, it would be no cause for wonder, for none other was then available. What is astonishing in Origen is that in the first half of the third century he constructed, on the irrefragible basis of the Catholic faith that Jesus is the Lord, a “connected body of doctrine” that anticipated both the Personal homoousios of the Son affirmed by the Nicene Creed, and the subsistence of Jesus, as the “one and the same Son,” at once in the single substance of humanity and in the single substance of the Triune God, taught by the Symbol of Chalcedon.
Writing as a private theologian, Benedict XVI has referred to Origen as a doctor of the Church.[458] His astonishing labor in the service of the Church well warrants the attribution. Arius, whose denial of the divinity and the humanity of the Christ rests precisely on the dualist a prior rejected out of hand by Origen, doubtless has his revisionist defenders, but few regard his heresy as a service to the Church.
Arius was born around 260, and thus is a contemporary of Eusebius of Caesarea. After ordination to the priesthood ca. 312, he was assigned to preach in the church of Baukalis, a district in Alexandria. His preaching brought him to the attention of Archbishop Alexander, who in 321 convened a provincial council which condemned his doctrine, excommunicated him, and forced his exile. Arius thereupon left Alexandria for Caesarea, where Eusebius was bishop. As a great scholar, and the bishop of the city in which Origen had spent much of his life, Eusebius was regarded as Origen’s intellectual heir and apologist. After his post-Nicene restoration to the favor of Emperor Constantine, he called several provincial councils which rehabilitated Arius; freeing him to preach in Caesarea.
However, some years earlier, in 323 A. D. Arius’doctrine had drawn the condemnation not only of Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, but also of Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem, Bishop Eustathius of Antioch, Bishop Marcellus of Ancyra, of several bishops from Phoenician Tripoli, and also of Pope Sylvester of Rome, whose support Bishop Alexander of Alexandria had sought in condemning Arius. In March, 325, Ossius (Hosius) of Cordoba, as Constantine’s advisor and emissary, summoned and presided over a Synod held at Antioch: it condemned Arius, provisionally deposed Eusebius of Caesarea, and appointed Eustathius of Borea the Patriarch of Antioch.
This deposition of the bishop of a major see caused a turmoil which Emperor Constantine could not ignore. It prompted him to summon a general council, originally to be held at Ancyra in central Turkey (Galatia), but moved to Nicaea, (a town in the Anatolian province of Bithynia, across the Bosphorus, convenient to Nicomedia where Constantine had established his court, and about 50 miles inland from the north-westerm coast of what is now Turkey.[460]. Some 300 bishops (Athanasius reported 318) attended the Council of Nicaea, which began in June, 325. Ossius would be a close ally of Alexander and his deacon Athanasius at this Council.
The influence of Constantine over the Council which he called, evidently in agreement with the Pope Sylvester, is disputed, but there is little evidence to support Constantine’s participation in the doctrinal decision against Arius. It is possible, even likely, that Ossius of Cordoba conveyed to Constantine the Latin Trinitarian tradition established by Tertullian’s assertion of the constitution of the one divine Substance as a Trinitas comprising the tres Personae, for the consequent consubstantiality of the Persons is precisely translated by the Nicene homoousios.[461] However, that inference is only surmise.
Constantine called the Council to resolve a dispute which had begun to disturb the public order of the Empire. If, as Eusebius of Caesarea reports, he introduced the homoousion of the Son into the Council’s discussion, it was rather to promote the restoration of public order by ending a controversy concerning which he had little understanding and no immediate personal interest, apart from ending it. The initial influence over him of Ossius’ mediation of the apostolic faith was insufficient to inhibit his conversion to Eusebius of Nicomedia’s Arianism, as subsequent events made evident.
Most of the bishops at the Nicene Council spoke Greek. A hundred were from Anatolia (i.e., Asia Minor, the peninsula between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, the western half of what is now Turkey), thirty from Syria-Phoenicia, twenty from Palestine and Egypt; only four, including Ossius, were from the Latin West. Two Roman priest-delegates, Victor and Vincent, from Pope Sylvester also attended. The rest were from the Greek region between Constantinople and Italy, the present Balkans, and southeastern Italy.
The doctrinal postures of the Conciliar Fathers (mostly bishops; Athanasius was then a deacon, while the Pope’s representatives were priests) can be arranged along a bell-shaped curve. On its orthodox limb, i.e., that of the spokesmen for the full divinity of the Son against Arius, are Alexander of Alexandria, his secretary, the deacon Athanasius who, four years earlier, had merited signing Alexander’s Letter to the Bishops,[462]) the Latin bishop Ossius of Cordoba, Macarius of Jerusalem, Marcellus of Ancyra, Eustathius of Antioch, and the Roman delegates from Pope Sylvester.
In the center were the conservative Origenists, influenced, even led, by Eusebius of Caesarea , whom he at least represented―for outrage over his excommunication and deposition by the Synod of Antioch contributed and perhaps forced Constantine’s calling of the Council—together with the timid traditionalists, fearful of innovation, and the moderate subordinationists (those followers of Basil of Ancyra who will later be known as homoiousians or, following Epiphanius, as semi-Arians. Finally on the limb opposite the orthodox are Arius, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and Arius’ other episcopal allies, Eusebius of Nicomedia, Secundus of Ptolemais and Thomas of Marmarica from Palestine and Libya.
The Council of Nicaea very soon developed an easy majority against Arius, and for the Son’s homoousios with the Father; Athanasius insisted upon this consubstantiality of the Son with the Father as essential to orthodoxy in the face of the Arian heresy, which had expressly denied the Personal divinity of the Son, and had ridiculed the homousios of the Son with the Father. (Arius had published his “Thalia” (Banquet) in 323, before his exile from Alexander and residence with Eusebius of Nicomedia). Athanasius was easily the leading theologian at the Council: none other has earned such bitter, long-protracted hostility. It extends to contemporary Church historians, none of whom have been able to challenge Annick Martin’s massively documented defense of his integrity in her Athanase d’Alexandrie et L’Église d’Égypte au ive siècle (328-373). He succeeded Alexander as archbishop of Alexandria in 328 and, for his unwavering insistence upon the Nicene doctrine of the substantial unity of the Trinity, suffered five exiles during the forty-five years of his episcopacy..
The Council deposed Arius when he refused to subscribe to the doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father. Arius went into exile, and was soon followed by Eusebius of Caesarea, who also had been deposed for refusing the homoousion, and by Eusebius of Nicomedia, who had been deposed and exiled for defending Arius despite his condemnation by the Council.
At Nicaea, the exact meaning of homoousios, whether signifying a numerical sameness or a merely generic sameness, was not raised:. Only the full divinity of the Son was in issue, which the term “homoousios” was understood to protect, inasmuch as Arius had already condemned it in a polemical letter to Alexander, and in the “Thalia” which he wrote after being exiled from Alexandria. Athanasius, as well as the Western bishops, undoubtedly knew that Son’s consubstantiality with the Father had that consequence only when it was understood in the numerical sense of undivided substantial unity, inasmuch as the generic sense of the word implied materiality and thus divisibility in God, and ultimately the polytheism of Arianism. Only an immaterial and indivisible divine ousia is capable of having members who are consubstantial with each other, not with the divine substance. The root of the subordinationist heresies is their common corollary, a divisible divinity.
No bishop of the Council, however accustomed to or influenced by, or even committed to subordinationist language, thought of the divine substance as material; none could have urged a “generic” interpretation of the unity of God in a literal sense. It was as evident then as now that the divine substance, the one God, is absolute, is immaterial, and cannot understood to be divisible. However, the question was not raised, and it may be the case, as has been alleged, that some Greek bishops at the Council of Nicaea understood, or imagined, the homoousion of the Son with the Father uncritically, i.e., as equivalent to “homoiousios.” Forty years later Hilary of Poitiers, who may not even have been baptized at the time of the Council, would assert that he had at first simply identified their meaning. However, that naiveté does not affect the Nicene Creed nor its correlative condemnation of Arianism. To repeat, the Council was a liturgical event, an exercise by the bishops attending it of their episcopal responsibility for the truth of the Church’s worship. Inquiries subjecting their exercise of that office to political or sociological scrutiny are beside the point.
The unity of the one God, the Trinity, was a Western emphasis; the Oriental theologians were accustomed to emphasize the distinction between three Persons rather than the unity of the Trinity. Even at Nicaea the need for such emphasis, i.e., the mia ousia , mia hypostasis upon which Eustathius of Antioch, Alexander of Alexandria, Marcellus of Ancyra, Macarius of Jerusalem and Ossius of Cordoba and Athanasius, the Alexandrine deacon and secretary of Alexander of Alexandria insisted, was not yet felt by the Fathers from the Greek East who, by 336, would be persuaded by Eusebius of Caesarea that the Western emphasis upon the substantial unity of the Trinity was inherently Sabellian. However defective may have been their doctrinal subordination of the Son to the Father and the Spirit to the Son, the liturgical formation and liturgical responsibility of the Oriental bishops overrode their inadequate cosmological representation of the Trinity when the question of the Son’s divinity was thus starkly raised by Arius.
At the same time, because the Arian polytheism (in the graduated or “henotheistic” sense of polytheism which affirms a superior God, such as Zeus, surrounded by a household of lesser divinities) was seen to be a denial of the divine unity, and was condemned at Nicaea, all tritheist interpretation of the three Origenist hypostasies was excluded by the Council, so that it was beginning to be clear also to the Greeks that the unity of God could only be numerical, not be generic, while the apostolic tradition barred understanding the unity of the One God as that of a Monas, as Arius would have it.
Theological difficulty dealt with at the Council was of course the subordinationism which Eusebius of Caesarea had read into Origen’s Peri Archon. Origen had in fact explicitly rejected subordinationism in that work, as it had been rejected by Justin and the Greek Apologists. Despite his use of Stoic imagery, Theophilus of Antioch understood the One God to be a trias (τρíας); implicit in the Trinitarian theology of the Greek Apologists, as in Tertullian’s exposition of the Trinitas, were their application to the Trinity of the Stoic and middle Platonic emanationism read at the letter, but tosuppose Theophilus of Antioch locked in such a conceptual box is absurd. It is similarly absurd to impose subordinationism upon Tertullian on grounds of his Stoicism, for he understood the one God to be a Trinity comprising three Persons. Taken at the letter by the Arian cosmological reading of Origen, the hypostases of the Son and the Spirit cannot be divine because they are emanations from the One God. The rationalist, monadic approach of the Middle Platonic cosmology to the divine unity can g rant it only to the incommunicable Monad. Arianism therefor relegated the Son to the status of the dyad, the “first creature” who is the mediator between the Monad and all that is created.
The entire Trinitarian import of the Council of Nicaea is its doctrine of the homoousion with the Father of the Son who is the Lord Jesus. The significance of the Council’s affirmation that Jesus is homoousios with the Father―that he is of the same substance―is that it carried the inevitable implication that the one God is the Trinity, not a divine Monas as Arius and his sympathizers supposed. This flat rejection of Trinitarian subordination by the Nicene “homoouosios” continued to be little understood before the First Council of Constantinople, as is evident from the resistance of the Macedonian “spirit fighters” to the homoousion of the Spirit.
Another hundred and twenty-six years would be required for the numeric unity of of the divine and the substance in the Person of Jesus, inseparable from the communication in him of divine and human idioms, and thus inseparable from the Nicene proclamation of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, to be understood to have as its corollary the Son’s consubstantiality with us. Thus with Nicaea began the development of Christological doctrine which matured at Chalcedon. It could not be otherwise, for the double homoousion of the Son, asserted with reference to the Father at Nicaea and, by implication, to the divine Spirit at I Constantinople, and finally with reference to all human persons at Chalcedon, is only the direct implication of the communication of idioms in the One and the same Son, liturgically and therefore doctrinally explicit in the Church’s apostolic affirmation of her faith: Jesus is Lord.
The Christological interest of Nicaea lies in its rejection of Arius’ conviction that Incarnation, in the sense of union of God with humanity, is impossible due to God’s transcendence. Insofar as Arus and those similarly guided by Greek cosmlogy are concerned, the world cannot bear the direct presence of God, and in consequence, history cannot mediate the presence of God. The Son or Logos therefore mediates between God and the world, and because he is the mediator, he cannot himself be God and so must be less than God. Thus the Arians safeguard the Incarnation by denying the divinity of the Son, the mediator, who belongs to the order of creation: viz., “there was when he was not.” This fundamental assertion is inextricably linked to a comparable denial of Jesus’ humanity. For Arius, Jesus cannot be truly human for, as sinless, immune to the vagaries of human freedom, he can have no human soul. Uniquely in Jesus, the created but nonetheless immaterial Logos, the mediator between God and what is not God, takes the place of the soul in Jesus. It must follow that Jesus is neither really human, nor really divine. This soul-body merger of the Logos and man in Jesus is the first appearance of the error which will mark the later Apollinarian and Monophysite heresies. Consequently, although for their protagonists, the Logos is divine, and they affirm the full divinity of Jesus, they follow the reasoning of Arius concerning the immanent peccability of the soul, and so must deny his full humanity. In sum, Jesus is not ensouled.: . .
Eustathius of Antioch was the first clearly to perceive the Christological dimension of the Arian heresy. Although supposing himself to be thinking, with all his contemporaries, within the context of the Spirit Christology of the Apologists, he at first identified the divine Logos of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son simply with Jesus’ divinity. However, shortly after the Council of Nicaea—where he had been one of the strongest upholders of Jesus’homoousion with the Father—he began to consider that the Logos, as divine, as the Eternal Son, not only could not be thus immanent in Jesus as to be the surrogate for his human soul, but that the divine Logos, “God from God, Light from Light,” could not be identified with anything historical, but must transcend history by his absence from history, and therefore could not be identified with Jesus, the Son of Mary. This confusion was Christological
Before Nicaea, he had been at peace with the communication of idioms: after Nicaea he found himself unable to be so: he began to use the adoptionist idiom of indwelling to account for a relation which was inherently impossible, given his nonhistorical reading of the Logos for, as simply divine, the Logos was immune to history. Jesus was remarkable in his humanity, but did not transcend it.
The problems facing the Church after the Council of Nicaea are those attendant upon the Trinitarian question left unresolved by the Council’s definition of the full divinity, the homoousion of the Son with the Father: that of how to designate the unity of God. The Council had referred to that unity both as “ousia ” and as “hypostasis,” as though the two were synonyms. Doctrinally, this has already been settled by the use of “homoousios” to name the consubstantial divinity of the Son who, as divine, is of the same divine ousia as the Father. “Ousia” had been Origen’s term for the substantial unity of God, but within less than a decade after his death, a Council at Antioch had condemned the unitarian, “Sabellian,” use of this term by Paul of Samosata. As the Western tradition had stressed the divine unity, so the Eastern tradition had stressed the Personal distinctions differentiating the Father, the Son and the Spirit. In the Asian, Syrian, and Palestinian East, the fear of the Sabellian suppression of those distinctions in favor of a monadic divine Unity was paramount among the bishops: nearly as a matter of instinct they rejected the Nicene affirmation of the substantial sameness (homoousion) of the Son with the Father: they might sympathize with some mitigation of the radical subordinationism of an Arius, but never with the Sabellianism particularly if erroneously attributed to Marcellus of Ancyra.
Eusebius of Caesarea, not precisely an Arian but, holding to much the same subordiantion of the Son to the Father as did the Arians, was the finest scholar among the Greek bishops at the time of the Nicene Council. At the Council’s close, he had assented suo modo to the Nicene definition of the homoousios of the Son with the Father, but in such a nuanaced sense as to have distanced him from Constantine’s favor. His namesake, Eusebius of Nicomedia, a convinced Arian, influential with Constantine as the Bishop of his first capital city, Nicomedia, and later as the Bishop of Constantinople, was condemned and deposed from his See by Constantine in 325 for refusing to subscribe to the Nicene condemnation of Arius: However, within three years, both of the Eusebii had regained their former standing: Eusebius of Nicomedia had become his theological advisor and, with Eusebius of Caesarea, began to reverse the impact of the Council of Nicaea,
The development of the passage from the oriental antipathy to the Nicene doctrine to its final acceptance went through six phases: cf. J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 217-18, a work upon which this survey is heavily dependent.
These years were marked by the rise and the success of an anti-Nicene reaction led by the two Eusebii, who presided over a series of local synods which excommunicated and saw to the deposition and exile by Constantine of the foremost upholders of the Nicene homoousios: bishops such as Athanasius of Alexandria, Marcellus of Ancyra, Macarius of Jerusalem, and Eustathius of Antioch.
With the death of Constantine in 337, the Empire was ruled by Constantius in the East and Constans in the West. Constantius, favorable to Arianism, was unable to impose his views even on the East during the lifetime of Constans, who was a strong and effective advocate of the Nicene definition, and the protector of orthodox bishops. His influence extended into the East. During this decade, a certain balance was maintained between the Arian sympathizers and those loyal to Nicaea who upheld the divinity of the Son, although during this time the anti-Nicene rejection of the homoousios remained dominant among the bishops of Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine . These, although opposing Arius’ denial of the divinity of the Son, considered the Nicene definition of the Son’s homoousion with the Father to connote the Sabellianism associated with Paul, the Bishop of Samosata, who had been condemned by councils held at Antioch in 265 and 268. In any case, they had little sympathy for Athanasius in remote Alexandria, whom they condemned at Tyre in 335, but on charges brought by schismatic Melitian bishops in his diocese of tyrannizing them, rather than of Sabellianism. They had already been dealt with as schismatics at the Council of Nicaea.
With the assassination of Constans in 350, Constantius was free to promote Arianism throughout the Empire, and undertook to do so, pursuing Athanasius in the East as its major enemy, and replacing the orthodox Western bishops with his Arian appointees: e.g., Auxentius in Milan, Saturninus at Arles; even attempting to replace Pope Liberius in Rome. Early in that decade, Aetius of Antioch and his followers, notably Eunomius, began successfully to promote an extreme form of Arianism which took Arius at his word and simply denied any similarity or likeness between the divine Father, as unoriginate, and the Son, whose origin from the Father reduced him in there eyes to a creature who as such must be utterly dissimilar from the Father. This “anomeanism” fragmented the anti-Nicene bishops; some were Arian deniers of the divinity of Christ, but most were simply unable to accept the Nicene doctrine of the consubstantiality of the divine Son because of the Sabellian implications that their own subordinationism could not but read into the Nicene doctrine. At bottom, they were unable to understand it otherwise, for the cosmological tradition which they took for granted rendered inconceivable a divine Trinitas of distinct and consubstantial Persons. Tertullian had been able to assert the Trinitas nonetheless; so also had Origen, but among the Oriental bishops of the latter half of the fourth century, apart from Marcellus, exiled from Ancyra from 336, Athanasius stood alone in defending at once the Personal consubstantiality and the Personal distinctions of Father, the Son and the Spirit
By 358, after the second Council of Sirmium[463], two irreconcilable stances divided the anti-Nicene Origenist bishops, one comprising the radical Arians, the ”anomeans,” and the other, the hopefully orthodox conservative followers, not so much of Origen as of Eusebius of Caesarea’s subordinationist interpretation of Origen. These bishops, despite their refusal of the Nicene homoousios as inherently Sabellian, nonetheless wished to uphold the divinity of the Son.
The radical Arians were led by Aetius and Eunomius; who denied any likeness between the Son and the Father. Their opponents were traditionalist bishops who insised upon a “likeness” (homoea) of the Son to the Father at the level of ousia or substance: hence, they came to be labeled “homoi-ousions.” In 357, Arian bishops gathered in Council in Sirmium, the capital of the Prefecture of Illyrica and one of the four capital cities of the empire, where Constantius was then in residence with his court, and published what would be named the “Second Creed of Sirmium.” This “homoean” document proposed a toning down of the controversy over the manner of stating the relation of the Son to the Father, affirming a “likeness” of the Son to the Father but at the same time refusing all reference of that likeness to ousia , thus rejecting the Nicene doctrine of homoousion of the Son with the Father The Anomean “hetero-ousion” was a strict rationalization of the subordinationist rejection of the Nicene homoousion by the followers of Eusebius of Caesarea. It was equally a rejection also of the “homoiousian” assertion of the Son’s substantial likeness to the Father (homoia kata ousia). The homoi-ousian bishops, who would soon rally behind Basil of Ancyra, could accept neither the supposed “homoean” compromise, nor the radical hetero-ousion doctrine of Aetius and Eunomius. Thus they found themselves forced to respond.
Early in 358, the year following the second council of Sirmium, a dozen of the conservative bishops, led by Basil of Ancyra, and including Macedonius of Constantinople, Eugenius of Nicaea, and Eusebius of Sebaste, met at Ancyra, where they formulated what would become the “Third Creed of Sirmium” affirming, against the radical Neo-Arianism of Aetius and Eunomius, the full divinity of the Son, while continuing to reject the Nicene homoousios on the subordinationist grounds, i.e., the “single concept of likeness” whose inapplicability to the Holy Spirit would finally split the group.[464].
With his homoiousian creed in hand, Basil sought out Emperor Constantius at Sirmium, and thought to have won him to his side. Constantius had supported the Homoean ‘compromise,” but now appeared to see in Basil’s creed a means of winning over the Western bishops to this more explicitly Trinitarian doctrine. His own theological advisors, the Arian bishops Ursacius and Valens, agreed to accept it, provisionally, inasmuch as it was a rejection of the Nicene homoousios, and seeing that the Emperor was willing to underwrite it. They would change his mind.
Intent upon achieving what appeared to be a possible ecumenical consensus, Constantius was willing to condemn the hetero-ousian minority among the Eastern bishops to gain the approval of the still pre- or anti-Nicene Western bishops. Therefore, at another Council of Sirmium, the fourth, held some months later in 358, Constantius rejected Eunomianism and homoenism alike, asserting that he had always held to a homoiousian doctrine of the Son’s essential or substantial likeness to the Father. No official records of the creed of the fourth Sirmium Council survive, and the comment upon it by the historian is “meager.”[465] In any event, with its conclusion, Constantius supported Basil of Ancyra in deposing and exiling the leading hetero-ousian bishops. Inasmuch as Ursacius and Valens, his formerly homoean theological advisors for the West, and numerous Eastern bishops in agreement with them, had been able to accept Basil’s homoiousian doctrine at this fourth Council of Sirmium, there remained only the calling of a fully ecumenical Council at which the Western bishops also would be present to arrive at the effective doctrinal harmony within the empire at which Constantius aimed.
To this end, Constantius recalled the bishops he had just exiled, other than the irreconcilable extreme left, the Neo-Arians led by Aetius, Eunomius of Cyzicus and Eudoxius of Antioch. The homoousians led by Athanasius, long since recognized as similarly irreconcilable, were equally ignored. Constantius at first intended intended that his ecumenical council meet at Nicomedia in Bythnia, near Constantinople, but an earthquake in that area forced a change in his plans.
At this juncture, Ursacius and Valens, having abandoned their temporary union with Basil of Ancyra, managed to persuade Constantius, evidently without protest from an unwitting Basil, to split the Council between two sites. Thus in 359, the Eastern bishops met at Seleucia in Cilicia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, while the Western bishops met at Rimini (Ariminum) on the Adriatic coast of Italy, south of Ravenna. Their separation prevented any free accord between them, while affording Constantius an opportunity to resolve the doctrinal controversy by using his imperial authority to dominate both assemblies, and so to impose his advisors’ homoean doctrine upon the Empire.
He then arranged for the composition, probably by Valens and Ursacius, of a summary document on the order of a ‘white paper’ for the benefit of the attending bishops. To this end, he summoned the bishops at to the fifth Council of Sirmium, the city where his court was then located. At this Council was drawn up what has come to be called the Fourth Sirmium or “Dated Creed” of May 22nd, 359. Basil of Ancyra was somehow able to regard it as an acceptably homoiousian statement.[466]
According to Hilary of Poitiers who, although in exile, was present at Seleucia, the majority of the Eastern bishops gathered there were favorable to the homoiousian doctrine. The few Alexandrine bishops attending that Council upheld the Nicene homoousion, and the Arians under Eudoxius remained Arian. Hilary considered the homoiousian party to be essentially orthodox. Athanasius reported in his De synodis that while the majority of the bishops present at Seleucia agreed with Nicaea, they would not accept the homoousion “because of its obscurity.”[467]
The Seleucian component of the bifurcated Council, after four days of debate, was unable to reach a consensus: the Council ended with a nominal deposition of leading Arian bishops from their sees by the homoean party. The several contesting parties then sent delegations, composed of bishops, to the Emperor at Constantinople; he pressured them to sign his homoean formula, to which all of them, including Basil of Ancyra, finally consented. Before his martyrdom under Julian the Apostate in 362, Basil of Ancyra retracted his consent.
Similarly, Constantius was able to compel the Western bishops, who gathered at Rimini, the ancient Ossius of Cordoba among them, to submit to his homoean doctrine, although Ossius refused to endorse its corollary, the condemnation of Athanasius, and finally retracted his consent.[468]
In 360, following his reduction of the bishops of the East and of the West to servile submission to his authority, Constantius called a council at Constantinople which proclaimed his homoean creed as normative for the Christian faith in the Roman Empire, and which he deposed all those bishops who had exhibited a reluctance to accept it. Of the major bishops only Athanasius, then in hiding from imperial police, refused his signature, having sent an encyclical to his suffragan bishops in Egypt and Libya, urging them to refuse as well.
Constantius died at the end of the next year, while his cousin Julian, the Western Ceasar, having been acclaimed as Augustus by his troops and, having accepted that Imperial title and refused Constantius’ request for military assistance in his campaign against the Parthians, was proceeding to contest Constantius’ governance of the Empire when, having been baptized on his deathbed, Constantius willed the Empire to Julian.
Julian, later named the Apostate, was Emperor over a brief reign of two years. Like Licinius forty years earlier, he wished to destroy Christianity in the Empire. To this end he recalled the exiled orthodox bishops to their sees in 362, hoping that the turmoil resulting from their reassertion of their authority aganst that exercised by their Arian replacements would benefit his project. However, a year after having strengthened the homoousian party by this maneuver, he was killed at the second battle of Adrianople. Athanasius, once returned to his diocese of Alexandria early in 362 after a brief exile, summoned the Council of Alexandria, in which, together with the diminished number of bishops in a position to respond to their metropolitan’s summons (less than twenty) he composed his irenic Tome to the Antiochenes, an eloquent appeal to the Antiochene clergy to transcend their internecine disputes in a simple affirmation of the Catholic faith in the triune God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This appeal amounted to an assertion that the impasse heretofore dividing them was irrelevant to the community of faith. The Tome to the Antiochenes was written in the hope of persuading the homoiousian clergy resident in and around Antioch of the doctrinal necessity of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Christ. It was not an attempt to impose the homoousion upon them, but rather to wean them from what Athanasius had always rejected, viz., the cosmologically-grounded, ultimately subordinationist disputes impeding the recognition by the homoiousions of their basic unity with the faith of Nicaea. The addressees of the Tome did not include Meletius, the bishop of Antioch, lately returned from exile; for he had been the protégé of Arian bishops such as Acacius of Caesarea and Eudoxius of Antioch; rather it was directed to the homoiousian bishops in Antioch, although they were accustomed to worship in “the old (place) a church in which Meletius presided. In 362 these were led by Basil of Caesarea, an admirer of Meletius, and by Diodore, whom Meletis later (378) appointed the bishop of Tarsus, together with Eustathius of Sebaste, once a friend of Basil, who broke with him over the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and the Macedonians, who also accepted the logic of Basil of Ancyra’s restriction of the homoiousion to the Son, and could find no theological justification for upholding the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit:[469] these, dubbed the “Spirit-Fighters,” were finally condemned at I Constantinople.
In the event, Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes failed. The role of Lucifer of Cagliari’s much criticized consecration of the pro-Nicene priest Paulinus, the leader of the Eustathian resistance to Melitius’ oversight of the See of Antioch, is defensible. He was certainly under no obligation to seek the approval of the consecration of Paulinus from the anti-Nicene Bishop Meletius; the charge of its irregularity is without foundation save for the baseless supposition that Meletius, who had also returned from exile, was pro-Nicene. Further, the possibility of converting the homoiousian clergy in Antioch to the Nicene Creed, upon which Athanasius’ Tome pivoted, simply lacked foundation. Lucifer was in a better position to recognize the homoiousian obduracy than was Athanasius’ in distant Alexandria. He was also in a position to know that he was the only reliably pro-Nicene bishop in Antioch and, recognizing that the only means of buttressing the weakness of the pro-Nicene Eustathians was the consecration of their leader Paulinus, whose Nicene orthodoxy Athanasius had warranted by welcoming his delegates to the Council of Alexandria, he quite reasonably decided to consecrate him. Thus Paulinus became the orthodox, i.e., pro-Nicene, bishop of Antioch. Lucifer had seen that Eustathian-Meletian opposition was irremediable by definition. The homoiousians were committed to the negotiation of Christian doctrine with the emperor, whose opposition to the Nicene Creed was absolute. In recognizing a year later the validity of Paulinus consecration, Athanasius formally denied the legitimacy of Melitius’ claim to the See of Antioch, which from the outset he had refused to recognize, a refusal in which he continued until his death eleven years later. By then, Basil of Caesarea had had nearly twenty years to pass beyond the confusion, manifest in his Letter 9, written about 361, of the Nicene “homoousion” with the subordinationist “homoiousion.” In that Letter he had considered the “homoousion” to be at best a clarification of the homoiousion, but by 362 he had become a firm ally of Meletius, and an opponent of the Nicene doctrine of the consubstantiality of Jesus with the Father.
The appropriate expression of Jesus’ divinity as the Son was then in question. Throughout nearly forty years of controversy, the Cappadocian “semi-Arians,” long content with the anti-Sabellian homoiousian insistence upon the Son’s substantial similarity―homoios kat’ousian―to the Father, equivalently the Neo-Niceneism which Harnack claimed to have been given doctrinal standing in Athanasius’ Provincial Council of Alexandria—were finally, in 363, unpersuaded by Athanasius’ postulate in Tome to the Antiochenes, that the divinity of Jesus the Son was not supported by Basil of Ancyra’s relativization of its fullness, as though Jesus were merely “like in substance” to the Father. The response of the homoousian community to whom Athanasius had addressed his Tome refused his invitation to ecclesial solidarity by subscription to the Nicene Creed, and instead upheld Meletius’ claim to the See of Antioch by attending the Council he called in the year following, which attempted to identify the Nicene Creed with the homoiousian rejection of its truth.
That Council confirmed the “Schism of Antioch;” thereafter Athanasius dropped any attempt to deal with the homoiousian majority. In 363, having travelled to Antioch soon enough to have anticipated the Arian and homoousian missions to the new Emperor, Jovian, Athanasius presented Jovian with a credal statement which earned Jovian’s confirmation of Athansius’ episcopal authority over the See of Alexandria. Thus armed, Athanasius confirmed Paulinus’ entirely regular consecration by Lucifer of Cagliari, and in so doing, recognized Paulinus as the legitimate Bishop of Antioch. Pope Damasus would soon confirm Paulinus’s authority over the See of Antioch.
This period marks the end of the Homoean ascendancy in the Roman empire. Theodosius succeeded to the imperial throne upon the death of Valens in 378, and reversed Valens’ vigorous support of Arianism with a support of Nicene orthodoxy which became comparably vigorous. By recognizing the authorityof the Council of Nicaea, he denied the religious authority of the emperor. He did not attempt to impose Nicene orthodoxy upon the empire; rather, he intended that it be authentically preached and to that end called the First Council of Constantinople.
The First Council of Constantinople (381) repeated the Nicene Creed’s doctrine of the full divinity of Jesus, the Son, and found this full divinity to be proper also to the Holy Spirit, although resisting to the end the urging of Gregory of Nazianzen to proclaim his homoousion with the Father and the Son.
The Council of I Constantinople’s confirmation of the Nicene Creed left the homoiousians with no place to stand. Their leader, Basil of Caesarea, began to construct a Trinitarian synthesis, but was never able to transcend his Eusebian confusion. References to his achievement of a “Cappadocian Settlement” are specious. They rely largely on the supposed acceptance of the Nicene Creed by Meletius in his Council of 363, which did not occur, and upon Basil’s attempts to construct a Trinitarian idiom on a basis which was anything but Nicene.
The doctrinal difficulty dealt with at I Constantinople was of course the product of the subordinationism taught by the Origenist followers of the Eusebians, thought by some to be implicit in the materialism latent in Tertullian’s exposition of the Trinitas in the Apologeticus. It is true that Tertullian was sufficiently a Stoic to assign materiality to whatever is real; however, his notion of the divine materiality does not entail divisibility; thus his affirmation of tres Personae in the substantial unity of the Trinitas forestalls any charge that he identified the Father with the divine una substantia. Subordinationism is implicit in any construct of Trinitarian theology upon a cosmological foundation: i.e., upon the identification of the Father with the divine substance. This subordination of the Son to the Father had been made explicit by Arius and his followers. Taken at the letter by the Arians, the Platonizing cosmology, travelling as Eusebianism, barred the divinity of the hypostases of the Son and the Spirit, because they are emanated by the unoriginate One God, αὐτóθεος, Ὁ Θεος (very God, The God). The Arians inferred from the relation of the Son and Spirit to the Father, as their source, their subordination to him; viz., by having their origin in him, the divine Monas, they are not unoriginate, thereforε not eternal, and consequently are not divine in the strict sense of the word, that sense proper to Ὁ Θεος. In the last analysis the only alternative is that they are creatures. While Arius tried to avoid making that inference clear, it was implicit in his denial of the divinity of the Son, and his critics had no hesitation in ascribing it to him.
Origen had described the Son as a creature, κτίσις, but only in the sense of his having his origin in the Father. Inasmuch as Origen recognized that the Father is eternally the Father, it must follow that he eternally begets the Son, who is co-eternal with him. He affirmed also the full “substantiality,” i.e., divinity, of the Holy Spirit, although unable to explain his origin from the Father as distinct from the begetting of the Son.
Seventy years after Origen’s death, Eusebius of Caesarea, Pamphilus’ disciple and heir, nominally, the disciple of Origen as well, the highly respected author of the ;rejected Origen’s affirmation of the co-eternity of the Son and the Father. This he did under cosmological presuppositions alien to Origen’s Trinitarianism. The required him to substitute a subordinationist interpretation of Origen’s doctrine of “three hypostases” in the Trinitarian ousia (Father, Son, and Spirit, equally “substantial” equally divine). Loyal to this metaphysical monism, h identified the Father with the divine substance, and consequently rejected the Trinity, subordinating the relativized substance of the Son to the absolute substance of the Father and, implicitly at least, subordinating the relativized substance of the Holy Spirit to relatively superior substance of of the relativized Son.
This “Origenism, misinterpreted Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine of “mia ousia , treis hypostaseis” as three substantially distinct subjects, the divine Father, and the less than divine Son and Holy Spirit, placed the high academic reputation of Eusebius firmly in support of the widespread subordinationist resistance to the authority of the Council of Nicaea and to the Nicene doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. Eusebius’ great authority as a historian, the author of the Ecclesiastical History, as the foremost authority on Origen, and as the bishop of Caesarea since 313-14, induced the conservative bishops of the East to join him in a standing indictment of the Nicene “mia hypostasis” doctrine as Sabellian. The Nicene insistence upon the “mia hypostasis, mia ousia ” of the Trinitarian substance had forced the recognition of the homoousios of the Son with the Father for, given this affirmation of their consubstantiality, the Father cannot be identified with the one God, neither as the “mia hypostasis” nor its Nicene equivalent, the “mia ousia .” This, the free truth of the Mysterium fidei, was simply unintelligible to the cosmological rationality of the Eusebians. Further, having accepted unreflectively the ancient pagan tradition which held the authority of the Emperor to be single and supreme; the notion of an ecclesial authority superior to that of the Emperor was similarly unintelligible to them. The pagan cultures underlying the philosophical traditions, Stoic and Platonic, in which the Eusebian bishops had been steeped from their infancy, took for granted the plenary authority of their rulers. The Eusebian version of this mentality did not dispute the supreme religious authority of the emperors; rather, having accepted it, the could only attempt to negotiate the tension between the imperial authority and the ecclesial. This effort could not but entail the politicization of the Christian faith.
The Nicene rejection of the cosmological identification of the Father with the divine substance, along with the Conciliar assertion of the authority of the Church over her doctrine, was incomprehensible to the Eusebians. Taught by Eusebius, they held the Nicene affirmation of the divine “mia ousia , mia hypostasis” to constitute flat Sabellianism. It was heard to identify the divine substance, their divine Monas, with the Trinity of Names (i.e., “Persons;” Father, Son and Spirit, who thereby were not substantially distinct, and consequently had no reality other than their identity with the divine substance, which could not be triune, but must as absolute be single, the Monas.
Their cosmological monism made it impossible for Eusebius and his followers, among whom were the homoiousians, to understand Marcellus’ use of “Names” to designate what is three in God. Marcellus’ critics, following Eusebius, identified “name” with “person,” and read Sabellius’ denotation of “person,” (πρόσωπον) into that usage. For that reason, it has been argued, Basil of Caesarea continued to avoid “prosōpon” in favor of “hypostasis” as the appropriate term for designating the members of the Trinity.[470]
In the Greek East, a reaction against the Origenist mediante anima Christology, which had misread Origen’s “fire-iron”similitude of the Henōsis as an account of the prior possibility of the Incarnation by invoking the immateriality of the soul of Christ as the principle of the union in him of divinity and humanity—a union thereby open to an adoptionist reading—is evident in theology of Eusebius of Caesarea, who is evidently in full flight from the association of Origen with Paul of Samosata implicit in this reading of the mediante anima.[471]
It was supposed, with little or no reflection, that an assertion of a soul in Christ implied an adoptionism akin to that which had been condemned eighty years earlier in the trials of Paul of Samosata. In short, to assign a human soul to the Christ was then thought to force so complete a distinction between Jesus and the (immanent) Logos as to make Jesus merely a man, psilanthropos (ψῖλ-άνθρωπος), as had the Sabellian adoptionism of Paul of Samosata, and so to reduce the Incarnation to a merely moral union of a man, Jesus, with the eternal Logos.
Perhaps largely for this reason, the early Greek theologians, starting with Malchion in the middle of the third century, have been read as though exponents of an early version of the Logos-sarx Christological analysis, understanding the “sarx” of Jn. 1:14’s logos sarx egeneto merely as an unsouled body, sometimes, as a human person, as by Origen’s in postulating the henōsis of the Logos and the primordial Jesus the Lord, the subject of the Incarnation in the biblical sense, as in the recital of his kenösis in Phil. 2:6-7.[472]
The eastern adherents to the anti-Nicene subordinationism of Eusebius of Caesarea, dubbed Eusebians, soon to be made official by Eusebius of Nicomedia, uniformly condemned the Nicene “mia ousia ” and its implication, the consubstantiality of the Jesus the Son with the Father, as equivalently a Sabellian reduction of the Trinity to a single Subject, a Monas. With Eusebius of Caesarea, they understood consubstantiality as intelligible only on a generic basis, thus proper to material creatures, but not to the indivisible divine Substance. In brief, under Eusebian influence, and locked into his cosmology, like him they were rendered incapable of understanding the Nicene doctrine. With the single exception of Alexandria, this cosmological fixation was firmly in place everywhere in the east within a decade or two of the Nicene Council. Particularly, it infected the homoiousian theologians led by Basil of Ancyra, among whose disciples are two of the Cappadocians, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, and Hilary of Poitiers. exiled from the West to Phrygia, in 356, from which he returned in 360.
The homoiousion resistance to the “Blasphemy of Sirmium,” the affirmation of the homoean doctrine (im the second Creed of Sirmium) at I Sirmium in 357, had remained loyal to Eusebius’ subordinationism, which was radically incompatible with the Nicene homoousios, for “likeness of substance” required the substantial, i.e., subordinationist, distinction between the Father and the Son which the Nicene insistence upon the “mia ousia ” had refused. The monadic rationality proper to the cosmology, whether Platonic, Aristotelian or Stoic, can grant divinity only to the incommunicable Monas. On that basis, Arius had relegated the Son to the status of the Dyad, the first emanation from the Monas, who is the mediator between the Monas and all that is created, and consequently reduced the Spirit to a yet lower standing.
Ηowever, the resistance led by Basil of Ancyra to the imperial imposition of Arian homoeanism upon the empire failed, following upon the concession to homoeanism forced in 359 alike upon the Eastern bishops at Seleucia and upon the Western bishops at Rimini, Constantius, influenced in this by Eusebius of Nicomedia, made that doctrine official for the whole of the empire at the Council of Constantinople in 360. Dying a year later, he left the governance of the Empire to his nephew, Julian who, apostasizing from his supposed Christianity, was resolved upon returning the empire to a Neoplatonizing paganism. Basil of Ancyra, who had been deposed and exiled by Constantius in 360, fell prey to Julian’s enmity, and was martyred by him in 362.
After having permitted the bishops exiled by Constantius to return to their sees in 361, with a view to inciting a strife among them which would assist his paganizing project, Julian died at the second Battle of Adrianople in 363, to be succeed by Jovian, a Christian more tolerant of the homoousion and homoiousian resistance to the official homoean Arianism than had been Constantius who, intent on imposing the homoean doctrine upon the empire, had deposed and exiled the bishops opposing it. Among them, of course, was Athanasius, from 335 the target of Constantine, then from 350, the target of Constantius, and finally, from 364, of Valens.
Jovian revoked the persecution of Christians instituted by Julian, proclaimed a .general freedom of religion, and reestablished Athanasius in his See in 363 [473] Jovian ruled only eight months, dying suddenly while on campaign early in 364. He was succeeded by Valentinian, an officer in the Roman army, who was proclaimed the emperor by his troops. Valentinian, a Nicene Christian, immediately made his younger brother Valens, the Emperor of the East.
Valens was a convinced Arian. Ruling the east from 364 to 378, he showed himself a savage opponent of the Church, persecuting Christians, particularly bishops, whenever occasion offered between his battles with the encroaching Gothic tribes. He sent Athanasius into his last exile in 364 As Julian the Apostate’s forces had confronted Rome’s ancient enemy, the Persians, and lost at Adrianople, so also Valens met the Gothic armies at Adrianople and died there in 378, as had Julian fifteen years earlier. With Valens the dynasty of Constantine ended.
While Valentinian was a Christian, he more intent upon striving for peace between the Christians, the Arians, and the pagans than with the promotion of Christianity. He died in 375, and was succeeded by his son, Gratian, a Catholic like his father, who had made him Augustus of the West in his childhood. Upon the death of Valens, Gratian appointed Theodosius to succeed him. Gratian was himself murdered five years later, in 383, at the instance of the usurper, Maximus. Before his death, advised by Ambrose, who had succeeded the Arian, Auxentius, as bishop of Milan, Gratian began the dismantling of Auxentius’ Arian establishment, and of the remnants of pagnanism in the west. Theodosius, who became the Emperor of the entirety of the Roman Empire upon the death of Gratian, pursued Gratian’s policy.
Athanasius was among those bishops who had returned to their dioceses in 362. Once returned to Alexandria, he summoned to a Council the bishops remaining in his diocese, not over fifteen, including Apollinaris of Laodicea, twenty years his junior and an influential advocate of the Nicene homoousios.[474] Athanasius published his Tome to the Antiochenes, i.e., to the homoiousian clergy in Antioch, at the close of the Council of Alexandria. The Tome approved the use of Origen’s Trinitarian formula of one divine Trinitarian substance, and three distinct hypostases within the Trinity: “mia ousia , treis hypostaseis” but not its Eusebian corruption, which the homoiousians preferred to the formula of Nicene Creed of one divine substance comprising three divine Persons. Under Eusebian inspiration, they had rejected the Nicene doctrine of the homoousian of the Son with the Father as Sabellian, supposing, as Basil of Ancyra had supposed, that the homoiousian surrogate for the Nicene homoousion of the Son with the Father, viz., homoios kat’ousian, (ὅμοιος κατ’οὐσίαν; similar in substance [to the Father]) was equally compatible with the divinity of the Son. Having been taught by the Eusebians to reject the Nicene affirmation of the substantial unity of the Trinity as inherently Sabellian, they read this subordinationism into Origen’s application of “hypostasis” to each of the members of the Trinity. Thereby they rejected its corollary, the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. At the same time, apart from the “Spirit Fighters,” Eustathius of Sebaste and Macedonius, confident in their “homoios kat’ousian” defense of the divinity of the Son, they entirely rejected Arianism,
Athanasius sent his Tome to the Antiochenes to the homoiousion clergy centered in Antioch; ignoring Meletius, the supposed bishop of Antioch, identifying them rather by their gathering at the “old place.” Although the Tome did not attain its objective, the reconciliation of the homoiousian majority at Antioch to the faith spelled out in the Nicene Creed, it may have contributed to what has been called the “Cappadocian settlement,” the return of the homoiousions to Nicene orthodoxy, although this was in fact the work of the First Council of Constantinople, which eliminated the Eusebian dissent to Nicaea simply by eliminating its imperial support.
The corollary of Eusebius of Caesarea’ refusal of the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea was his enthusiastic support of of the Caesaropapism whose subordination of the Church to the empire served to justify the anti-Nicene posture of nearly all of the Oriental bishops apart from the See of Alexandria until that recourse to imperial authority collapsed for lack of support under the pro-Nicene emperor, Theodosius. Nonetheless, its disavowal by a reigning Pope wojuld wait another century and a half for its formal rejection by Gelasius I in a famous letter to the Byzantine Emperor, Anastasius I.
Gelasius rejected the universal rule claimed by Anastasius, simply as the Emperor, asserting rather that the world is ruled by two interrelated but irreducibly distinct realities, the auctoritas pontificum and the potestas regalis. The ecclesial authority of the bishops, moral rather than coercive, operates as a limit upon the otherwise unqualified potestas regalis, while remaining in itself unlimited. Without coercive capacity, the Church’s exercise of her authority is simply her public worship, her sacramental liturgy, which includes the preaching of the apostolic tradition, and the public implementation of that preaching. . Instituted by Christ, the Church is intrinsically incapable of submission to coercion: it may be suppressed, even crucified, but as every totalitarian encounter with her has discovered, the Church cannot be ignored, for her sacramental worship cannot but be efficacious as public, so cannot but have a public impact.
This continually contested Augustinian insight into the “two loves which have built two cities” was unthinkable in the first half of the fourth century, but by its end, Athanasius had made its recognition inevitable. He was the first Oriental bishop to reject the subordination of episcopal authority, the auctoritas pontificum of the Catholic Magisterium, to the civil government, the potestas regalis. Athanasius’ stance was entirely unacceptable in the Orient. [475] He relied upon the supreme ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea, and was the first to do so. This reliance was found insolent by Constantine, and criminal by his Oriental successors. The Nicene Council was the Church’s first exercise of her plenary, i.e., ecumenical and universal auctoritas pontificum. This ecclesial authority is always simply liturgical; its exercise arises out of the bishops’ succession to the apostolic responsebility, in union with the successor of Peter, for the Church’s Eucharistic worship in truth of her Lord, who is Truth. Consequently, as Eucharistic and sacramental, the Church’s worship is public and has a public impact. However, inasmuch as the sacramental efficacy of the Church’s liturgy is free, the authority of the Magisterium is moral only. The Catholic liturgy has no coercive impact and consequently can never contest the political power, the potestas regalis of the princeps or monarch, while always authorized to opposing its misuse, its temptation to an amoral exercise as though absolute.
The Church’s public expression of her moral authority is inevitably perceived as political by every holder of potestas regalis which, simply as regalis, is per se indivisible and therefore universal with a universality cosmological rather than political, thus at once civil, military, and religious. Every princeps given to this conviction cannot but regard any independent exercise of personal authority as reus laesae majestatis, i.e., as guilty per se of a traitorous affront to his royal person. On the other hand, inasmuch as the concrete exercise of the potestas regalis, i.e., of coercive power, is inevitably limited, the appearance of universal coercive authority is preserved by the nominal reduction to a personal grant of privilege to those in fact effectively exercising personal responsibility by reason of their de facto immunity to his coercion. Such grants of privilege are in theory revocable, but the grant is usually permanent, and often becomes Hereditary, passing to the heirs of the original grantee. Thus revolutions are forestalled, but hardly prevented.
Sacramental marriage is the most conspicuous public exercise of the free personal responsibility which seeks no higher warrant than the Church’s liturgy. This public assertion of political independence has since Plato been judged irrational and consequently indefensible. Current assaults upon it rely, as in the Republic, upon the zero-sum implications of political monism, in which the exercise of personal freedom is mere irrationality, to be suppressed as a criminal threat to political unity. The ideological nullification of man as historical, as free and personally responsible, is permanently threatened by the Catholic liturgical worship, the love which finds fulfillment only in the anagogical City of God and recognizes no transcendent City of Man.
Until Ambrose, the freedom of the Church from imperial control was equally unrecognized in the Occident, for it requires a free conversion of holder of the potestas regalis to the truth of Christ, as liturgically and therefore efficaciously mediated in history. Western civilization rests upon that conversion; its foundations now crumble by reason of its rejection.
The concretely public liturgical mediation of the truth of Christ, as free, waits on no one’s permission: it can neither be imposed nor forbidden. As instituted by Christ, i.e., as ineradicable in history, it has served to relativize the otherwise absolute political power simply by its own inherently public exercise of personal freedom, the freedom of participation in that liturgical worship which is at once normative and public because constitutive of free historicity as such. Whether ruling or ruled, Christians are to lead lives of free responsibility for each other, under the authority of the Lord of history, the sole basis of the rule of law under which the civilization of the Western world freed itself of the despotism of its pagan predecessors.[476] The current secularism entails precisely a return to that pagan despotism, benevolent where possible, but intent on the one thing necessary, that “abolition of man” whose precondition is the abolition of God.[477]
The controversies in the Oriental Church following the Council of Nicaea took place within the Roman Empire, whose political unity had already begun to break down, but whose imperial exercise of a sovereignty still understood in terms of the pagan monism as at once political, military, and religious. This imperial monism confused the import of the conversion to Christianity of Constantine and his successors with a grant of supervisory authority over the Church, a notion that prevailed from Constantine in the fourth century to Justinian in the sixth, to Charlemagne in the eighth, Henry IV in the eleventh and Henry II in the twelfth. Thereafter on the continent it fuelled the Guelph-Ghibelline controversy, and the interurban warfare which proceeded to the ruination of the Italian peninsula. In the early fourteenth century, Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham and John Jandun offered a theoretical justification for the subordination of the Church to the potestas regalis; it entailed the denial of the intrinsically efficaciious sacramental signing which constituting the Church’s public worship. Berengarius was the author of this rejection of sacramental realism in the eleventh century, coincidental with the Gregorian Reform; its rationale was resumed by Wycliff. in the fifteenth century, and taken up by by Hus in Bohemia . Its rejection of the public worship of the Church, i.e., of the historicity of her sacramental worship, at one with the auctoritas pontificum, was an abreacttion to reassertion of that authority by the Gregorian reform. Its rationale anticipated the antisacramentalism of the Reformation, and the reduction of the worship and authority of the Church to a political program. This ancient error presents a permanent temptation. The Church is indeed semper reformanda, but in in the freedom whose source is her worship of the Eucharistic Lord of history, her Beginning and her End.
In short, the ancient pagan meld of religious and political authority in the person of the princeps has proven difficult to exorcise. In the fourth century it dominated the imagination of the Eusebian bishops to the point of their inability to recognize their independence of the emperors. They took for granted the subordination of the Church to the Empire, and the consequent necessity to negotiate religious issues with the emperor, with the corollary that none of their local synods could claim doctrinal authority unless underwritten by the emperor’s universal authority,
If the situation differed in the Occident, it was largely by reason of the conversion to Nicene Christianity of the western Augusti, Constantine II and Constans. However, when their influence ceased with the death of Constans in 350, Constantius, the sole surviving son of Constantine, and the Augustus of the Orient since 337, succeeded to the authority of his brothers, to become the ruler of the whole of the Roman empire, the West as well as the East. Within two years, freed of all domestic and the more urgent foreign threats to his governance of the empire, Constantius proceeded to attempt the restoration of the religious unity of his Empire by the coercive devices proper to the still-pagan Roman law. In this, he only resumed the caesaropapism to which his father, Constantine, had returned shortly after the Council of Nicaea, persuaded by the “two Eusebii” to reconsider the conciliar condemnation of Arius. Constantine’s summoning of the Council of Nicaea to resolve the Arian crisis would seem to have entailed his refusal of any imperial authority over the Church, but from about 327, he supported the program of the two Eusebii to depose the Oriental pro-Nicene bishops who had been the decisive factor in the Council’s condemnation of Arius, and in the proclamation of that which Eusebius of Caesarea knew and thereafter proclaimed to be cosmologically absurd, the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father.
Upon Constantius’ succession to the imperial authority, he proceeded to implement his parent’s version of imperial unity, continuing, but without Constantine’s ambiguity, to the forcible conversion of the empire to Arianism. In 352 he placed an Arian bishop in Milan, incidentally exiling Eusebius of Vercelli for his indignant assertion of the authority the Council of Nicaea. Proceeding into Gaul, Constantine appointed the Arian Saturninus to the See of Arles and, at a Council held in Béziers on the Mediterranean littoral in 356, deposed and exiled Hilary, the bishop of Poitiers, for failing to join the rest of the attendant bishops in the condemnation of Athanasius which Constantius had required of them and, in the end, received from them. Athanasius was practically unknown in the West; so also was the Council of Nicaea.
However, as Constantius became more and more intent upon the subordination of the local councils to his Arianism, the Eusebian front, solid until mid-century, began to crack: it contained too many Eusebian bishops who flatly rejected Arianism, and too many Eunomian bishops in ardent support of Arianism, to maintain any semblance of unity, whether political or religious. The assertion of Roman authority at the Council of Serdica in 343, rejected by the Orientals led by Eusebius of Nicomedia, was followed by a series of Councils, ironically resumed by Athanasius in his De synodis, which made all too evident the impossibility of imposing religious unity upon the empire.
The dragooning of the Western bishops at Rimini in 359, and the simultaneous suborning of the Orientals at Selucia, a triumph consolidated at the Council of Constantinople in 360 as the final full implementation of the imperial policy, collapsed a year later with the death of Constantius and the succession of Julian the Apostate.
Julian the Apostate, upon his succession to the throne of Emperor Constantius had in the following year permitted the orthodox bishops to return from exile to their Sees. Julian apparently hoped by this device to provoke a conflict in which both sides would be destroyed. In the event, the Arian usurper of the See of Alexandria, George of Cappadocia, appointed in 345 by Constantius, had already been assassinated by a mob of the pagans and Christians for whose persecution he had been appointed. After a three-year absence, shortly after Julian’s succession in 361 but before before his release of of the pro-Nicene bishops from the exiles orderd by Constantius, (which permitted Athanasius to return to Alexandria from his third exile), George returned to Alexandria without notice to resume a near decade of a bitter pursuit of the exiled Athanasius and persecution of the orthodox Catholics; his mission from Constantius included as well the persecution of the pagans, whose splendid temple to Serapis in Alexandria he had threatened to destory. The ttemple survived for another thirty years but his threat to it destroyed George, for it aroused a mob comprising the Christians whom George had oppressed as well as the pagans, which assailed and killed him, with the result that Athanasius, returning to Alexandria in February, 362 enjoyed a rare freedom 362, and took full advantage of it.
He had spent his third exile avoiding pursuit by George’s minions by hiding in various locations in the Thebaid and the Delta. Then in his late sixties, Athenasius had occupied the See of Alexandria for thirty-four years, but his energy and apostolic determination had not abated. Released from exile by Julian’s decree, he returned to Alexandria and immdiately convoked a provincial Synod of the few remaining loyal bishops in his diocese, hardly more than a dozen. His episcopal authority over the Church in Alexandria had never been successfully challenged by Constantius’ appointment of such Arian usurpers as George of Cappadocia; by this time he had the complete loyalty of the clergy, the monks, and the people of Egypt;. The schismatic Melitian bishops in the Delta were anti-Arian and, as Athanasius would learn soon learn, had shown themselves capable of an ad hoc alliance atainst the homoean Arians with the pro-Nicene Alexandrine bishops whom they had met at the Council of Seleucia in 359, and whom Athanasius had summoned to the Council of Alexandria. Aided by Eusebius of Vercelli and Asterius who, released by Julian’s edict from their exile by Constantius, attended the Council, Athanasius wrote his Tome to the Antiochenes, an invitation to the homoiousian Antiochene clergy to affirm the Nicene Creed as the condition sine qua non of the ecumenical union he sought. The invitation was refused, on grounds discussed elsewhere. Probably chief among them was Lucifer of Cagliari’s ordination of the pro-Nicene priest Paulinus, the leader of the Antiochenes who refused to accept any anti-Nicene usurper of the See of Antioch. His consecration by Lucifer made irretrievable the antagonism, already nonnegotiable, between the Eustathians and the homoiousian majority in Antioch, who upheld Meletius’ claim to the See.
When the envoys missioned by the Tome to the Antiochenes arrived in Antioch after the close of the Council of Alexandria, they discovered their cause to be already lost.
By then, Julian had been alerted to the obstacle Athanasius represented to his efforts to paganize Alexandria, and instituted a persecution which forced Athanasius to leave the city for about ten months. He had referred to Julian’s enmity as “a little cloud that would soon pass away,”[478] but he soon found himself in fear for his life. While thus in flight, he learned of Julian’s death in battle, and of his succession by Jovian, then in Antioch. Jovian, the pro-Nicene successor to Julian, was determined to learn the character of the disputed claims to legitimacy among the bishops of the dioceses in his dominion. To this end he had sent letters to the major Sees requiring creeds from each. Athanasius was determined to be the first whom Jovian would hear, and arrived in Antioch sufficiently before his Arian, homoean and homoiousian competitors to present his Letter to Jovian, in which he not only detailed his own Nicene orthodoxy, but also described with precision the heretical alternatives to it which the anti-Nicen bishops would shortly propose to Jovian.[479]. Athanasius had visited Antioch in 363, after Meletius’ Council of Antioch had attempted to assimilate the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son to the homoiousion subordinationism,. He ignored Meletius, as his Tome had ignored him, affirmed Lucifer’s consecration of Paulinus as legitimate, and recognized him as the Bishop of Antioch. The Council of Alexandria had underwritten Paulinus’ criticism of Apollinarianism, although its formulation of that criticism has itself been criticized as ambiguous, and so to have failed as a condemnation of the Apollinarian monophysism.[480]
The definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father by the Council of Nicaea nearly forty years earlier to uphold the faith of the Church against the Arian heresy could not be self-enforcing. It had authoritatively rejected the commonplace cosmological subordinationism which had inspired and fed it the Arian heresy and at the same time underwrote the imperial assertion of religious authority, but the Conciliar proclamation was an expression of ecclesial authority, not political powser. It could not be self-enforcing. As with its coincidental denial of the authority of the schismatic Melitian bishops, the Council required that orthodox bishops recognize the Nicene Creed to be definitive, non-negotiable, that they affirm it, and that they refuse to compromise it.
The refusal by the Eusebian bishops of the magisterial authority of the Council was also a refusal to challenge the religious authority of the emperor. It followed that they must join in the condemnation of Athanasius, , as at once an obstacle to the peace of the Church and to the religious unity of the empire, for he notoriously opposed them on both points The “two Eusebii” did not find it difficult to persuade Constantine to their view. By the time of his death in 337, the two Eusebii had deposed Eustathius of Antioch and Marcellus of Ancyra, both fervent supporters of the Nicene Creed, and fervent opponents of Arius and Arianism In 335, they and had seen to the condemnation of Athanasius by a Council held in Tyre for his allegedly criminal administration of his diocese. Having convicted Athanasius by what amounted to a kangaroo court, they persuaded Constantine to exile him, but were unable to persuade Constantine to not to depose him. [481]
When Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria on the basis of his succession to the same apostolic authority as possessed by each of the Fathers at Nicaea, undertook the governance of his diocese, the preaching to his flock of the truth of Christ, and ther sanctification by an unceasing pastoral diligence, he understood himself to be exercising a responsibility and authority given him by Christ, owing nothing to the emperor. He refused all compromise, whether with Constantine, the Melitian schismatics, or the Jews, whose enmity to Christianity could be taken for granted in the mid-fourth century, or with the pagans whose resentment of the overthrow of their culture by Christianity was still palpable, as Julian would later demonstrate.
First and probably foremost, he ignored Constantine’s command to accept the unrepentant Arius back into communion; he refused all compromise with the self-professed Arians within his archdiocese, whose rejection of his authority had led them to seek the support of Athanasius’ arch-enemy, Eusebius of Nicomedia, at the price of conversion to the Arianism supported ambiguously by Constantine and unambiguously by his successors. Thus converted, the Arianized Melitians brought the criminal charges against Athanasius for which he was condemned at the Council of Tyre.
To this end, after the Synod of Tyre, his preaching against the Melitian schismatics had ample cause to lump them, polemically, with the Arian deniers of the faith, and with the Jews and the pagans, seeing in their conglomerate a single enemy of the faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord, a single obstacle then to his pastoral authority over, his responsibility for, and his care of the archdiocese.
Steeped in the orthodoxy of the Alexandrine liturgical, doctrinal and moral tradition, upholding the doctrine of Nicaea whose thrust is soteriological, consequently pastoral, and not at all political,[482] Athanasius took for granted the apostolic doctrine that Jesus is the Lord, that his mother is thereby the Theotokos, a title ancient in Alexandria, and that the Council of Nicaea’s assertion of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and of the indivisible unity of the Trinity, is the uniquely authoritative statement of the Catholic faith in Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of the eternal Father.
Given Athanasius’ investment in what a century later Cyril would label the communication of idioms, it was as immediately apparent to him as it had been to Alexander, that Arianism is a denial of all that the Church has taught. Alone among the bishops of the Orient nearly from the beginning of his episcopacy, apart from the easily marginalized Marcellus of Ancyra, Athanasius found in the Nicene Creed the full expression of the Church’s faith; he grasped, as had none before him and few since, the indispensability of the absolute unity of God, mia ousia, mia hypostasis, and the consequent consubstantiality of Jesus the Lord with the Father, the Personal homoousion by which Jesus is divine and his mother the Theotokos.
The price paid for this high-profile Nicene obduracy was to be alienated by the Oriental bishops, nor was he much loved in the West. E.g., Constantius’ agents at Béziers in 356 had little difficulty extracting condemnations of Athanasius from most of the bishops there assembled. Finally even Pope Liberius was prevailed upon to condemn him. However, in the East, his most devoted enemies were those most offended by his vigorous support, before, at, and after Nicaea, of Alexander’s condemnation of Arius, viz., the “two Eusebii,” soon allied with those whom his pastoral diligence had offended in Egypt, the unreconciled Melitian schismatics who were quite willing to become Arians in order to unseat Athanasius..
Soon after Melitius’death, his followers, having failed at Nicaea to defeat the jurisdiction of the Athanasius of Alexandria over the whole of Egypt, decided to appeal from the Nicene Creed to the Emperor. To this end, John Arkaph[483], who, shortly after the Council of Nicaea, had succeeded Melitius as the leader of the schismatic Melitians, led a group of his bishops to Constantinople, hoping to obtain Constantine’s support of their denial of Athanasius’ authority over them. They were unable to gain an audience with the Emperor until noticed by Eusebius of Nicomedia, recently restored to a position of influence in the court, who saw in them prospective allies with his own campaign against Athanasius, and offered to intercede for them with the Emperor, but at the price of their subscription to the Arian heresy.
The Melitian emissaries accepted the offer for no other motive than to depose Athanasius. Thereafter Athanasius dealt with the Melitians as Arians as well as schismatics, although it is unlikely that their conversion to Arianism was more than nominal from the outset; Their connivance with Eusebius of Nicomedia would best described as political rather than religious, were not the description anachronistic: like the Eusebians, the Melitians had shown themselves incapable of making that distinction.
Knowing with whom he had to deal, Athanasius also refused it. He regarded them simply as Arian supporters of an Arian emperor; and was entirely justified in doing so; he could hardly have done otherwise. After their failure to achieve communion with the Church at Nicaea, a failure confirmed shortly thereafter by Athanasius’ refusal to grant Arius communion in his archdiocese of Alexandria, Arianism was forced to become a political movement in order to survive: it was thereafter entirely dependent upon imperial support, and faded when that failed: an eminent Church historian has spoken concisely to that point:
Theodosius made his formal entry into Constantinople 24 Nov. 380, and at once required its bishop to accept the Nicene faith or to leave the city. Demophilus honourably refused to give up his heresy, and adjourned his services to the suburbs. But the mob of Constantinople was Arian, and their stormy demonstration when the cathedral of the Twelve Apostles was given up to Gregory Nazianzen made Theodosius waver. But not for long. A second edict in Jan. 381, forbade all heretical assemblies in the cities, and ordered the churches everywhere to be given up to the Nicenes. Thus was Arianism put down as it had been set up, by the civil power. Nothing remained but to clear away the wrecks of the contest. [484]
The “two Eusebii,” the bishops of Caesarea and Nicomedia, the instigators and leaders of the Oriental resistance to the Nicene Creed, had been exiled by Constantine at the close of the Council, the former for his evident Arian sympathies, the latter for refusing to accept the condemnation of Arius. Within three years, both were again trusted members of Constantine’s court. Thus returned to imperial favour, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea were able to persuade Constantine, already displeased with Athanasius due to the latter’s refusal of the imperial order to restore an unrepentant Arius to communion, and to underwrite a program through which the major Oriental supporters of the Nicene doctrine would be tried by regional synods composed of bishops under the evidently irresistible political and inevitably heretical influence of the “two Eusebii.”[485]
The first of this pair, the openly Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia, had been a classmate of Arius at the school of Lucian in Antioch, where both imbibed the cosmological dualism underlying the Arian heresy. This Eusebius had been appointed the bishop of Berytus, and then, by means of his familial influence as a relative of Constantine’s sister Constantia, the wife of Licinus, was appointed the Bishop of Nicomedia under Licinius, the Augustus of the East, sometime prior to the latter’s defeat in 324 and subsequent execution by Constantine, the former Augustus of the West who within a dozen years had passed from friendship with Licinius to mortal enmity. His victory over and execution of Licinus removed the last obstacle to his becoming the Roman emperor. With Constantine’s accession to the throne, Eusebius managed to avoid the political implications of his former close association with Licinius, probably again by the influence of Constantia, the sister of Constantine, the widow of Licinus. However managed, Eusebius of Nicomedia, the bishop of Constantine’s first capital city, became a member of Constantine’s official family. Well before Constantine’s ascendancy however, Eusebius had supported Arius, offering him refuge at Nicomedia in 321, after his condemnation and expulsion by the Synod of Alexandria. He derided Arius’ opponents, attempted to win him allies among the Oriental bishops, and generally used his proximity to the throne to promote the Arian heresy.
Deposed by the Council of Nicaea and then exiled by Constantine because of his refusal to accept the Council’s condemnation of Arius, within three years Eusebius had regained the favour of Constantine, again probably by way of his’ friendship with Constantia, and returned from exile. He soon become Constantine’s theological adviser, the office held before the Council of Nicaea by the Western bishop, Ossius of Cordoba, who had been one of the chief supporters of Alexander and Athanasius at the Council, and had presided over the Synod of Antioch in 325 which had condemned, if provisionally, Eusebius of Caesarea, accused by Eustathius of the Arian heresy.
Substituting his own Arianism for the Nicene orthodoxy of Ossius of Cordoba, who had been Constantine’s original theological adviser, Eusebius of Nicomedia was able to persuade Constantine that Arius was basically orthodox in his faith, that he really had been misunderstood at Nicaea, and that Athanasius, as Bishop of Alexandria, should re-admit him to communion and thus resolve the controversy threatening the peace of the Empire. Constantine was angered by Athanasius’ ignoring of this request, which set the stage for Athanasius’ trial, conviction at Tyre in 335, and his exile thereafter.
In short order, a Synod of Antioch held under the presidency of Eusebius of Caesarea, perhaps as early as 327,[486] condemned Eustathius of Antioch for Sabellianism, and deposed him. Exiled by order of Constantine, Eustathius died in exile, probably about 336 but perhaps as late as 360. In 336, Marcellus of Ancyra, also charged by Eusebius of Caesarea with Sabellianism, received the same treatment at a Synod of Constantiniple. Long afterward, in 360, when his successor, Basil of Ancyra, had himself been deposed by the Council of Constantinople, exiled by Constantius, and martyred two years later by Constantius’ successor, Julian the Apostate, Marcellus was able to return on occasion to his diocese of Ancyra, where he died in 374 at a great age. As a bishop he had attended the Council of Elvira, and must then have been nearly thirty years of age. The dating of that council ranges from 300 to 314 but; inasmuch as its proceedings make no mention of the Diocletian persecution, dating it at 300 is reasonable, apart from making Marcellus a hundred and four at his death in 374—truly a great age.
Macarius of Jerusalem, another of Athanasius’ firm allies at Nicaea, named an enemy by Arius as early as 318, had died before Athanasius’ trial by the Synod of Tyre in 335, where Macarius’ briefly Arian successor, Maximus, was among his judges. There Athanasius was charged, not with Sabellianism, perhaps because he was too closely identified with the still unchallengeable doctrinal authority of the Council of Nicaea[487] (e.g., the defenders of Arius, such as Eusebius of Caesarea, did not at first contest the Creed, asserting rather that Arius had been misunderstood by the Council). Instead, Athanasius was accused of the gross mismanagement of his diocese: this indictment comprised a list of strict measures he had taken against the Melitian schismatics who had been coopted by Eusebius of Nicomedia. His exercise of authority over them was described as mistreatment with an unspecified barbarous cruelty. He was also charged with the murder of a Melitian bishop, Arsenius, and with the commission of sacrilege, viz., the breaking of a chalice in use by a Melitian priest by one of Athanasius’ subordinates, the priest Macarius, who had been arrested by Eusebius of Nicomedia and brutally hauled in chains to Tyre.
Although at the Council of Tyre Athanasius had proven that Ischyras, whose chalice Athanasius’ deputy, Macarius, was accused of breaking, was not in fact a priest; and had produced, clearly alive, the bishop Arsenius with whose murder he had been charged, it was all to no avail. When upon Athanasius’ direct appeal the Synod was transferred from Tyre to Constantine’s court at Constantinople Constantine rejected the findings reached by Eusebius of Nicomedia and his Melitian-Arian allies. Nonetheless, the effort by Eusebius of Nicomedia to depose him continued. He now accused Athanasius of having threatened to cut off the supply of wheat from North Africa to Constantinople, which would constitute a direct challenge to Constantine’s imperial authority.
This was sufficient for Constantine, already affronted by Athanasius’ refusal some years earlier to support his effort to achieve religious peace in the Empire by approving the orthodoxy of Arius. Constantine was outraged by the alleged threat to his throne, and this time underwrote the Eusebian project, or so it seemed. Convicted out of hand by the synod, Constantine exiled Athanasius from Alexandria to Trèves in Gaul. However, moved by a lingering respect for him, Constantine failed to appoint a successor to Athanasius’ See. Thus Athanasius remained the bishop of Alexandria, acquitted by Constantine of the charges made against him at Tyre.[488] Nonetheless, Athanasius was not to return to Alexandria as its archbishop until the death of Constantine in 337, when his successor, Constantine II, terminated the exile.
This was the first of Athanasius’ five exiles, over the decades of which the bishops, priests, deacons, monks, and laity of his archdiocese of Alexandria exhibited an increasingly unbending loyalty to him and to the Nicene Creed, despite their often brutal persecution by the Arian usurpers appointed by the Emperors to replace him and oppress them. Even the schismatic monks who had supported the Melitian bishops became loyal to Athanasius.
The second of the “two Eusebii,” the Bishop of Caesarea who, before he died in 339, saw to the condemnation and deposition of Eustathius of Antioch and Marcellus of Ancyra, as well as the condemnation and exile of Athanasius, is the first great Church historian and the best-known scholar among the oriental bishops during the first half of the fourth century. Under the martyred Pamphilius, whose library, first compiled by Origen, he had inherited, Eusebius became an enthusiastic student of Origen.[489] but his uncritical a priori commitment to a Platonizing cosmology led him to reject Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine of three divine hypostases and one divine ousia in favor of the cosmological identification of the divine ousia with the Father, understood as exhausting the divine substance, the Monas, which forced the subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father’s substantial divinity, the One God. This was radically incompatible with Origen’s doctrine of the co-eternity and consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit with the Father. It entailed as well the denial of the divinity of the Son and the Spirit. Eusebius’ manifest sympathy with Arianism generally, and particularly with Arius’ rejection of the divinity of the Son, is at one with his inability to transcend the cosmological determinism which he finally imposed not only on Origen’s Trinitarian theology, but upon the Catholic faithful throughout the Orient, excepting only Alexandria. This cosmological fixation rendered him incapable of understanding the Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father. Clearly incompatible with the monism of cosmological rationality, he argued, quite evidently with the backing of the Emperor Constantine, that the Nicene doctrine of homoousion of the Son with the Father must conclude either to tritheism or to Sabellianism. The opponents of Arianism had labeled it a tritheism, albeit subordinationist; Eusebius, sympathetic to Arius, read the Nicene homoousion as Sabellian, i.e., as an inherently and necessarily false identification of the Father with the Son and the Spirit which forced a Christological adoptionism, the heresy for which Paul of Samosata had been condemned at two Councils held at Antioch in 265 and 268. Forty-five years earlier Pope Callistus had condemned Sabellius, a Libyan, for the same error, Pope Dionysius repeated the condemnation of Sabellianism in a Roman councel held in 250.
Eusebius proceeded to condemn the defenders of the Nicene homoousion on entirely different grounds: it contradicted his cosmological postulates by forcing a cosmologically impossible Tri-Personal divine substance, the mia ousia , treis hyposteseis, expressly taught by Origen, and relied upon by the Council of Nicaea.
After the Council of Nicaea had rejected his subordinationist understanding of the Trinity, Eusebius of Caesarea had been deposed and exiled to Illyria, together with Eusebius of Nicomedia but, as with his namesake, and probably through his namesake’s familial influence of Constantine’s sister, Constantia, he was soon returned to favor and restored to his See of Caesarea. From that powerful position, in effect that of a court bishop, he was able to undertake the imposition of his subordinationist interpretation of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father heretical, because Sabellian. It soon became normative for the Oriental bishops apart from Athanasius; because of Eusebius’ great authority as a scholar, the author of the Historia Ecclesiastica and the foremost student of Origen, but also and not least because of his demonstrated ability, with the assured cooperation of the court bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and through him, of Constantine, to arrange the deposition of those bishops who remained loyal to the Nicene bedrock definition of the substantial unity of God (“mia ousia , mia hypostasis”) foundational at once for the homoousion of the Son with the Father, and for the condemnation of the Arian subordinationism.
Eusebius of Caesarea died in 339, four years after Athanasius was tried and condemned at Tyr but by then, in cooperation with Eusebius of Nicomedia and with the at least tacit approval of Constantine, he had seen also to the deposition of Eustathius at the Synod of Antioch and of Marcellus at a Synod of Constantinople, having devoted two works, the Contra Marcellum and the Theologia Ecclesastica, to the latter’s condemnation.[490] His successors in interest, the bishops Valens and Ursacius, would pursue the ancient Ossius of Cordoba at Rimini in 359, when Ossius was well past eighty, persuading him to sign a homoean document which he soon disavowed, but failing to persuade him to condemn Athanasius.
After condemning as Sabellian and deposing Eustathius of Antioch, perhaps as soon as two years after the close of the Council of Nicaea, the two Eusebii proceeded to indict as Sabellian and convict Sabellian Marcellus of Ancyra at a synod held in Constantinople in 336: he was the second of the three surviving high-profile Oriental defenders of the Nicene insistence, against Arius, upon the absolute unity of God: “mia hypostasis, mia ousia.” Marcellus would not return to Ancyra from his exile until shortly before his death in 374, when he was about a hundred years old.
That left Athanasius of Alexandria, whom the Eusebii succeeded in condemning at Tyre, but failed to depose. Perhaps Athanasius was so associated with the still-unimpeachable authority of the Nicene council as to prevent his indictment as a Sabellian. Although harassed thereafter by his conviction on criminal charges at Tyre, despite Constantine‘s dismissal of them, he was never accused of heresy. Marcellus of Ancyra was the target of Eusebius of Caesarea’s final assault, i.e., the Contra Marcellum, composed in 335 and De ecclesiastica theologia in 336. In 339 Eusebius died, having convinced every bishop in the Orient apart from Athanasius, and of course Marcellus, that Marcellus was a “second Sabellius.” He had persuaded the same Oriental bishops of the orthodoxy of his subordinationist doctrine as the sole alternative to the Sabellianism implicit in Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father. Alone among the Orientals apart from Marcellus, Athanasius upheld the Nicene Creed and refused the Eusebian subordinationism, becoming thereby the bête noire of the Arian emperors, beginning with Constantine, whom the two Eusebii had easily persuaded to recognize in the imposition of version of Arianism upon the empire the obvious means of achieving its religious unity.
In view of its strategic location Constantine moved his capitol to Byzantium in 330, and renamed it Constantinople. Although Eusebius of Nicomedia remained in the former capital city of Nicomedia, as its bishop, he continued the close association with the emperor which permitted him to dominate the Oriental bishops apart from Athanasius, whom neither he nor Constantine could intimidate. Seven years later, during which time the pro-Nicene bishops in the Orient had been replaced by Arians or at least by bishops willing to condemn the Nicene homoousios, Constantine fell ill and died in Nicomedia, after his baptism there by Eusebius of Nicomedia, who would die six years later as the Bishop of Constantinople, having been appointed to that See by his imperial disciple, Constantius, after his deposition of the pro-Nicene Patriarch, Paul.
Thus there remained sufficient time for the last of the “two Eusebii” to put his stamp upon Constantine’s ultimate heir, Constantius II who, in 352, would become the unchallenged ruler of the undivided Roman Empire. After Constantine’s three surviving sons: Constantine II, Constantius II, and the youngest, Constans, had eliminated those of their relatives whom Constantine’s will had given some ambiguous imperial authority, they met at Sirmium to divide the Empire between them as three “Augusti” who would each govern one of the three divisions of the one Empire. The oldest son, Constantine II, a Nicene Christian, became the Augustus of the Western empire: i.e., Gaul, Hispania and Brittania; Constans, the youngest, also a Nicene Christian, became the Augustus of Italy, Pannonia and Africa. The second son, Constantius II, became the Augustus of the Orient, comprising Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, Libya, and Egypt.
The oldest of the three surviving sons of Constantine, Constantine II had considered himself the guardian of Constans, the youngest brother, and gave concrete expression to this supposed ascendancy by invading Italy in 340, in reaction to Constans’ having ignored his tutelage and undertaken the independent governance of his domain. Constans was able to repel Constantine’s intrusion: his smaller force ambushed and defeated his brother’s troops at Aquilaea. In the fighting there Constantine II was killed.[491] With the elimination of his oldest brother, Constans succeeded to his Augustan authority, thus becoming the Augustus of the West as well as of Italy, Pannonia and Africa. Like Constantine II, Constans, as a pro-Nicene Christian, opposed the homoean Arianism to which Constantius, as tutored by Eusebius of Nicomedia, was committed. Constans therefore supported Athanasius, and was able to restrain his brother’s enmity toward this eminent obstacle to the imperial imposition of Arianism as the religious unity of the Empire.
Under pressure from Constans, whose domain included “Africa,” Constantine II, then the Augustus of the East, whose dominion included Egypt and therefore Alexandria, cancelled his father’s exile of Athanasius from Alexandria to Treves, to which he had been sentenced after the Synod of Tyre in 335, thus allowing his return to the oversight of his archdiocese The necessity of this submission to Constans naturally much annoyed Constantius, Unable at the time to resist Athanasius’ return, .and remaining so for another dozen years, his toleration of this obstinately Nicene opponent of his own commitment to Arianism was entirely unwilling. It ended with the death of Constans in 350: thereafter Constantius dealt with Athanasius as an enemy to be suppressed, moving against his influence in the west in 352 by appointing Saturninus to the See of Arles.
Constantius continued to rule the East: In 338, a year after his father’s death, he had made Eusebius of Nicomedia the Archbishop of Constantinople, deposing the incumbent Archbishop Paul from that office.[492] Under Eusebius’ tutelage, Constantius had become committed to Arianism in a much stronger sense than his father had been. Constantine had been persuaded by the two Eusebii to see in Arianism the only means of restoring the religious unity of the Empire, but only as raison d’état; he was annoyed, even angered, by Athanasius’ refusal to cooperate, but he did not regard him as someone to be suppressed: he did not depose him from his See.
Constantius was for a time further distracted from his ambition to impose an Arian unity upon the empire by Persian attacks upon his eastern front, by the pressure of Gauls against the Danube, as well as by Constans who, like his dead brother, interfered with Constantius’ program for the persecution of Athanasius and the Nicene bishops generally.
Constans’ troubling of Constantius ended in 350, when an ambitious general, Magnentius, a commander of two divisions of the imperial guard, was proclaimed Emperor by his legions. He proceeded to take advantage of the dissatisfaction of Constans’ army with his rule, and persuaded them to rebel against Constans and to follow him instead. Thus weakened, Constans was easy prey; he fled to a refuge in the Pyrenees, but was soon killed, probably by assassination, perhaps in a chance encounter with a detachment of Magnentius’ cavalry. After Constans’ death, Magnentius consolidated his control over the former domains of Constans and Constantine II, and proceeded to challenge Constantius’ rule of the East. In 351 Constantius’ army decisively defeated Magnentius at Mursa Major, a town in what is now Croatia, in one of the bloodiest battles in Roman history. Magnentius retreated to northern Italy, and thence to Gaul. His flight ended with his suicide in 353. Constantius became the unchallenged emperor:of an empire unified as it had not been since Diocletian’s abdication fifty years earlier.
The elimination of the last threat to his throne left Constantius free to resume a persecution of the pro-Nicene bishops in the West; apart from Athanasius, periodically exiled, and the western pro-Nicene bishops similarly deposed from their dioceses, there were none left in the East. Constantius, stationing himself in Milan, began this Western persecution in 352 by displacing the incumbent bishop of Arles, a small city in southern France, with an Arian, Saturninus. Then, in 355, he replaced Bishop Dionysius at Milan with another Arian, Auxentius, and proceeded to replace the Nicene bishops of the other Western cities, among them Hilary, the Bishop of Poitiers, at a synod held in Beziers in 356. Summoning them to local councils controlled by Valens and Ursacius, Pannonian bishops who, upon Eusebius of Nicomedia’s death in 342, had succeeded to his office of advising Constantius, the Western bishops were required to subscribe to the a homoean Arian creed composed by these advisors, and to anathematize Athanasius and thereby the Nicene doctrine which he notoriously upheld—a goal long since attained in the East by the two Eusebii.
In 359, Constantius finally succeeded in imposing his homoean version of Arianism upon the generally pro-Nicene Western bishops at the Council of Ariminium (Rimini), and upon the Eastern bishops, particularly upon the dissenting followers of Basil of Ancyra, at the Council of Selelucia, and then upon the whole of the Empire at the Synod of Constantinople in 360. Dying a year later, he was succeeded by Julian the Apostate, who then permitted the Nicene bishops exiled by Constantine and Constantius II, Athanasius among them, to return to their sees, hoping for a conflict between them and the Arian usurpers of their Sees which would be to the advantage of his program for the restoration of a sophisticated paganization of the Empire. Julian died in battle at Adrianople in 363, to be briefly succeeded by a Christian, Jovian and, less than a year later, by the Arian Valens, an incompetent emperor but a committed persecutor of Christians. He also died in battle at Adrianople, fourteen years later, in 378, after vigorously persecuteing anti-Arian bishops, not least Athanasius, during all those years. He was succeeded by Theodosius, the pro-Nicene Emperor who in 381 called the First Council of Constantinople, thereby putting an end to the imperial Arianism; its last significant representative in the West was Auxentius of Milan, who died in 374, to be succeeded by Ambrose.
Basil was appointed in 336 to succeed Marcellus of Ancyra in the See of Ancyra upon the latter’s condemnation and deposition by Constantine, as advised by the two Eusebii. Apart from possible momentary interruptions by the deposed Marcellus, he held the See until his deposition by Constantius in 360; he then fell under the displeasure of Constantius’ pagan successor, Julian, and was martyred in 362.
Basil was loyal to the Eusebian subordinationism and its rejection of the Nicene Creed as inherently Sabellian. Thus persuaded, it did not occurr to him that the refusal of the consubstantiality of Jesus with the Father was a denial of Jesus’ divinity. The political implications of this rejection, i.e., acceptance of the doctrinal authority of the emperor, would become evident only with the passage of more than twenty years during which the Arian revolt had found imperial support from Constantine in his last years. While inhibited by the sons of Constantine until the death of Constans in 350, Arianism thereafter began to flourish again. In 342 Eusebius of Nicomedia had persuaded the young Constantius, the Augustus of the East to, sympathy, at a minimum, with the Arian doctrine. From 352, secure in his own domain, he undertook to impose Arianism upon the Latin West, for with the death of Constans he now ruled the entirety of the Roman empire. By 356, Hilary of Poitiers, at the Council of Béziers, had sufficiently affronted Constantius as to earn exile to Phrygia in what is now central Turkey. There he came under the influence of Basil of Ancyra,, who by then had been the untroubled bishop of Ancyra for twenty years, but was about to become better acquainted with the imperial exercise of religious authority.
In 357 a Arian Council was held at Sirmium, one of the four capitals of the Roman empire, at a time when Constantius was in residende. The Councial rejected any use of “substance” to describe the relation of the Son to the Father and simply affirmed that the Father was greater than the Son. A second Arian Council, held in Sirmium in 358, used the term “homoios,” i.e., “like” or “similar to” to describe the Son’s standing relative to the Father. This ‘homoeanism” became the classic expression of Arian doctrine.
Early in 358, in response to the “Blasphemy’ of the 357 Council of Sirmium” Basil called a meeting, a minor council, of a few of his advisors to affirm the divinity of the Son, choosing the expression “similar in substance” (homoios kat’ousian; ὅμοιος κατ’οὐσίαν) to reaffirm the Son’s concrete similarity in all things to the Father, as opposed to the generic “likeness” proposed by the Second Council of Sirmium.
This concrete likeness to the Father was further described by Basil as a “single concept ot likeness,” applicable only to the Son; thus understood, it was implicitly binitarian, for it ruled out any affirmation of the divinity of the Holy Spirit.
Hilary was born around the turn of the fourth century to noble and perhaps pagan parents in Poitiers, a prominent city in southern Gaul, who provided him with the education proper to the members of his privileged class. He was familiar with the Latin philosophers, and may have had some acquaintance with the Greek language, although its extent is questioned. He was at an rate sufficiently fluent to been able to read Greek theology by 359, three years into his exile, when he wrote his De synodis in order to pass on to the bishops of the West his familiarity with current Greek Trinitarian thought. Addressed to the Western bishops, the De synodis, like the rest of his works, is in Latin, but it rests upon a fair acquaintance with the . His interest in philosophy in the classic sense of a quest for wisdom led him to the Christian scriptures and, through them, to his conversion from Middle or Neoplatonism to Christianity. Beyond this, there is no record of him other than that which his own writings provide. It is evident from them that he possessed the high culture of the late Latin world, which flourished in the cities of southern Gaul. The literary and philosophical studies which led him to conversion and baptism provided him with the literary and dialectical skills which served him well when he became the bishop of Poitiers around 353.
His theological competence is another matter. His sole work before his exile in 356 is his Commentary on Matthew. His Christology is set out for the most part in the latter books of his De trinitate, VIII-XII. It had been inchoatively presented in his Commentary on Matthew, and is finally developed his Commentaries on the Psalms.[493] It is of the non-speculative, simply parenetic variety which J. N. D. Kelly understands to have relied upon Tertullian’s doctrine of the two substances and the one Person in Christ. This reliance upon the liturgical affirmation of the Lordship of Jesus simply bypasses the speculative controversies typical of Greek Christology, to affirm Mary’s motherhood of God and, by implication, the human consubstantiality of the Christ with us.[494] It affirms and proclaims the apostolic tradition.
Kelly considers Ambrose of Milan to typify this Christology. Ambrose certainly upholds it, for it is inseparable from the liturgical mediation of the apostolic faith, but the immediate object of Ambrose’s fides quaerens intellectum is the liturgy, whose significance and salvific efficacy Ambrose knows to be immediate, needing no defense but only proclamation, explanation and exhortation. However, Ambrose could read Greek, and had studied Origen. Therefore his exposition of the liturgy transcends the usual Western paraenesis or catechesis which echoes Tertullians disinterest in speculation.
Tertullian’s Christological interest, set out in his Apologeticus, was soteriological from the outset, and the Latin tradition after him was correspondingly impatient of speculation, even that prompted by the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father. Hilary of Poitiers presents another instance of this impatience; he never understood the distinction between the Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father and the homoiousian doctrine of the Son’s similarity in substance (homoios kat’ ousian, that he learned from Basil of Ancyra during his exile in Phrygia. He looked upon the distinctions between them as inducements to futile controversy.
As taught by Basil of Ancyra in the last two years of Hilary’s exile, the homoiousian Christology exhibits the Eusebian confusion which understands Christian theology forced to choose between a heretical Sabellianism and a Trinitarian subordinationism, Basil of Ancyra had chosen the latter option. Early in 358, he called the small quasi-council in Ancyra mentioned earlier, wherein he proposed a subordinationist Christology in which Christ is not homoousios with the Father, but rather was similar to him in substance: homoios kat’ousian. Basil, following Eusebius of Caesarea, understood the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father to be inherently Sabellian,. However that confusion is tempered by Hilary’s conviction of the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, although he was unable to accept the capacity of Jesus to suffer. This conviction did not arise from any dehistoricization of the Son, whom he always identified with the Johannine Logos, whom he knew to be Jesus the Lord.
Rather, Hilary supposed the Holy Spirit so to have arranged the Incarnation as to have made Jesus’ humanity inherently immune to suffering. This mitigation of the kenōsis of Phil. 2:6-7 is not without cosmological undertones, but they are overborne by Hilary’s identification of the Christ with the Johannine Logos, a spontaneous expression of the communication of idioms inherent in the confession that Jesus Christ is Lord. If Hilary’s view of the kenōsis displays a cosmological resistance to the notion of a divine suffering, nonetheless he did not accept the “two-stage” view of the Incarnation that is implicit in subordinationism as such. For Hilary, the subject of the Incarnation is Jesus: this is never in doubt. His commitment to the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord testifies to his implicit recognition of Jesus’ Personal unity. He does not refer the kenōsis to the eternal Son; rather he accepts s the explicit reference to Jesus Christ the Lord of Pauline doctrine of the kenōsis in Phil. 2:6-7. With a possible reference to Origen, he affirms the “ethereal” humanity of Jesus, a humanity to whom suffering was entirely alien, unnatural. Jesus’ suffering, which he admits, was then not proper to the reality of his humanity; rather, it took place only by Jesus’ free decision. Here again is an echo of Origen’s Christology.
In sum, Hilary’s Jesus was not subject to suffering, but was free to choose to suffer and did so choose, with a freedom which is that of obedience to his Mission from the Father. This solution to a speculative dilemma supposes a distinction between the freedom of the historical Jesus and his free obedience to his Mission from the Father, which cannot exist,
There is in this Christology no dehistoricization of Son, That error cannot be attributed to Hilary, who did not understand the “immanent Logos” to be the subject of the Incarnation. He displayed no interest in a cosmologized Christ. His Christology was committed to the communication of idioms. If Hilary did not develop its corollary, that Jesus Christ the Lord pre-exists as the Pauline second Adam, as the Johannine “man from heaven,” the Alpha and the Omega, in this he is scarcely alone. His constant emphasis is upon the unity of humanity and divinity in the one Son. His homiletic Commentaries on the Psalms are replete with affirmation of the identity of the Son with Jesus the Lord.
Thus, while Hilary regarded the Christ’s suffering as real, his understanding of the kenōsis as proper to the “immanent Son” obscures his recognition of the kenotic humanity of the Christ as like us in all but sin:. J. N. D. Kelly thinks that Hilary’s designation of Jesus’ humanity as “ethereal,” in the sense of unfallen (following Origen), thus a humanity to which suffering was unnatural, reflects Origen’s Christology to an extent verging on Docetism. This criticism reflects Kelly’s view of Origen rather than Hilary’s Christology, whose stress upon the communication of idioms bars such inference; as for that matter so also does Origen’s. Specifically, Hilary has affirmed what all Christian ages have affirmed, the incongruity of the suffering of the Son of God who is the Incarnate Jesus the Lord, and his total obedience to his Mission from the Father. Hilary firmly rejects any suggestion that Jesus’ humanity was less than complete: he insists on its ‘ensoulment,’ but not in the context of the “two-stage” Christology of the fourth century, which fails to recognize what the Antiochene tradition would see, that for Jesus to be like to us in all but sin requires that, like us, he be a human Person; it is meaningless to describe his humanity as sinless if it is not Personal.
Hilary’s faith in Jesus the Lord is not troubled by cosmology, the perennial source of Christological befuddlement. With his Latin contemporaries, he affirmed his faith in the full unity of the Jesus the Christ, and so of the communication of idioms in him. Influenced by the Latin tradition ofTertullian’s “una persona, duae naturae,” unfettered by cosmological considerations which led his Oriental contemporaries to suppose the immanent Son of God, i.e., the dehistoricized Son, to be the subject of the Incarnation, he identified the Person of the Son with the Person of Christ, whom he understood to be at once the Son of the Father and of the Virgin, “one and the same.” The historical faith of the historical Church motivated his theological inquiry. He held to the communication of idioms in Jesus Christ the Lord. His is the Spirit Christology of the Apostolic Fathers, which alone can support the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord.
However, his Trinitarian theology, and consequently his Christology, is tempered by the doctrine of Basil of Ancyra. That subordinationist influence imposes incoherencies upon his theology, as will be seen
Eustathius of Antioch had been a loyal ally of bishop Alexander of Alexandria and thus also of Athanasius at the Council of Nicaea, and remained a powerful upholder of the Conciliar definitions of the substantial, unity of the Trinity, the One God, and of the full divinity of Jesus Christ the Lord, both of which doctrines Arius and his followers had denied. Eustathius‘ post-conciliar theological concern for the full humanity of Jesus rested upon the Nicene affirmation of his Personal unity: thus Grillmeier.[495] In the pages following, Grillmeier interprets Eustathius Christology as having abandoned the “older tradition,” i.e., the Nicene Creed, which understood the Personal unity of the Jesus to be inherent in his Name. and to have accepted in its stead the diophysism which, in the Eranistes, Theodoret of Cyr reads into the fragments which remain of Eustathius’ Christology.
This supposition of Eustathius’ conversion to a diophysite Christologyis entirely at odds with his support of the Nicene Creed at the Council, as Grillmeier recognizes,. It assumes in Eustathius a post-Nicene recognition that the soul of Christ is integral with his full humanity forced him to reject the Nicene Creed in favor of the Logos-anthrōpos Christology developed in the fifth century by the School of Antioch.
Sed contra, J. N. D. Kelly[496], citing Michel Spanneut[497] who, early in his Recherches sur les écrits d’Eustathe d’Antioch, mentions and regrets the absence of a critical edition of the Eranistes.[498] Twenty-seven years later, Gérard Ettlinger provided that critical edition.[499] The latest edition of Eustathius’ works is Eustathii Antiocheni, Patris Nicaeni, Opera quae supersunt omnia. Ed. José Declerck (Paris: Brepols; Leiden: Turnhout, 2002). The final two hundred and eighty-six pages of this volume, devoted to the critical edition of the pertinent Greek texts; are prefaced by an Introduction of four hundred and fifty-seven pages. The present writer, lacking the learning, the talent and the time to appreciate that massive study of Eustathius, has chosen to rely instead upon Spanneut’s Recherches. Before entering upon an survey of Spanneut’s examination of Eustathius’ writings, a clarification of the doctrine of the Council of Nicaea is in order, for it is there that Eustathius, whose radical opposition to Arius was well established, also subscribed to the Nicene Creed which affirms the full divinity, not of a nonhistorical eternal Son, but of Jesus the Christ, whose Personal unity is consubstantial with the Father.
The subject of the Nicene Creed is Jesus the Lord. The Creed is not concerned with the divinity of a non-historical second Person of the Trinity, for the simple reason that the second Person of the Trinity, whom the Creed affirms to be consubstantial with the Father, is historical: Jesus the Lord. Arius denied the divinity of Jesus the Lord. He did so on the cosmological grounds which underlay his subordinationist heresy. The bishops who attended the Council of Nicaea met to assert the divinity of Jesus the Lord against Arius and his followers. Jesus, the Only-begotten Son of the Father, Jesus the Christ, is the subject of the Nicene Creed, apart from the final phrase which includes the Holy Spirit within the object of the Trinitarian faith of the Church, for whose defense the Fathers met in Council at Nicaea.
In a separate statement of the Arian errors which literally contradict the Church’s faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, the Fathers at Nicaea condemned Arius’s heresy and spelled out the corollaries of his subordinationist reduction of Jesus’ Personal divinity to a creaturely standing. These condemnations are perhaps the best-known statements of the Council, and must be understood as resting upon the definition in the Creed of the homoousion of the Son, Jesus the Christ, with the Father from whom he eternally proceeds. The consubstantiality of the Father and the Son is their membership in the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit. It excludes definitively any substantial unity in God other than the Trinity. Arianism is basically a cosmology and consequently a subordinationism. Therefore it is a denial of the Trinity and thereby a heresy. As a cosmology, it understands the unity of God to be that of an absolute and immanently necessary substance, a Monad, incapable of relation to anything as a matter of definition.
Arius accommodates this monism to Christianity by identifying the divine substance with the Father, reserving divinity to him. This requires that the divinity of the Son and the Spirit be only nominal, in a manner of speaking which is not to be taken seriously. Failing to be divine, they can only be necessary emanations from the Monad, therefore relative to him and, in that sense, creatures. Cosmological theology is inherently henotheistic; the Absolute is known only through its emanations.
It is the application of this subordinationism to Jesus the Lord that the Council of Nicaea anathematized. The anathemata focus upon and condemn statements by Arius and his followers which insist upon the creaturely standing of the Logos, the Son. In sum, they condemn the Arians for teaching that the Son had a beginning; specifically that “there was when he was not,” that he was therefore a creature, created from nothing, and consequently was mutable, “passible,” capable of change, .
Unfortunately, the Nicene anathemata are so intent upon the Arian error that they ignore their own doctrinal foundation in the Nicene Creed, for their references to the Arian denials of the divinity of the Son, the Word, the Logos, all prescind from Jesus’ human historicity, his Personal humanity, his Mission from the Father, his conception, birth, maturation, his baptism by John, his calling of his disciples, his preaching of the Kingdom of God as revealed in him, his persecution, his death, his Resurrection: in brief, his eminent ability to change.
Thus literally read, the anathemata accept the Arian dehistoricization of the subject of the Creed, viz., Jesus the Lord, fully divine, fully human, fully one and the same Son, and thereby implicitly condemn the Creed’s assertion that it is by his Incarnation and his suffering death, that Jesus, not merely his Personal divinity, is the author of our salvation. Over a century earlier, Irenaeus had summed up the apostolic faith in Jesus: he is one and the same Son of the Father and of the Virgin, and is therefore one Son, one Person, fully God and fully man. The anathemata are so intent upon the pursuit of Arius as to be oblivious of their purpose, i.e., to uphold the apostolic faith that Jesus is Lord, whose One Sacrifice redeems the fallen universe. The dissociation of the Nicene anathemata from the Nicene Creed so typifies the Christology of the fragments of Eustathius’ writings informing the Eranistes as to suggest that he wrote the anathemata.
Eustathius’ anti-Arian enthusiasm made him so intent upon a literal reading of the anathemata of the Conciliar condemnation of Arianism as to impose an errant diophysite expression upon the Christology of the Nicene Creed. Seduced by his anti-Arianism into an alternative error, he was so intent upon asserting what Arius had denied, the immutability and impassability of the divinity of the Christ, as to deny the communication of idioms in Jesus as the price of maintaining the immutability of his divinity. All references to Jesus’ historicity had to be referred to his humanity, in opposition to Arius who, having reduced the Son to a creature, was intent upon referring Jesus’ historicity to the diminished Logos-Son.
Eustathius’ isolation of the divine Son from history is essentially Monarchian, viz., a Christology in which the Son, as abstract divinity, is assumed to be the subject of the Incarnation and is of course incapable of the sufferings wlich the apostolic tradition attributes to Jesus the Lord. This Monarchian stance, explicit in the fragments of Eustathius works assembled by Theodoret in the Eranistes, requires that the sufferings of Jesus be assigned to his humanity, his “man” as Eustathius puts it. It is here that Eustathius finds the basis for his condemnation of the Arian anticipation of the monophysist denial of a human soul in Christ: viz., the Arians deny his full, i.e., ensouled humanity in order to assign the sufferings of Christ solely to the Logos, the creaturely and only nominally divine Son of their heresy. Eustathius’ hatred of Arianism often blinds him to the apostolic faith that Jesus died on the Cross, rose, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. His insistence that suffering, death, and resurrection must refer to his humanity, anticipates by nine centuries the Christology of St. Thomas.
However, Eustathius was not simply an anti-Arian driven by that stance to a Monarchian error; he was also a senior bishop at the Council of Nicaea, and a leading figure among those who upheld the Spirit Christology of the Nicene Creed; this Nicene orthodoxy is reflected in some of the fragments of his writings.
Spanneut’s study of the fragments of Eustathius’ Christological works, those gathered in Theodoret’s Eranistes, together with Eustathius’ one intact writing, “On the Pythonesse (the Witch of Endor”, an attack upon Origen’s allegorical exegesis of 1 Samuel 28:3–25, and with other fragments not cited in the Eranistes, is of particular interest. The most reliable and pertinent fragments of Eustathius’ works are those warranted by Theodoret of Cyr’s citation of them in the Eranistes in support his own diophysite Christology. Theodoret’s authority is such as to have persuaded some, perhaps many patristic scholars to accept his interpretation of Eustathius’ Christology as simply diophysite. However, as J. N. D. Kelly has pointed out, with reference to Spanneut’s Recherches, this interpretation is inapplicable to identifiably pre-Nicene fragments of Eustathius’ works. The modesty Spanneut displays in the “Conclusion” of the Recherches is at once admirable and instructive. After having meticulously surveyed and criticized contemporary efforts to produce a synthesis of Eustathius’ Christology, Spanneut presents the results of his own effort to understand Eustathius’ writings in their integrity:
Here is the manner by which are established the results of this second inquiry, the parts of which is substantiated (acquis) and the part that is hypothesis.
Eustathius is the author of at least two treatises, the works which Jerome has cited, On the Pythonesse, and On the Soul. Based upon the manner of the historian’s mention of them, as well as by their content, these two writings appear to us to be anterior to the battles with the Arians.
Among the other works, we know specifically five discourses mentioned by Theodoret: On the titles of the psalms of inscription, On the soul, On Proverbs 8, 22, On the titles of the psalms of the ascents, On Psalm 92. Since the bishop of Cyr always cites them in the same order, he possesses them as assembled in a selection which, according to their titles, may well be a collection of homilies (une homiliaire). What is the relation between this ‘homiliaire’ amd the Contra arianos which Theodoret has cited exclusively in the Gelasian florilegium? One might be tempted to make no distinction between them (de les confondre), but we are rather persuaded to see in the Contra arianos an antiarian treatise by Eustathius, divided in eight books, which would be independent both of the discourses cited with their title in the Eranistes, and of the discourses Contra arianos cited by other witnesses. These two series of discourses may on the other hand be confounded (pourraient se confondre). We admit however that this hypothesis does not impose itself absolutely.
Our certitudes are no greater for the remainder of the work. Surely Eustathius has composed other homilies, but little of them exists, perhaps nothing. It is improbable that he composed scriptural commentaries; in any case he is not the author of the commentary on the Hexaemeron that was attributed to him in the seventeenth century. We remain wary of the modern efforts to augment the literary patrimony of Eustathius by such restorations, and we avoid in particular the Christological Homily on Lazarus, Mary and Martha.
We have thus examined the Eustathian heritage according to the quality of its witnesses and the nature of its content. In this difficult labor, we have left a large part to hypothesis, but that is the first step of science. We believe ourselves authorized to present to the reader the work of the bishop of Antioch in a new edition. It shows, better than our discussions of details, the variety of the Eustathian works. The writings are from the outset without relation to the present interest. They become in consequence an armament against heresy. The ideas, despite the partiality of the florilegia, are diverse, and to consider them merely systematically, as though cast from the same mold, the antiochene mold, for example, is a grave error. .Any serious study of the doctrine of Eustathius must reckon with the diverse aspects of this powerful and vital personality.[500]
The Trinitarian Ideas
One cannot prove, it seems, that Eustathius understood the Trinity in “physico-economic” terms. We shall neglect that which concerns the Holy Spirit; there is very little point in it, and its consideration would entail other difficulties while resolving nothing. Our inquiry will bear solely upon the relations of the Father and the Word. On this point the terminology of our bishop offers nothing unfamiliar. It is obvious that in speaking of the activity of the Logos, the author uses the terms ἀρετῇ, ἐνεργείᾳ, δυνάμει but he never calls the Word ἀρετῇ or ἐνεργείᾳ. The use he makes of these terms is always purely classic, devoid of all technical or philosophical distinction. On the other hand, δυναμις, like σοφία and πνεῦμα do designate the Word, at least in the anti-Arian writings, but this is the same across all theology of the period and particularly so among the Arians.1 Moreover this usage relies upon the Bible (cf. I Cor. i. 25 ou Luc i. 35) sometimes in terms of a particular exegesis. One cannot infer from it that Eustathius sees in the Word a simple attribute of a monopersonal God.
We declare, in direct opposition, that he often uses terms implying, between God and the Word, a relation of Father to Son (son, child, begetter. genitor), as well in the minor work on the Witch of Endor as in the fragments. Sometimes, even when commenting upon biblical texts which include the word Logos, he introduces the idea of filiation. Thus he has no prejudice against this theology. On the contrary, the idea of generation occurs very often. The Word of the Father is God, he by whom he is engendered (F. 33 ; cf F. 35), by an ineffable generation ((F. 67; cf. F. 44). He is manifestly God by nature, engendered by God (F. 35 ; cf. F. 19), Authentic Son of God by nature (O. x = Kl. 31, 1 = 633B) and Eustathius applies to him even the laws of heredity (F. 21; cf F. 44). Is it possible to doubt that which he himself called a real theogony ((). xxiv = Kl. 54, 5 = 663 A) ?[501] Is the Word therefore also a person? It is not a question of seeking in the terminology of Eustathius a precision proper to another age. Neither is it necessary to detach the terms he uses from their historical context. Our bishop certakinly says that the hypostasis of divinity is unique.(F. 38) but this affirmation is disquieting only to modern eyes, inasmuch as the synod of Alexandria in 362 still permitted affirmations whether of one or three hypostases in God. Elsewhere in the same fragment the author excludes Sabellianism by proclaming insistently the duality in the sisngularity. In the course of the treatise on the Pythonesse, commenting rather oddly upon some verses of Deuteronomy which end with these words: “The Lord your God tests you to know whether you love the Lord your God.” (xiii, 2) He says of the sacred author: Presenting here the dyad of the Father and of the Only-begotten Son, he has named the one the Lord who tempts and an other than he, the well-beloved Lord God, by way of showing, on the part of the dyad, the unique divinity and the real theogony (O. xxiv = K1. 54, 11-5 = 664A; cf F. 50. Nothing here resembles less an economic conception of the Trinity; we are nearly at a scholastic precision. [502]
2. In the opuscule (i.e., the treatise On the Pythonesse) the Holy Spirit is clearly named four times, and the author attributes to him the inspiration of the Scriptures. The fragments pose a delicate question of terminology which we cannot enter upon here. As to the passages where he spoke of the dyad, the exegetical context or the object of the discussion furnish the justification. In the end, the Holy Spirit is in the background of Eustathius’ preoccupations. His time has its task, but does not explain all of it.
1 Thalie II and XVIII, cf. G. Bardy, St. Lucien d’Antioche et son école (Paris, 1936), pp. 256 and 273.
Spanneut, art. cit., 222.
Passing on to the specifics of Eustathius Christology, Spanneut limits his treatment of them to two strategic themes: [503]
The Christological Ideas
We will be content with two remarks upon the Christ. The first bears upon the ‘mechanism’ of the Incarnation; the other upon the human nature of the being which results from the Incarnation. (F. 20 ; cf. F. 35, 44, 48).
In order to fullfill his salvific mission, the goal of the Incarnation (F. 14, 23, 43, 49), in traversing the maternal womb, the Word, always impassible, (F. 15, 30, 31, 46, 47), builds for himself a temple; he wears bodily members (F. 18 ; cf. F. 30)1, he assumes (ἀναλαμβών) a human instrument (F. 23). The term “to assume” occurs again (adsumere) (F. 41; ἀναλαμβáνομαι, F. 14) and the Incarnation in the eyes of Eustathius is indeed the assumption of a man by the Word.2
1 This corresponds to a known exegesis of Luc 1. 35.
2 Some other fragments approximate more closely “the word was made flesh” of St. John, but they are less frequent and somewhat doubtful (F. 64 and 70).
This man, in the Christ, is generally understood as in place of the presence of the Word, on a footing of equality. Eustathius seven times calls him the man of Christ, a curious expression which the tradition has not adopted.3 He insists, astonishingly, upon the integrity of this human nature and, a detail entirely remarkable, he explicitly attributes to it a soul. While the Fathers of that period, even a St. Athanasius,4 to judge at least from their surviving writings, are silent on the soul of Christ, in spite of its express denial by the Arians. Eustathius exclaims on the subject of heretics: why do you consider it so important to show that the Christ assumed a body without a soul? (F. 15). By this unique clairvoyance, he attacked the heresy at its weak point, and saved the integrity of the natures in Christ.
3 Only the Major Sermon on tbe Faith offers expressions very near this, in particular the famous κυριακος ανθρωπος (lordly man) which Msgr. Lebon has however recognized as a work of St. Athanasius.
4. M. Richard, “Saint Athanasius and the Psychology of the Christ according to the Arians”, Mélanges des Science Religieuse (Lille, 1947), IVe année, Cahier 1, pp. 5-54.
Spanneut, art. cit., 223.
But this is only to raise the crucial point: while recognizing that Eustathius used πρόσωπον to refer to this “man,” and noting also his tendency toward an exaggerated dualism, Spanneut insists that in Eustathius’ time the attribution of a not yet technical term to the integral humanity of Christ did not carry a dualist connotation:
Inasmuch as the Christ is humanly complete, is it necessary to admit that this man is a person? The exaggeratedly dualist tendency in Eustathius is evident. However we do not give the term πρόσωπον which he sometimes applies to the human nature of Christ a value which it did not have.5 In fact, the bishop of Antioch affirms elsewhere the unity of the Saviour. It is the same Christ who has two births (F. 67) who is in the heart of the Father and sojours on the earth (O. xviii =Kl. 46, 7-8 =652cd). In spite of his eagerness to distinguish that which is proper to each nature, he says of our God: How could he have been raised among men if it was not when he was born among them of a Virgin and lived among them and grew and drank and ate kc.? Did he not go so far as to speak of divini Verbi commistio (F. 53) ?
5 M. Richard, “The introduction of the word « hypostasis » in theology of the Incarnation,” Mélanges des Science Religieuse (Lille, 1945), II année, pp.5-32 et 243-70.
Spanneut concludes his discussion of Eustathius’ Christology with two paragraphs which corroborate his earlier summary conclusion in the Recherches:
Inasmuch as the dualist insistence appears only in the fragments, generally anti-Arian, they all permit one to belive that Eustathius was lad by polemic. Against thjose who diminished, over and again, the human and divine Christ, he has to demonstrate the reciprocal perfection of the man and of the Word. Eustathius, in this sense, was not a born Antiochene.
Eustathius of Antioch thus appears to us as scarcely able to serve as a witness attesting to the continuity of the Antiochene tradition. His Trinitarian ideas carry no special mark. They are even exceedingly biblical. His Christology, very affirmative as to the unity of the Saviour, owes its perhaps exaggerated dualism only to circumstance. But these affirmations, heavy with consequences, would demand a more detailed exposition and further development. They permit at least some remarks, in our opinion opportune, upon the doctrine of Eustathius of Antioch.[504]
Those persons « qui diminuaient tour à tour dans le Christ l’humain et le divin » are of course the Arians. It was Eustathius’ demonstration of the full humanity and the full divinity of Jesus the Christ in opposition to them that earned his selection by the Council of Antioch (325) to succeed to the See of Antioch. There he continued that opposition, beginning with his attendance at the Council of Antioch which condemned Eusebius of Caesaea, and then at the Council of Nicaea, with an intensity sufficient to earn the focused animosity of the “two Eusebii” who, once restored to imperial favor ca. 328, immediately saw to his condemnation, deposition and exile. They knew him and condemned him for what he was, a Nicene loyalist. His insistence upon the substantial unity of the Trinity, μία οὐσία (mia ousia) was notorious, to the point of his rebuking Eusebius of Caesarea for denying the faith of Nicaea.[505] Eusebius’ Christology cannot be reduced to a Monarchian diophysism. With the Creed, he upheld the communication of idioms in Jesus; if he was distracted from the apostolic faith by his anti-Arian polemic, as Spanneut has proposed, that connotes confusion, not conversion. It was a widely shared confusion in the fourth century, and remains so today.
Spanneut’s refusal to accept the reduction of Eustathius’ Christology to an Antiochene diophysism is repeated, by Kelly, ut supra, by Grillmeier, op. cit., 301, and by Quasten, Patrology III, 305.
Eustathius first appears in history as a confessor who suffered under Diocletian, and as the vigorously anti-Arian bishop of Beroea (Aleppo) in Syria.[506] Early in 325, shortly before the Council of Nicaea, a provincial council of fifty-nine Oriental bishops met at Antioch, whose bishop, Philogonius, had died in 324[507]. The council was presided over by Ossius of Cordova, at that time Constantine’s theological advisor. This council met to fill the vacancy in the Patriarchal See of Antioch left by the death of the Patriarch Philogonus, and to formulate a credal statement condemning Arianism. Three of its members, Theodotus of Laodicea, Narcissus of Neronia, and Eusebius of Caesarea, refused to sign the creed, and were provisιonally excommunicated.[508] The council then chose Eustathius of Beroea to succeed to the patriarchal See of Antioch. This promotion of a well known anti-Arian bishop, which consolidated the opposition of the strategic See of Antioch to Arianism, had Constantine’s approval. It is not incidental that Ossius of Cordoba was then Constantine’s theological advisor, nor that he ceased to be soon after the close of the Council of Nicaea, having been replaced in that role by Eusebius of Nicomedia.
At that time, Eusebius of Caesarea was well established as the leading scholar in Syria, at once the author of the Ecclesiastical History, and the best-informed commentator upon the works of Origen, for, as the bishop of Caesarea since about 313, he had Origen’s library at Caesarea at his disposal, and made himself familiar with it. However he was unable to accept Origen’s doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, for it contradicted his own subordinationism, and the monophysite Christology which he held in common with Arius and his followers, including his namesake, Eusebius of Nicomedia, the court bishop who, under Constantine, would follow Constantine from Nicomedia to Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, when he moved his capital in 430.
The attempt of the two Eusebii to vindicate the cosmological subordination of the Son to the Father at the Council of Nicaea, shortly after the provincial council of Antioch had condemned Eusebius of Caesarea’s adherence to that heresy, failed utterly and with it, as Kelly has shown, failed also the rehabilitation of Eusebius of Caesarea, whose earlier earlier condemnation by the Council of Antioch had left him without authority at Nicaea. At the Council of Nicaea, Eustathius, as the Patriarch of Antioch, the major See in Syria, could not but be a major figure at the Council; J. N. D. Kelly suggests that he may have chaired the Council’s proceedings[509]; He was at any rate one of the five major anti-Arian bishops, the others being Alexander of Alexandria, (together with his deacon, Athanasius), Marcellus of Ancyra, Ossius of Cordoba, and Macarius of Jerusalem.
Scandalized by an Arian creed proposed by Eusebius of Nicomedia, the conservative bishops of the Council rallied to the support of these anti-Arian stalwarts. They soon discovered the necessity of going beyond the customary reliance upon Scripture to frame their condemnation of Arianism, and found in the assertion that Jesus the Son is of the same divine substance as the Father, homoousios with him, a formula around which the anti-Arians could rally, for it had already been refused by Arius and his followers, particularly in a letter from Arius to Alexander some time before the Council met. This doctrine, at once Christological and Trinitarian, remains foundational for the Magisterial confirmation of the apostolic preaching that Jesus Christ is the Lord.
Eustathius was particularly intent, at the Council and thereafter, upon upholding the Nicene doctrine of the substantial unity, mia ousia, of the Trinity. This directly contradicted Eusebius’ subordinationist interpretation of Origen’s use of the “mia ousia” to affirm the apostolic tradition of the unity of the Trinity. Eusebius of Caesarea had already found Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine of one divine substance comprising three divine hypostases radically incompatible with the cosmological necessity that the divine unity be a transcendent Self, a Monas. He held this conviceion in common with the Arians. On these grounds he could not but deny, as did the Arians, the divinity of the Son, thereby denying his eternity. Eusebius’ failure to persuade the Council of Nicaea that the Trinitarian “three hypostases” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are incompatible with the substantial unity of the Trinity (mia ousia , mia hypostasis) did not shake his confidence in the cosmological rationality which demanded the subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the divine Monas with whom he and the Arians identified the Father.
Within the dozen years of life left to him after recovering the favor of Constantine, with the powerful support of the court bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia and therefore with the support of Constantine himself, Eusebius of Caesarea was able o persuade the bulk of the Oriental bishops that the Council of Nicaea was in heresy and that its defenders were Sabellians.
Constantine’s decision to support the Eusebian resurgence of Arianism was probably influenced by his half-sister Constantia, Licinus’ widow and a convinced Arian, who had protected Eusebius of Nicomedia from the political consequences of his early association with Licinus, the last opponent of Constantine’s imperial ambition, whom Constantine executed in 324. His interest in the Council of Nicaea was not simply doctrinal; he wished also to resolve the doctrinal division between the Arianizing bishops and their opponents, and expected this result from the Council. To this end he immediately deposed those bishops who refused its doctrine. Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia, although condemned by the Council and deposed by Constantine in consequence, were soon able to persuade their emperor that the religious unity of the empire which he sought would be possible only by the rehabilitation of Arius, whose condemnation (and theirs) they persuaded Constantine to regard as serious mistakes inasmuch as, instead of achieving the goal of imperial unity, it guaranteed an ongoing dissent. Constantine was easily persuaded. To achieve this end of religious unity in the empire, certainly his main goal in calling the Council of Nicaea in the first place, Constantine sent a message to Athanasius, who in 328 had succeded Alexander to the See of Alexandria. urging him to accept Arius as an orthodox member of the Church of Alexandria. Athanasius refused, and lost Constantine’s favor thereby, albeit not entirely, for Constantine refused to depose him after his condemnation by the Council of Tyre when Athanasius appealed to him from that decision.
It may be noted here, as Hanson fails to do[510], that at the Council of Tyre (335) Athanasius was charged with crimes, not with heresy. Consequently his appeal to Constantine was not a recognition of Constantine’s ecclesial authority comparable to that of his Eusebian opponents, as Hanson presumes. Athanasius was the first to distinguish the unquestioned political authority of Constantine from the ecclesial authority which he and his imperial successors entirely lacked, but continually attempted to usurp.
From about 327-328, perhaps as early as 326, the two Eusebii had Constantine’s at least tacit approval to punish those bishops who had defeated them at Nicaea, first and foremost Marcellus of Ancyra and Eustathius of Antioch. Within three years after the Council of Nicaea, the two Eusebii convened a provincial council at Antioch which condemned, as Sabellian, Eustathius’ loyalty to the Nicene definition of the substantial unity of the Trinity. The indictment was garnished with a charge of adultery, an accusation revelatory of the character of the judges of Eustathius rather than that of their victim. However, Constantine accepted the accusation as though substantiated; he deposed Eustathius and exiled him to Thrace. It appears that Eustathius died there prior to 337, for he failed to return to his See in that year, when the death of Constantine permitted his eldest son, Constantine II, the Western Augustus, to annul the exiles of pro-Nicene bishops which his father had imposed after their deposition by the Eusebian councils between ca. 326 and his own death in 337.
According to Photius’ condensation of the Arian church historian Philostorgius’ History of the Church, which otherwise exists only in fragments, Philostorgius reports that at his trial Eustathius was convicted of adultery.[511] He does not mention Eusebian indictment of Eustathius as a Sabellian heretic. Curiously, neither does Theodoret, whose countervailing account of the trial and condemnation of Eustathius exculpates him from the charge of adultery[512]. There Theodoret defends the honor of Eustathius, and reveals the iniquity which underlay the accusation of adultery, but makes no mention of the charge of Sabellianism, agreeing with Philostorgius that Constantine, persuaded that Eustathius’ was guilty of adultery, deposed him for that reason.
Hanson notes the indecision of the “ancient authorities” over the reason for Eusebius’ trial, conviction, and deposition, but proceeds to affirm what is on other grounds evident;
The real motive was of course his championing of the Nicene formula and his opposition to those who disliked it and theology it seemed to represent, which is mentioned several times by historians.15
15. Socrates HE I, 23, 24 (though Socrates is quite wrong in saying here (23) that Eustathius taught three hypostases); VI.13; Sozomenus HE II.19.1; cf. Athanasius, Hist. Arian. 4.
Hanson, Search, 210-11. The authorities mentioned would include Philostorgius and Theodoret, ut supra. Hanson’s judgement on this point is confirmed by Jean Bouffartigue.[513]
Further in support of Eustathius adherence to Nicene orthodoxy, it is passing odd that the Eustathians, under the priest Paulinus, who were thus designated by reason of their unflagging loyalty to Eustathius, knew nothing of his supposed departure from “the old tradition.” They knew that it was precisely for loyalty to the Nicene Creed that the Arian bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and his collaborator, Eusebius of Caesarea, had condemned him as a Sabellian, and they refused to recognize−and in fact condemned as usurpers−the Arians and anti-Nicene homoean and homoiousian bishops appointed as his successors to the See of Antioch. Had Eustathius recanted, they would have been the first to be informed. In fact, they refused to accept the authority of even the pro-Nicene bishop of Antioch until early in the next century, and only then made available to scholars their collection of Eustathius’ literary heritage. Among the earliest of the texts exploited were those collected in anti-Nestorian and pro-Monophysite florilegia. In short, the library of Eustathius’writings which the Eustathians handed over to the community at Antioch was explored for parti pris theological ends, not least, as Spanneut records, by Theodoret.[514]
Eustathius, while bishop of Beroea, had anticipated the condemnation of Arius and displayed an unrelenting opposition to Arianism. Promoted to the See of Antioch for that reason by a Council of Antioch, called by Ossius of Cordoba, momentarily Constantine’s theological adviser, he was a leading figure at the Council of Nicaea. After it closed, he continued to uphold the Conciliar definition of the substantial unity of the Triune God, and its corollary, the condemnation of Arius and Arianism. His unflinching commitment to the “mia ousia , mia hypostasis” of the Trinity, taught by Nicene Creed, led to his condemnation as Sabellian by a resurgent Arianism, and to his deposition, exile and death.
Athanasius, on a visit to Antioch in 346, while returning from his second exile, had recognized the Nicene orthodoxy of the anti-Arian “Eustathians,” and did so again in his Tome to the Antiochenes in 362. On his last visit to Antioch, in 363, he recognized as valid the “irregular” consecration by Lucifer of Cagliari a year earlier of the long-time leader of the Eustathians, the priest Paulinus, Athanasius had acccepted the two delegates whom Paulinus, then only a priest, had sent to the Council of Alexandria in 362; both had signed that Council’s Tome to the Antiochenes. The Eustathians knew nothing of any conversion of their revered Bishop Eustathius from the faith of Nicaea to an anti-Nicene diophysism. His “mia ousia” was precisely defensive of and indissociable from the Nicene Creed’s affirmation of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord. One of the fragments embarrassing the diophysite interpretation of Eustathius’ writings is his ascription of ‘Theotokos to our Lady. In another fragment, he refers to the crucifixion of the Word.[515] At bottom, his theology is historical, which is to say, Nicene.
We have seen that Eustathius’ post-Nicene Christology is confused by the cosmological notion of God as Absolute, as immobile, as unchanging, as immune to the mutabilities of history, quite as the Christology set out by Origen in the Peri Archon had on occasion been confused a century earlier. This confusion led Eustathius, as it had led Origen, to affirm, over and again, the divine Son’s immunity from the redemptive suffering and death of Jesus. Only occasionally, insofar as the remaining fragments of his writings inform us, does he remember the incongruity of this dissociation with the flat affirmation by Creed of Nicaea of the Church’s faith that it is Jesus who is the Lord. A century later, we find Theodoret sharing this confusion, for he too, equally intent upon the immutability of the Son, nonetheless intends to uphold the faith of Nicaea.
The Nicene anathematization of the Arian reduction of the Son to a creaturely status fully supports the conviction of the devoutly anti-Arian Eustathius that the Son must be immutable. Eustathius, from the outset, was an ardent upholder of the apostolic tradition. Athanasius records his stand ing as a confessor, a man who suffered for the faith during the Diocletian persecution. As the implacably anti-Arian bishop of Beroea well before the Council of Nicaea, this doctrinal intransigency had won Eustathius promotion to the See once held by Peter, and by Ignatius Martyr, its second bishop. He used its authority to indict Eusebius of Caesarea, the most influential supporter of the Arian heresy in his patriarachate. As a senior bishop at the Council of Nicaea he continued his defense of the apostolic tradition, and saw to the condemnation of Arianism as such.
On the other hand, there is no evidence that Eustathius was a systematic thinker.[516] His antipathy to Origen was rather visceral than reasoned. At Nicaea he simply melded the Nicene Creed with his literal reading of the condemnations of Arius in order to support his denial of mutability to the Son and found in that no incongruity, as Theodoret would not: both clung to the faith of Nicaea. He insisted over and again on the dehistoricization of the Son in what has been considered his post-Nicene phase, but quite evidently intended at the same time to maintain the faith of the Council of Nicaea, that Jesus Christ is Lord. He had been a leading figure at the Council, to whose defense against Arius of the full divinity of Jesus the Christ he certainly subscribed.
Finally it is necessary to examine the evidence adduced by Theodoret’s collection of fragments to confirm a post-Nicene conversion of Eustathius to diophysism. The authenticity of the fragments has been warranted by Spanneut’s Recherches sur les écrits d’Eustathe d’Antioch and, a quarter century later, by Gérard Ettlinger’s critical edition of the Eranistes (Theodoret of Cyrus. Eranistes). It is the selection of these fragments, and their interpretation that may be examined. Spanneut, in the excerpt supra, has spoken to both of these issues. Together, they permit no apodictic relegation of Eustathius’ Christology to any parti pris position.
Theodoret’s interpretation of these fragments relies, in sum, upon a begging of the question. He reads his own diophysism into any affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus, which reading itself relies upon his supposition that the subject of the Incarnation is the ‘immanent Logos. This had become a universal postulate among the Oriental theologians by the mid-fifth century when Theodoret composed the Eranistes. Early in the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea had persuaded all of the Oriental bishops, apart from Athanasius and Marcellus, to dismiss the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea in favor of the supposedly universal authority of the emperor. The summoning of the First Council of Constantinople by the pro-Nicene Elmperor Theodosius wrote finis to the imperial support indispensable to the Eusebian dissent to the Nicene Creed, for it had rejected a priori the only alternative authority, that of the Church, first exercised ecumenically, i.e., universally, at Nicaea.
Eusebius of Caesarea’s demolition of Origen’s theology in favor of cosmological rationality trumphed over the apostolic tradition during the half-century between the deposition of Eustathius and the First Council of Constantinople. With that rejection of the authority of the historical Church, Oriental theology became Eusebian, which is to say, cosmological qua tale. The subject of the Incarnation, Jesus the Lord, was dehistoricized as a rational; necessity, for the Monas, the cosmological divinity, is immune to history; therefore, history cannot mediate the divine.
By the middle of the fifth century neither the Alexandrines nor the Antiochenes were able to accept the Ephesian Formula of Union, as their successors would be unable to accept its reaffirmation by the Symbol of Chalcedon. It would have been unthinkable for Theodoret to have understood Eustathius otherwise than as he did, for the sole alternative would have been to read into those fragments an impossible monophysism. Cosmology cannot permit the historical development whether of doctrine or of theology: its dehistoricization project rules out any intelligible future. This cosmological dismissal of the faith of Nicaea precluded any interest in the historical question, viz., whether the fragments witnessing to the post-Nicene Christology of Eustathius of Antioch were compatible with his subscription to the Nicene Creed. When the Council closed, Eustathius had at most five years in which to write before his trial, conviction, deposition and exile. The dominant anti-Arian tonality of the remaining fragments of his work accord with Spanneut’s refusal to consider Eustathius a diophysite.‘
Grillmeier’s Thomist Christology assumes the divine Son, sensu negante, to be the subject of the Incarnation; His dehistoricizing of the Incarnation, of the “logos sarx egeneto,” dehistoricizes the Event to which the historicity of “sarx” is indispensable. The historical Logos, Jesus the Lord, becomes flesh; he does not “assume flesh,” whatever that might mean. Consequently, Grillmeier suppposes the “sarx” (flesh) of the Logos-sarx formula to be the equivalent of “soma,” (unsouled body) on which ground he denied to Athanasius any theological recognition of the soul of Christ: “His Christ is only Logos and sarx.” (op, cit., I, 310). It is on the basis of this petitio principii that he criticizes Athanasius’ Christology for having given no place for the soul of Christ Neither does he consider that Eustathius, like Athanasius, understood “soma” historically, thus to be the equivalent of “sarx,” which in Jn. 1:14, as elsewhere in the New Testament, denotes the Personal unity of the Name, the Word, the Christ, who did not assume flesh but became flesh.
Grillmeier’s supposition that the ‘immanent Logos” is the subject of the Incarnation transposes the inexhaustible mystery of the faith into a flat contradiction in terms, incapable of supporting the quaerens intellectum inseparable from the apostolic faith that Jesus Christ is Lord. The Nicene Creed does not attempt to explain the Mysterium fidei; it simply affirms that Jesus is the Lord. Grillmeier labels this the “older tradition,” defined at Nicaea, from which Eustathius, according to Theodoret, is thought to have been converted to the diophysism typifying the Antiochene tradition that Theodoret defends in the Eranistes against the monophysism of Dioscorus who then, in 348, was about to call the “Robber Council” of Alexandria.
Only by rejecting the Nicene Creed for loyalty to which he had been condemned by Eusebius of Caesarea could Eustathius be the source of the anti-Nicene diophysite tradition. Its major defender, Diodore, whose Christology Grillmeier believes to have remained in the Logos-sarx format (op. cit., I, 356), was a homoiousian, a Eusebian loyal to Meletius of Antioch rather than to the faith taught at Nicaea. His naïve dehistoricization both of the “logos” and the “sarx’ of the Johannine “logos sarx egeneto” issued finally in the denial by Nestorius of the divinity of Jesus the Christ, for which he would be condemned by the Council of Ephesus. The defense by the Council of Nicaea of the Church’s faith in the divinity of Jesus the Christ focused upon the Arian denial of his divinity by the ascription of a “beginning” to the Son, and the consequent assigning to him of a mutable creaturely standing. This focus upon the most signal element of the Arian heresy, the denial of the Son’s divinity, was entirely proper to the office of the Conciliar fathers, simply upholding the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord.
If Eustathius was not the first, then he was among the first, to perceive the heretical corollary of the Arian denial of the divinity of the Christ: viz., the denial of his full humanity, in which the Arian “logos” became the “ruling principle” or hegemonikon of Jesus’ humanity, displacing his human soul. Arius understood Jesus to be preserved from sin precisely by his lack of a human soul, As already noted, the supposition that Eustathius’ opposition to the Arian monophysism, and his insistence upon the full humanity of the Christ, led him to depart from the “older tradition” defended and defined at Nicaea and, following that defection, then to proceed to dehistoricize the subject of the Incarnation, transforming Jesus the Christ into the “immanent Logos,” makes no sense at all. He was certainly confused, as Origen before him and Theodoret after him, but confusion is not infidelity to the faith of Nicaea.
Spanneut’s study of the fragments which are all that remain of Eustathius’ Christological works is of particular interest, for the most reliable and pertinent fragments are those warranted by Theodoret of Cyr’s citation of them in his Eranistes to support his own diophysite Christology. Theodoret’s authority is such as to have persuaded most patristic scholars to accept his interpretation of Eustathius’ Christology as diophysite. However, as J.N.D. Kelly’s reference to Spanneut has pointed out, this interpretation is inapplicable to the identifiably pre-Nicene fragments of Eustathius’ works. The concluding paragraphs of Spanneut’s commentary on Eustathius are instructive:
Nous avons ainsi examiné l’héritage eustathien, d’après la qualité de ses témoins et la nature de son contenu. En ce travaille difficile, nous avons laissé une large part à l’hypothèse, mais c’est là le premier pas de la science. Nous nous croyons donc autorisé à présenter au lecteur l’œuvre de lévêque d’Antioch dans une édition nouvelle.
Mieux que nos discussions de détail, elle montre la varieté de l’œuvre Eustathienne. Les écrits sont d’abord sans rapport avec l’actualité. Ils deviennent ensuite des machines de guerre contre l’héresie. Les idées, malgré le choix partial des florilèges, sont diverses, et les considérer toutes systématiquement comme coulées dans le même moule, le moule antriochien par exemple, c’est une grave erreur. Une étude approfondie de la doctrine de Eustathe doit tenir compte des différentes aspects de cette personnalité forte et vivante.
Spanneut, Recherches, 94.
While Hanson mentions the indecision of the “ancient authorities” over the reason for Eusebius’ deposition, authorities who may be supposed to include Philostorgius and Theodoret, ut infra, he accepts what is otherwise evident, that the real motive of Eustathius’ persecutors, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea, was:
of course his championing of the Nicene formula and his opposition to those who disliked it and theology it seemed to represent, which is mentioned several times by historians.15
15 Socrates HE I, 23, 24 (though Socrates is quite wrong in saying here (23) that Eustathius taught three hypostases); VI.13; Sozomenus HE II.19.1; cf. Athanasius Hist. Arian. 4.
Hanson, Search, 210-11. Thus also The Oxford Dictionary of The Christian Church (2005) s.v., 579B.
The council at Antioch had convicted Eusebius of Caesarea provisionally for his Arian proclivities, but left the final decision in the hands of the Council of Nicaea, which met a month or two later. There, as the Patriarch of Antioch, Eustathius was a one of the senior anti-Arian bishops, together with Marcellus of Ancyra, Alexander of Alexandria, Ossius of Cordoba, and Macarius of Jerusalem, whose condemnation of the Arian denial of the divinity of the Son carried the day at the Council of Nicaea, and assured approval of the pre-conciliar condemnation of Eusebius of Caesarea.
Eustathius was particularly eloquent, at the Council and thereafter, in upholding its doctrine of the substantial unity, mia ousia, of the Trinity, which directly contradicted Eusebius’ subordinationist interpretation of Origen’s orthodox use of “mia ousia” to affirm the unity of the Trinity. Eusebius had found Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine of one substance comprising three hypostases entirely incompatible with the cosmological convictions which he held in common with Arius, to the point of denying the eternity of the Son, and thereby his divinity. At the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius persisted in his insistence upon the subordination of the Son to the Father but failed to persuade the Council, which condemned him for his quasi-Arianism.
Nonetheless, soon restored to favor by Constantine, probably by the influence of Constantine’s half-sister Constantia, a convinced Arian, Eusebius and his close ally, Eusebius of Nicomedia, sought revenge upon those who had defeated them at Nicaea, notably Marcellus of Ancyra and Eustathius. Within less than five years after the Council, the two Eusebii, of Nicomedia and of Caesarea, convened a council at Antioch which condemned as Sabellian Eustathius’ loyalty to the Nicene definition of the substantial unity of the Trinity. The indictment was garnished by a charge of adultery, an accusation revelatory rather of the character of the judges of Eustathius than that of their victim. Accepting it as true, Constantine deposed and exiled Eustathius, who died in exile abut 337.
According to Photius,[517] the Arian historian Philostorgius records that at his trial Eustathius was charged with adultery. Photius’ condensation of Philostorgius’ History of the Church, a work otherwise in fragments, does not mention Eustathius’ indictment as a Sabellian heretic; neither, curiously, does Theodoret, whose countervailing account of the trial and condemnation of Eustathius exculpates him.[518]. There Theodoret defends the honor of Eustathius, and reveals the iniquity which underlay it, but makes no mention of an accusation of Sabellianism, agreeing with Philostorgius that Constantine, persuaded that Eustathius was an adulterer, deposed him for that reason.[519]
Further in support of Eustathius’ Nicene orthodoxy, it is passing odd that the Eustathians, under Paulinus, who were thus designated by reason of their unflagging loyalty to to Eustathius, knew nothing of his supposed departure from “the old tradition.” They knew that it was precisely for loyalty to the Nicene Creed that the Arian bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and the Arian sympathizer, Eusebius of Caesarea, had condemned him as a Sabellian, and they refused to recognize the Arians appointed as his successors to the See of Antioch. Had he recanted, they would have been the first to be informed.
During his years as the Bishop of Beroea, Eustathius had anticipated the condemnation of Arianism and continued his unrelenting opposition to its heresy, to the point that when, early in 325, 59 Syrian bishops met in Antioch to select a successor to that Patriarchal See, the selected Eustathius, clearly in approval of his hatred of Arianism. Once appointed, with the approval of all but three of rhe fifty-nine bishops assembled at the Council of Antioch, Eustathius, as already a senior bishop, and now the Patriarch of Antioch, he approved the condemnation of the three dissident bishops, one of whom was Eusebius of Caesarea. This condemnation was provisional, awaiting confirmation by the Council of Nicaea. Attending the Council of Nicaea as senior both in age and in rank, Eustathius vigorously urged the condemnation of Arius and Arianism; he continued so to do after the Council of Nicaea closed. Condemned as a Sabellian by an anti-Nicene conspiracy ca. 327-330, he died in exile, probably within the year.
It is evident that Eustathius theology is confused by his commonplace uncritical subscription to the cosmological notion of the impassibility of what is divine, insisting over and again upon the Son’s immunity to and dissociation from the redemptive suffering and death of Jesus. Only rarely does he remember the incompatibility with his loyalty to the Nicene Creed with this dissociation of the humanity from the divinity of the Christ. The Creed’s flat affirmation of the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord has as its corollary the communication of idioms, of Names, as Origen has it. A century later, we find Theodoret sharing this confusion; he too, however intent upon the immutability of the Son, understood his own diophysism to be at one with the faith of Nicaea.
Finally, as Spanneut has shown, the evidence adduced by Theodoret’s collection of fragments does not support a post-Nicene conversion of Eustathius to diophysism. The authenticity of the fragments has been warranted by Spanneut’s Recherches sur les écrits d’Eustathe d’Antioch and, a quarter century later, by Gérard Ettlinger’s critical edition of the Eranistes [520] It is Theodoret’s selection and interpretation of them that may be questioned. Spanneut has spoken to their authenticity and their interpretation as definitively as scholarship permits. He has concluded that is not possible to label Eustathius a diophysite, a proto-Nestorian.
Eusebius of Caesarea’s imposition of cosmological subordinationism upon the Origen’s historical theology triumphed over the historical apostolic tradition during the half-century between the deposition of Eustathius and the First Council of Constantinople. With the demolition of the apostolic Christology of the Peri Archon, Oriental theology became Eusebian, which is to say, cosmological qua tale. By the middle of the fifth century neither the Alexandrines nor the Antiochenes were able to accept the Ephesian Formula of Union, as two decades later their successors would be unable to accept its reaffirmation in the Symbol of Chalcedon.
Despite Theodoret’s probable authorship of the Formula of Union,[521] it would have been unthinkable for him to have understood Eustathius otherwise than as he did, for the sole alternative would have been to read into those fragments the impossible monophysism he found in Cyril and Dioscorus. Theodoret’s reading of these carefully selected fragments relies, in sum, upon a cosmological error which troubled third and fourth century theology in the Orient, and which in the fifth century controlled Christological speculation as such: viz., the a priori impossibility of the communication of divine and human idioms in Jesus the Christ. Theodoret reads his diophysism into any affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus, in full reliance upon his uncritical supposition that the subject of the Incarnation is the ‘immanent Logos,’ not Jesus the Lord This postulate had been universally accepted by the Oriental theologians when Theodoret composed the Eranistes in 347. Early in the fourth century, as been seen, Eusebius of Caesarea had been able to persuade all of the Oriental bishops to dismiss the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea in favor of political authority of the emperor, apart from Athanasius and the survivors of those bishops allied with him at the Council of Nicaea, notably Eustathius and Marcellus: Ossius had returned to Cordoba, shortly after the Council and remained there until 343, when he attended the Council of Serdica.
This reliance upon imperial support, indispensable to the Eusebian dissent, failed with the calling of I Constantinople by the pro-Nicene Emperor Theodosius. However, the correlative cosmological consciousness which that dissent had inculcated so infected the fifth century Oriental theological speculation, whether Antiochene or Alexandrine, as to paralyze it. Twice condemned, at Ephesus and Chalcedon, it still dominates the Orient, and has provided the first major Christian heresy in the West. Berengarius’ naive application of the binary “new logic” to the Eucharistic Institution Narrative was promptly dealt with on the level of doctrine through an impressive development of Eucharistic theology over the course of sixty-five years, resting upon the insistence by Paschasius Radbertus’ defense of the literal truth of the Institution Narrative against a Carolingian use of the “new logic’ to defeat it. On that firm ninth-century foundation Lanfranc of Bec, Guitmond of Aversa, Alger of Liège and Gregory of Bergamo undertook the explanation of the “essential” (Lanfranc’s usage) and then the “substantial” (Alger’s refinement of Lanfranc’s “essential”) truth of the Eucharistic Words of Institution. Their conclusion of the “substantial” Presence of Christ in the Eucharist prepared the way for the doctrine of Eucharistic “transubstantiation” firmly in place by the middle of the twelfth century; it entered the doctrinal tradition in 1215 by way of the Fourth Lateran Council summoned by Innocent III, and was solemnly defined by the Council of Trent.
Unfortunately, this doctrinal development by senior bishops inspired by their apostolic responsibility for the liturgical tradition was countered by scholars whose devotion to the “new logic” was inspired by Roscelin’s nominalism by way of Abelard (Roscelin’s student, later his critic), a brilliant critic of conservative upholders of sacramental realism, notably Anselm of Laon and his student, William of Champeaux, who founded the Abbey of St. Victor and taught Abelard, only to be savaged by him for his philosophical realism. Joined by members of the monastic community of the Victorines, Abelard’s brilliant dialectic prompted a renewal of the Eleatic rationalism that dehistoricized whatever it touched and which, from the twelfth century, had a destructive impact upon Latin theology.
The cosmological consciousness underlying the Eusebian dismissal of the faith of Nicaea precluded any interest in the historical question, viz., whether the fragments witnessing to the post-Nicene Christology of Eustathius of Antioch were compatible with his subscription to the Nicene Creed. In any event, Eustathius was in no position to pursue this interest. He had at best three years after the Council, and perhaps as little as a single year, in which to do so before the two Eusebii summoned the Council in Antioch which tried him for Sabellianism and for adultery, convicted him, and saw to his deposition and exile by Constantine. The Eusebii had been able to persuade Constantine of the truth of the charge of adultery and so justice of the conviction, whereupon he deposed Eustathius from his See of Antioch, and exiled him to Trajanopolis in Thrace, where he died, probably before 337. His Nicene orthodoxy was never doubted by the pro-Nicene people of Antioch, who refused, well into the fifth century, to accept the anti-Nicene imperial appointees, Arian, homoean, and homoiousian, to the See of Antioch.
Whatever mey have inspired Constantine to accept the absurd verdict which persuaded him to depose Eustathius, Eustathius’ adversaries well knew that he had not abandoned the faith of Nicaea. Wth Athanasius, he upheld the substantial unity of the Trinity, and it is this that damned him in their eyes.
Diodore of Tarsus (d. 391) was born into an aristocratic Christian family in Antioch. He received a fine education at Athens, and became a monk shortly after returning to Syria. He soon was chosen to be the head of a monastery in or near Antioch, where he and Flavian, another scion of the nobility who had abandoned his wealth to become a monk, were sufficiently at ease with Leontius, the Arian bishop of Antioch, to be in communion with him. Upon Leontius’s ordination of the neo-Arian, Aetius, to the diaconate, Diodore threatened to sever that unity. Aetius was already well known as a radical Arian, and later was famous for insisting upon the “hetero-ousian” doctrine implicit in the Arian denial of the divinity of the Son. Leontius took Diodore’s threat seriously enough to deprive Aetius of all ecclesial functions.
However, even at that time, between 348 and 357, Diodore had no sympathy with the Eustathian party’s refusal to recognize an Arian imposition of an anti-Nicene bishop upon the ancient patriarchal diocese of Antioch. Decades later, at the First Council of Constantinople, Diodore was able to block Gregory of Nazianzen’s nomination of Paulinus to succeed Meletius─who, perhaps on the basis of having displeased Emperor Constantius, had been chosen to preside over the First Council of Constantinople, but died before taking office─and to substitute for Paulinus his old friend, Flavian. In this, he had the support of Gregory of Nyssa, equally dismissive of the authority of the Council of Nicaea. Emperor Theodosius appointed Gregory of Nazianzen to replace Meletius..
As the superior of the Antiochene monastery, Diodore revived in it the school of literal exegesis founded by Lucian of Antioch, who may have been the Lucian honored for his martyrdom in 315; if so, he is the incongruous mentor of the self-styled “Collucianists,” among whom are Arius, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and Leontius. By his direction of his revived School of Antioch, Diod\ore became a major contributor to its tradition of a literal hermeneutic, in opposition to the allegorical reading of the biblical text initiated by Philo in the first century, taken up by Origen in the third, and thereafter associated with the School of Alexandria, notably as represented by Alexander and Athanasius. While their exegetical differences were probably philosophical at the outset, for: the Alexandrine tradition, beginning with Philo, had been Platonic; but as the School (didaskeileon) of Alexandria it received a Christian conversion. The role of Ammonius Saccas is here doubtful, but a reliable tradition has Pantaenus founding a Christian didaskeileon; he was succeeded as its director by Clement and, upon his departure by Origen, the second founder of the School of Alexandria, its most notable exegete and the first systematic theologian. Following Origen, the Alexandrine exegetical tradition, renewed by Didymus in the last half of the fourth century, is unwilling to concede to the literal sense of scripture a more than symbolic intelligibility, corresponding to the stress of Origen’s exegesis upon allegory.
On the other hand, the leading exegete of the School of Antioch, Theodore of Mopsuestia, a friend of St. John Chrysostom and the tutor of Nestorius, considered the goal of scriptural exegesis to be the discovery of the mind of the biblical author through the grammatical and linguistic analysis of his text, with a consequent literalism which, rigorously applied, would refuse Paul’s allegorical interpretation (Gal. 4:24) of the two “wives” of Abraham, the slave girl and the free woman, as symbolizing the distinction between the Old Covenant and the New. The Antiochene exegesis rarely allows the text of the Old Testament to refer to Jesus the Christ. Its methodological development, as a Christology, is clearly Aristotelian, and as clearly diophysite. Prior to Theodore, the Antiochene exegesis is best represented by Diodore, whose emphasis upon the full humanity of Christ was probably rather a defensive reaction to Apollinarius’ rationalization of Diodore’s Logos-sarx Christology than an attempt to construct a Logos-anthrōpos alternative, for earlier, under the teasing of Julian the Apostate, he had refused Julian’s inference of an implicit diophysism in his affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus the Lord.
It is the misfortune of the Antiochene exegesis to have accepted the strict linkage of the Aristotelian logic to the Aristotelian metaphysics. Specifically, this linkage imposes a monadic notion of substance, and consquently tends to a Trinitarian subordinationism and a diophysite Christology. The subordinationism will be more or less radical, depending on whether its logic is pushed, as by Aetius and Eunomius, or mitigated, as by homoiousians such as Diodore. The Antiochene Christology, under Aristotelian influence, tends to the Nestorian error, and consequently to a Christology “from below.” The alternative Alexandrine exegesis, under Platonic influence, tends to a monophysist merger of the divine and the human in Christ, and consequently to a Christology “from above.” Neither could accept the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord.
The perennial disagreement over the propriety of the alternative Christologies inherent in the Antiochene literalism and the Alexandrine allegorism is recognized by Benedict XVI’s two-volume study, Jesus of Nazareth. The dispute arises out of the cosmological impossibility and the historical actuality of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, with which academic exegesis is uncomfortable, now as then. Sixty years ago, while a member of the theological faculty of Woodstock College in Maryland, Fr. Gustave Weigel, S.J., displayed little interest in academic exegesis; he affirmed, over and again, the unique validity of the ecclesial exegesis, concrete in the ordinary liturgical preaching of the Church, confirmed by the ecumenical Councils, in which the bishops, in union with the Pope, exercise their plenary liturgical reponsibility for the Church’s worship in truth. Benedict XVI entirely agrees with Fr. Weigel.
Little remains of Diodore’s works apart from fragments, largely due to his post-mortem condemnatiion as a Nestorian, first by a council held in Constantinople in 499, and again by Emperor Justinian in 553. Nonetheless, if Quasten’s survey be accepted, he was “reckoned a pillar of orthodoxy during his own day.” [522] We may suppose that this “reckoning” of Diodore’s orthodoxy was limited to the Antiochene followers of Basil of Ancyra, whose subordinationist “homoiousian” Trinitarian doctrine entailed a rejection of the Nicene “homoousion” together with its corollaries, the unqualified unity of the divine substance, the Trinity, and the communication of divine and human idioms in the Christ.
Certainly, the pro-Nicene Eustathians led by Paulinus would not have accepted the homoiousian corruption of the substantial unity, mia ousia, mia hypostasis, taught by the Council of Nicaea and adamantinely maintained by their hero, Eustathius, as after him by Athanasius. Diodore’s anti-Arianism would have earned no praise from the Arians and their sympathizers. That left the recognition of Diodore’s orthodoxy to the majority Meletian party, whose homoiousian interest was rather Trinitarian than Christological, although its subordinationism entailed a denial of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, [523]
Despite the homoiousian confusion corrupting his Trinitarian doctrine, Diodore was a dedicated anti-Arian. He defended the divinity of Jesus against the mockery of Julian the Apostate during the latter’s residence in Antioch in 362-63, against the accusation that he taught a “two Son’s” Christology. The charge was unjust, but Diodore’s inability clearly to distinguish the full humanity he attributed to Jesus from the full humanity of a human person finally led to his post-mortem condemnations as Nestorian.
Diodore recognied Meletius as the bishop of Antioch despite the doubtful orthodoxy of his appointment to that See by the Arian or Arianizing palatine bishops, Eudoxius of Constantinople and Acacius of Caesarea. In recognizing Meletius, Diodore merely continued his early opposition to the Eustathian party under Paulinus, whose unyielding thirty-year commitment to the Nicene assertion of the “mia hypostasis” of the Trinity he rejected out of hand as Sabellian, Diodore was loyal to the homoiousian doctrine of the Meletians.
Meletius returned to Antioch from exile in 362, ousting in doing so the Arian pretender Ozoious from See of Antioch.. In 363 he called the Council of Antioch, which attempted to mask the subordinationism of the homoiousian account of the divinity of the Son by asserting its equivalence with the doctrine of Nicaea.[524] It is only on this basis, i.e., his support of this corruption of the Personal homoousios of the Son with the Father, as defined at Nicaea, that Diodore and Meletius can be labeled pro-Nicene. Neither ever accepted the Nicene Creed, nor is it likely that either understood it.
Diodore’s reputation for learning and preaching, and his commitment to the homoiousian doctrine of Basil of Ancyra, made him an influential member of the Meletian party, those Antiochenes who gathered at “the Old” (church) to worship in communion with Meletius, whose members Athanasius intended to be the audience of his Tome to the Antiochenes. The consecration of Paulinus by Lucifer of Cagliari, with its implication that he rather than Meletius was the authentic bishop of Antioch, would have particularly offended Diodore. It is easy to understand that Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes could find no audience in the homoiousians in Antioch, and could receive from them no reply.
In 378, nearly twenty years later, Meletius finally appointed Diodore the bishop of his suffragan See of Tarsus. Three years later, at the First Council of Constantinople, with the support of Gregory of Nyssa, he defeated the efforts of Gregory of Nazianzen to include the definition of the homoousion of the Holy Spirit in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. He was also instrumental in defeating Gregory of Nazianzen’s effort to persuade the Council to appoint Paulinus, the pro-Nicene bishop of Antioch who had been deposed by Constantius, to succeed Meletius to the See of Antioch. Meletius had died soon after convoking the Council as its president; Emperor Theodosius selected the pro-Nicene Gregory of Nazianzen to succeed Meletius in that office. His defense of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son of course challenged the anti-Nicene homoiousianism of Diodore and Gregory of Nyssa/ In close alliance, they were able to defeat his projects: Diodore was able to promote his old friend Flavian to succeed Meletius at Antioch rather than Paulinus, and under his influence the Council Fathers refused to affirm the homoousion of the Holy Spirit, contenting themselves with affirming his divinity.
By about 350, Diodore had dropped the one of the implications of his Logos sarx vocabulary, the denial of the full humanity of the Christ, in favor of what appeared to be a diophysite Christology. It is curious that Diodore’s insistence upon Jesus’ full humanity did not inspire him to understand that this emphasis must humanize the Logos, for he continued to theologize on the Logos-sarx basis. He never accepted the Logos-anthrōpos analysis, His affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus was a reaction to the Apollinarian heresy; only this radical development of the Logos-sarx Christology had led him to insist upon the full humanity of Christ.
In this connection, it is well to recognize the ambiguity of “Logos-sarx.” vocabulary These terms had been consecrated by John the Evangelist, whose Prologue asserts that “the Word became flesh: “logos sarx egeneto.” It is evident that from the first appearanace of “Logos” in the Prologue, i.e., Jn. 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word,” that the Gospel’s ascription of ”beginning: to the Word requires that the Evangelist understand “Logos” as a title of Jesus the Lord, and therefore understood “sarx egeneto” as the equivalent of “kenōsis” in Phil. 2:6-7, i.e., as designating the entry of the primordial Jesus the Lord into the condition of fallen humanity, “one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.like us in all save sin. (Hebrews 4:15; RSV)
However, the Gospel was preached to a pagan audience, whose cultural immersion in the middle-Platonic version of cosmological rationality prompted a spontaneous dehistoricization of the historical language of the New Testament and, most particularly, of the Prologue of the Gospel according to John.[525] “Logos” and “sarx” thereby became abstractions, deprived of their biblical-liturgical and consequently historical, reference to Jesus the Lord. “Logos” thus came to be understood to designate the eternal and therefore non-historical Son who, akin to the first divine emanation, became simply the second Person of the Trinity, subordinate to the Father. It is this cosmologized Logos who is then understood to be the subject of the Incarnation, the Logos sarx egeneto, while “sarx” was heard to refer to the dehistoricized humanity of the dehistoricized Son: i.e., his body, soma rather than flesh, and equally abstracted from the historical worship of the historical Church, whose object is Jesus Christ the Lord, not an ‘humanity’ whose association with the nonhistorical “immanent Logos” was immediately problematical. This dehistoricization of the Prologue, finally Gnostic, was overcome only with great difficulty. Due to largely to Tertullian’s defense of the apostlic tradition in the Apologeticus, it never gained much foothold in the Latin West, but despite the genius of Origen’s Christology and Trinitarian theology, the Eusebian subordinationism and consequent rejecttion of the communication of idioms infested the Greek and Syrian Orient until the Council of Chalcedon.
Once submitted to the imposition of cosmological rationality, the message of Jn. 1:14, “Logos sarx egeneto” became the affirmation that the Trinitarian-immanent eternal Son had become human in the exceedingly truncated sense in which an abstract divinity may be thought to relate to an abstract humanity. Arius had accepted this sense, in which his finite, quasi-angelic “logos” displaced the soul of Jesus, rendering him nonhistorical, thus incapable of sin, Forty years laer Apollinarius would uphold against Arius the full divinity of the Son but, like Arius, would make the Logos to be the ruling principle, the hegemonikon, of Jesus’ consequently unsouled humanity. Thus read, the Logos entered into a concrete composition with the soulless humanity of Jesus, constituting a single “theanthropic” nature or physis. This monophysite Christology, rejected first at the Council of Alexandria, notably by the Eustathian deacons sent there to represent Paulinus, was condemned twenty years later at I Constantinople by the homoousians and homoiousians alike. While Cyril’s early Christology understood the subject of the Incarnation to be the dehistoricized Logos, he dropped this notion in favor of what Jurgens has named the “Creed of Ephesus,” i.e., the Formula of Union, which taught the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousios of Jesus was with members of the human substance as well as the Members of the Trinity. With Cyril‘s death in 444, the monophysite refusal of the Personal humanity of Jesus was resumed by his successor, Dioscorus, assisted by an aged abbot, Eutyches, in the “Robber Council” of 349; but two years later, together with its diophysite counterpart, monophysism was rejected again, definitively, at the Council of Chalcedon which, following the Formula of Union, affirmed the full humanity as well as the full divinity of Jesus, “the one and the same Son.”
As had the Ephesian Formula of Union, the Symbol of Chalcedon rejected as well the Antiochene alternative of monophysism, the Logos-anthrōpos (Word-man) Christology the implication of the full humanity of Jesus the Christ left undeveloped by Diodore, who never abandoned the Logos-sarx point d’appui from which his original Christological speculation proceeded, with the unfortunate result that its subsequent Logos-anthrōpos development, like its Logos-sarx counterpart, is stymied by the same uncritical identification of the “Logos” with the Trinity-immanent and therefore non-historical Son. It followed that, whereas the Logos-sarx Christology is always threatened by a too strict association of the divinity with the humanity of Christ, the Logos-anthrōpos Christology is always troubled by their too loose association. Both dehistoricize the humanity and divinity of Jesus the Christ. This is obvious as to the Logos, while the “flesh” of Christ, whether presumed to be unensouled, in terms of “sarx” or ensouled in terms of “anthrōpos,” remains an abstraction, a nature, whether with or without a soul.
Each of these dehistoricized theologies, each invoking the opposition of the other, is rendered incapable of development by its dehistoricization of its subject, viz, the historicity, the Personal unity, of Jesus the Lord. In brief, each rejects the communication of divine and human Names, ”idioms,” in Jesus the Lord. Athanasius rejected both dehistoricizations of the Christ. He used the Logos-sarx vocabulary in stating his Christology, but interprêted it within the dogmatic context of the Nicene Creed, and the yet more basic liturgical context of the Apostolic Spirit Christology, which alone accords with the communication of idioms in Christ. As had Origen, he based his theology on the absolute unity of the Trinity, and the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, .and refused to negotiate either point of the Church’s faith.
Diodore was of an entirely other mind. His theology was basically goverrned by the Trinitarian subordinationism which Eusebius of Caesarea had taught most of the Orient to regard as the only alternataive to the Sabellianism he had ascribed to the Nicene affirmation of the Personal homoousion of the Son. For Eusebius and his followers, the sole alternative to the subordination of the Son to the Father, and thus to their substantial distinction, is their substantial identity.
Under that influence, Basil of Ancyra tried to counter the Eusebian subordination of the Son to the Father by affirming the Son to be “similar in essence” to the Father (homoios kat’ ousian). This similarity he understood as unique, applicable only to the Son, which left the divinity of the Holy Spirit without theological support or vindication. By the middle of the fourth century, the Arian unity had disintegrated. The homoiousian alternative (Epiphanius’s labelling of them as “Semi-Arians” had ample warrant) displaced the Logos-sarx Christological analysis which had until then provided theological vocabulary in most of the Orient, to adopt an alternative, the Logos-anthrōpos Christology first deployed by Diodore.
The dearth of textual evidence renders fragile any reconstruction of Diodore’s Christology. He never abandoned the Logos-sarx Christological analysis which he had accepted as a matter of course, but began to use an incongruous diophysite vocabulary sometime prior to his encounter with Julian. Both Kelly and Grillmeier doubt his subscription to the Word-man Christology which, following Theodoret of Cyr, they attribute to Eustathius.[526] Diodore followed Eustathius in affirming the full humanity of Christ, while continuing to think in terms of a Eusebian, i.e., cosmologized interpretation of the Logos-sarx of Jn. 1:14 wherein the supposedly pre-human Logos, not Jesus the Christ, is understood to be the subject of the Incarnation. In the first half of the fourth century, no other Christology was available.[527] As a follower of Basil of Ancyra, Diodore was out of sympathy with Paulinus’ pro-Nicene party, the so-called “Paulinians,” (not to be confused with the ‘Paulician’ followers of Paul of Samosata). He had further reason to opppse Paulinus and his Eustathians after Paulinus’ consecration by Lucifer of Cagliari. Like Basil of Caesarea, Diodore considered Meletius rather than Paulinus to be the authentic bishop of Antioch. Diodore’s entire agreement with the Eustathians insistence upon the full humanity of Christ, but this could not temper his entire opposition to them as pro-Nicene. On the other hand, he also condemned Apollinarius’ denial of that full humanity. The Emperor Julian, briefly in residence in Antioch, had in fact accused Diodore of holding a “two sons” Christology, which is to say, a proto-Nestorian distinction between Jesus, the human son of Mary and the Logos, the divine Son of the Father, Cyril of Alexandria would repeat that criticism in 428, lumping Diodore with Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius, but the charge is anachronistic. Diodore’s theological interest was mostly in exegesis; he lacked the metaphysical sophistication, the speculative interest, which would later distinguish between ‘person’ and ‘intellectual nature.” Tertullian had established this distinction for the Latin Christology, and his failure to provide it with a metaphysics did not trouble the Latin theologians, who had little metaphysical curiosity.
Diodore’s evident confusion on the humanity of Jesus invited Julian’s accusation. It was unjust, for Diodore’s stress on the difference between affirming the full humanity of Christ and affirming his distinction from the Logos as that of a personal human subject entailed neither a denial of Jesus’ divinity nor a “two sons’ Christology. No doubt there is a logical continuity between his Christology and its diophysite development by Nestorius, but between Diodore’s asseretion of t he full humanity of Jesus and its rhetorical exploitation by John Chrysostom, its explicit rationalization by Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Nestorius refusal to recognize the divinity of Jesus , there is a considerable gulf fixed. Theodore’s Aristotelian monism had long been latent in the Antiocene exegetical tradition, but it had not been taught by Diodore, whose opposition to Apollinarius was exegetically rather than systematically grounded.
It remains true that the diophysism implicit in Diodore’s Christology could not permit the dogmatically necessary distinctions between the humanity, the divinity, and the Person of Jesus the Christ, but Diodore’s diophysism remained undeveloped, whether by disinterest in speculative inquiry or by a failure to find a theological funcion for the soul which he insisted that Jesus must possess if he were to be human at all. Were it denied, as by Apollinarius, Jesus could not be the Lord, a Person at once human and divine. Diodore’s Christology was dogmatically grounded. It had no support in his homoiousian opposition to the Nicene Creed, but that did not trouble him. In sum, he intended to support the communication of divine and human idioms in Jesus the Lord. He was fully committed to the Church’s faith in the Lord Jesus and did not trouble himself over its cosmological impossibility: Theodore of Mopsuestia read his Aristotelian cosmology into the Catholic doctrinal tradition, and passed this doctrine on to Nestorius. It cannot be attributred to Diodore, who never denied, as Nestorius did, that Jesus is the Lord.
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Meletius had been chosen by the homoiousian majority of the Antiochene clergy to succeed Eustathius after the thirty years of Arian interregnum following Eustathius’ deposition. While Melitius was still in exile by reason of having insufficiently distanced himself from the Nicene Creed which, along with most of the rest of the Orient, he had earlier rejected, but now even with his homoiousian orthodoxy in doubt, his authority as bishop of Antioch was restored, ironically, by the impetuosity of the pro-Nicene Bishop Lucifer of Cagliari. Lucifer, a friend of Athanasius in exile for his support of the Nicene Creed, had chosen to bypass the Council of Alexandria as already in sympathy with its goals. He detached two deacons from his service to represent him at the Council, and then proceeded directly to Antioch while the Council of Alexandria was still in session, to aid in advance its effort, via the Tome to the Antiochenes, to restore Nicene orthodoxy in Antioch.
However, once arrived in Antioch, he perhaps imprudently but certainly regularly consecrated Paulinus, the leader of the pro-Nicene Eustathians, Antiochenes loyal to the long-since deposed Eustathius, to be the Bishop of Antioch. This elevation of Paulinus actualized beyond repair the schism already dividing the Eustathian pro-Nicene minority who supported Paulinus, from the homoiousian majority, whose long established opposition to the Nicene homoousion placed them in general sympathy with Meletius, whose Eusebian antecedents made it impossible for him either to affirm or deny a non-negotiable doctrine. Like all the disciples of Eusebius, he looked to the emperor for doctrinal decision. If not openly supporting his claim to the See of Antioch, the Homoiousian party was certainly in liturgical communion with him. Once his episcopal authority was put in issue by the consecration of Paulinus, the die was cast. From this point on, their support of Meletius was clear, but simply as political, as conditioned on his possession of the imperial favor, for they also were Eusebians.
Three years earlier, this party, the Antiochene upholders of the homoi-ousian (homoios kat’ ousian) of Jesus with the Father as taught by Basil of Ancyra, had renounced the Homoean doctrine at the Arian Council of Seleucia and, in alliance with the schismatic Egyptian homoiousians, and the few Alexandrine pro-Nicenes attending that council, had constituted an anti-Arian party whose members Athanaius hoped would be open to conversion to the Nicene homoousios of the Son with the Father, and thus to full communion with the Church. Athanasius had antecedently ignored Meletius’ claim to the See of Antioch; he had always regarded him as incapable of becoming the pro-Nicene leader of a converted majority of the homoiousian clergy of Antioch.
Once it was evident that Athanasius’ hope for a Nicene solidarity in the Orient was doomed, and that Meletius was firmly established as the bishop of Antioch―perhaps the more so by reason of Athanasius’ confirmation, in 363, of the consecration of Paulinus—Meletius, without departing from his sympathy with the homoiousian rejection of the Nicene Creed, but moved by a desire to end the homoousian –homoiousian schism, called a Council with that goal in view.
Athanasius had expressed a hope, in his Tome to the Antiochenes, that the homoiousians might come to recognize that their faith in the divinity of the Christ had reduced their opposition to the Nicene homoousios to a lis de verbis, a disagreement rather verbal than doctrinal, It may be that, while failing to persuade the Antiochenes to whom it appealed, his Tome persuaded Meletius, although not as Athanasius had intended. He knew that only conversion to the Nicene Creed could support their ecumenical union; Meletius, true to his Eusebian heritage, sought only their accommodation, which Athanasius scorned. .
Meletius, confirming the opinion Athanasius had of him well before publishing the Tome to the Antiochenes, found it possible to meld the Nicene doctrine of the Son’/s homoousion with the Father, and the homoiousion denial of the Nicene formula, but not, perhaps, a denial of its content—which, under the pervasive subordinationist influence of Eusebius of Caesarea, the homoiousians had never understood, and never would. It was precisely by reason of this deliberate ignorance, in short, his basic Arianism, that Meletius was incapable of becoming the prospective leader of a conversion of the Antiochene homoiousions to Nicene orthodoxy. Their putative affirmation the divinity of the Christ did not leave them open to conversion to the Nicene Creed. As for Meletius, no such conversion was even thinkable. Once Lucifer’s consecration of Paulinus had left the Antiochene homoiousian majority with no option but to confirm the authority of Meletius as the authentic bishop of Antioch, Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes had no audience: the Nicene cause was lost. From the outset, Melitius had been incapable of understanding it, and the Council of Antioch (363), in which he proclaimed the merger of the Nicene “mia ousia” and the Eusebian subordinationism, only proved what Athanasius had long known, that he was a heart an Arian.
Athanasius, in composing his Tome to the Antiochenes, had aimed it at the homoiousian clergy who had gathered around Meletius, but did so perhaps faute de mieux, Athanasius intended to provide them with a very clear alternative, the faith uttered definitively at Nicaea, which their Eusebian presuppositions had prevented them from understanding. The Tome to the Antiochenes was intended to resolve their doubts,. Therefore Athanasius did not, in the Tome, present the hard-edged alternatives between the Homoousios of the Son with the Father and the heteroousios of a less-than-divine Son from the Father, which hd had. pointed out earlier in his De synodis. He knew that the compromise between the homoousios of the Son, and the homoiousian alternative─for whose suggestion in a homily preached before Constantius Meletius had been exiled─was entirely fictive, simply another of those efforts which he had excoriated in the De synodis. To negotiate with the Arians was simply to politicize the faith, to relativize the truth of the apostolic tradition.
Athanasius had since 346 favored Paulinus and the Eustathians by reason of their loyalty to the Nicene mia hypostasis, and their unqualified refusal to negotiate it. He had come to despise the flurry of conciliar efforts to mediate between the faith of the Church and the power of the imperial throne. This conviction would force him to ignore Basil of Caesarea’s repeated requests to support the cause of Meletius in Rome. Athanasius’ influence on Pope Damasus was such as to induce doubts in Rome over the validity of Meletius’ consecration as bishop of Antioch, and this to Basil’s vast disgust, convinced as he was that only the full recognition of Meletius by Rome would end the Antiochene schism, the face-off between the Eustathians led by Paulinus, whose irregular consecration Athanasius had recognized as valid, and the obstinately subordinationist followers of Meletius. Athanasius was less concerned for this schism than for assurance that the bishop of Antioch would uphold the mia hypostasis, mia ousia , of the Nicene Council. Twenty years later, Melitius, hopefully recognized as the Bishop of Antioch, was chosen to preside over the First Council of Constantinople, but died before it convened.
In the end, the Council of Constantinople did not recognize Paulinus as the bishop of Antioch, nor was he permitted to succeed Meletius to that See. However, it was largely by Paulinus’ efforts that the Apollinarian Christological heresy, in which the divine Logos displaced the human soul of Jesus, had become an issue at the Synod of Alexandria (362), where Paulinus defended, on soteriological rather than philosophical or theoretical grounds, the position earlier defended by Eustathius, viz., that Christ must possess a fully human nature if he is to be our redeemer: “what is not assumed is not healed,” a maxim later exploited by Gegory of Nazianzen Although an allegedly ambiguous formula concerning the soul of Jesus had supposedly left Apollinarius uncondemned by the Synod of Alexandria, Paulinus’ view finally prevailed. Apollinarius was condemned by the provincial Synod of Antioch in 379 and, finally, by the First Council of Constantinople in 381 as well.
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Eustathius of Antioch had been a loyal ally of Alexander and Athanasius at the Council of Nicaea, and remained a powerful upholder of the Conciliar definitions of the substantial, unity of the Trinity, the One God, and of the full divinity of Jesus Christ the Lord, which doctrines Arius and his followers had denied. Eustathius‘ post-conciliar theological concern for the full humanity of Jesus rested upon the Nicene affirmation of his Personal unity: thus Grillmeier: op. cit., vol. I, at 296-97. In the pages following, Grillmeier understands Eustathius to have abandoned the “older tradition,” i.e., the Nicene Creed, which understood the Personal unity of the Jesus to be inherent in his Name. and thereupon supposes him to have accepted the diophysism which, in the Eranistes, Theodoret of Cyr reads into the fragments which remain of Eustathius’ Christology. This supposition of Eustathius’ conversion to a diophysite Christology, entirely at odds with his support of the Nicene Creed at the Council, assumes that a post-Nicene recognition that the soul of Christ is integral with his full humanity forced his rejection of the Nicene Creed in favor of the Logos-anthrōpos Christology developed in the latter fifth century by the School of Antioch.
While still the Bishop of Beroea, Eustathius had anticipated the condemnation of Arianism; as the Bishop of the Patriarchal See of Antioch, he continued his unrelenting opposition to it at the Council of Nicaea where, as a very senior bishop, he vigorously urged the condemnation of Arius and Arianism, and continued to do so after the Council had closed. Condemned by a Eusebian conspiracy ca. 327, he died in exile. Athanasius, on a visit to Antioch in 346 en route to Alexandria at the end of his second exile, had recognized the Nicene orthodoxy of the anti-Arian, “Eustathians” and, when he visited Antioch again in 363, he validated the entirely regular conescration of their leader, Paulinus, by Lucifer of Cagliari a year earlier. Paulinus had sent two delegates to the Council of Alexandria in 362; both had signed that Council’s Tome to the Antiochenes.
Finally, as Spanneut has shown, the evidence adduced by Theodoret’s collection of fragments does not support Eustathius’ post-Nicene conversion to diophysism. The authenticity of the fragments has been warranted by Spanneut’s Recherches sur les écrits d’Eustathe d’Antioch and, a quarter century later, by Gérard Ettlinger’s critical edition of the Eranistes (Theodoret of Cyrus. Eranistes. Critical Text and Prolegomena (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975) It is Theodoret’s selection and interpretation that may be examined. Spanneut has spoken to both.
Eusebius of Caesarea’s cosmological imposition of subordinationism upon the Origen’s historical theology triumphed over the historical apostolic tradition during the half-century between the deposition of Eustathius and the First Council of Constantinople. With the demolition of the apostolic Christology of the Peri Archon Oriental theology became Eusebian, which is to say, cosmological qua tale. By the middle of the fifth century neither the Alexandrines nor the Antiochenes were able to accept the Ephesian Formula of Union, as their successors would be unable to accept its reaffirmation in the Symbol of Chalcedon. It would have been unthinkable for Theodoret to have understood Eustathius otherwise than he did, for the sole alternative would have been to read into those fragments an impossible monophysism. Theodoret’s reading of these carefully selected fragments relies, in sum, upon a cosmological error which troubled third and fourth century theology in the Orient, and in the fifth century controlled its Christological speculation: viz., the a priori impossibility of the communication of divine and human idioms in Jesus the Christ. Theodoret reads his diophysism into any affirmation of the full humanity of Jesus, in full reliance upon his uncritical supposition that the subject of the Incarnation is the ‘immanent Logos’, not Jesus the Lord This postulate had become a universal among the Oriental theologians by the mid-fifth century when Theodoret composed the Eranistes, Early in the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea had managed to persuade all of the Oriental bishops, apart from Athanasius and his allies at Nicaea, notably Eustathius and Marcellus, to dismiss the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea in favor of political authority of the emperor. This reliance, indispensable to the Eusebian dissent, failed with the calling of I Constantinople by the pro-Nicene Emperor Theodosius. However, the correlative cosmological consciousness which that dissent had inculcated so infected the fifth century Oriental theological speculation, whether Antiochene or Alexandrine, as to paralyze it. Twice condemned, at Ephesus and Chalcedon, it still dominates the Orient, and has provided the first major Christian heresy in the West. Berengarius’ inane application of the “new logic” to the Eucharistic Institution Narrative was promptly dealt with on the level of doctrine, but it prompted a rationalist reaction, which in the twelfth century went on to dehistoricize Latin theology.
The cosmological consciousness underlying the dismissal of the Nicene Creed precluded any interest in the historical question, viz., whether the fragments witnessing to the post-Nicene Christology of Eustathius of Antioch were compatible with his subscription to the Nicene Creed. Eustathius had at most five years after the Council, and probably no more than three, in which to write before his trial, conviction, deposition and exile by adversaries who knew all too well that he never abandoned the faith he had defended at Nicaea.
Nothing is known of Paulinus prior to his sending of two deacons as his emissaries to the Council of Alexandria in 362. He remained in Antioch during that Council. At that time, although only a priest, he was the accepted leader of the pro-Nicene “Eustathians,” so named for their loyalty to the last pro-Nicene Patriarch of Antioch, Eustathius. In 326 Eustathius, a dedicated opponent of Arianism, before, during, and after the Council of Nicaea, was condemned as a Sabellian in Antioch by an Arian cabal in a Council called by Eusebius of Nicomedia and presided over by Eusebius of Caesarea. Eustathius was deposed and exiled by Constantine; he died in exile sometime before 337. Well into the fifth century the Eustathians refused to recognize as legitimate the Arian claimants who were routinely appointed to that See.
Athanasius had first encountered the Eustathians in 346 when, returning to Alexandria as the end of his second exile, he briefly visited Antioch, and was impressed by their fidelity to the faith as proclaimed at Nicaea, and to the memory of their great bishop. He attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Emperor Constantius to furnish them a church in Antioch in which they could worship. He maintained contact with them thereafter, as is manifest by his references to them in the Tome to the Antiochenes which his Council of Alexandria addressed to them as well as to the anti-Nicene homoiousians who had accepted Meletius as the legitimate bishop of Antioch and worshiped with him. Thus Paulinus was known to Athanasius at least by reputation when he called the Council of Alexandria in 362, as is evident his welcoming Paulinus’ delegates, even though in sending them Paulinus exceeded his authority as a priest; it is unlikely that he would have done so without an invitation from Athanasius.
While the Council was in session, a Western bishop, Lucifer of Cagliari, exiled by Constantius to the Thebaid for his pro-Nicene proclivities, had been invited to attend the Council with three other bishops similarly exiled to the Thebaid. Enroute to Alexandria, he changed his mind. Sending two deacons to the Council as his emissaries, he went on to Antioch where, in 362, he consecrated Paulinus, validly and regularly, for t here was no pro-Nicene, i.e. orthodox claimant to the See of Antioch. Paulinus then became a Nicene claimant to the See of Antioch, challenging the authority of the doubtfully orthodox Meletius, who in 362 had returned from exile, at about the time that Lucifer’s consecration of Paulinus had cancelled the prospect of achieving the goal of the Council’s Tome to the Antiochenes. Lucifer, a close friend of Athanasius, would not have arbitrarily foreclosed the project of the Tome. Familiar with the local situation, he saw the immediate need to protect the Eustathians against the homoiousian establishment awaiting the return of Melitius by giving them an authentically pro-Nicene claimant to the See of Antioch. The commonplace charge of the irregularity of this consecration lacks foundation, for it assumes that Lucifer should have sought permission from either Euzoios or Meletius, which is absurd.
Athanasius visited Antioch in the fall of 363, having left Alexandria secretly and in haste when notified of the death the emperor Julian and of his successor, Jovian, whose edict of toleration restored the rights given Christians by Constantine fifty years earlier. Athanasius wished to be first on the scene, in order that Jovian might not be misled by Arians or homoiousians. During this time, having succeeded in obtaining Jovian’s approval and his recognition of Athanasius as the bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius recognized Paulinus’ consecration as legitimate. He never recognized Meletius; the Tome to the Antiochenes ignored him. In the same year, 363, Meletius convened in Antioch a homoiousian Council which assimilated of homoiousian doctrine of the Son’s similarity in substance to the Father (homoios kat’ousian, to the contradictory Nicene affirmation of the homoousios (of the same substance) to the Father vindicated Athanasius’ refusal to recognize him as the Bishop of Antioch, and amply warranted his recognition of the claim of the newly consecrated Paulinus to that See. Athanasius had been close to Rome since his second exile, and is likely responsible for Pope Damasus effective recognition of Paulinus as the legitimate bishop of Antioch in a letter written in 373, the year in which Athanasius died. Jerome, influenced by his wealthy friend, Evagrius, joined the Eustathian community led by Bishop Paulinus. Paulinus, much encouraged by the Pope’s letter, persuaded Jerome to be ordained by him to the priesthood. [528]
We hear no more of Paulinus, apart from his death in 388. Sixty years later, Theodoret, in his Ecclesiastical History III, 4-5, recalled his role in the Antiochene schism. Evagrius was consecrated bishop in Antioch in 389 and until 392 led the Eustathians as Paulinus had before him, claiming the See of Antioch. They were not reconciled with the See of Antioch until well into the next century.
Athanasius was born a few years before the turn of the fourth century; Quasten and Jurgens both suggest 295, dating his earliest work, Contra Gentes et De Incarnatione, at 318. Hanson has argued to a similar birthdate, but he would date this earliest work twenty years later than have Quasten and Jurgens. Annick Martin, on other grounds, considers Athanasius to have been barely thirty, perhaps thirty-three years of age, at his consecration in 328, thus born ca. 295. [529]
Little is known of Athanasius’ early years, but his Life of Anthony indicates that he spent some time during his youth with one of the eremitical monastic communities under the leadership of the Abbot Anthony.[530] Such communities were then becoming numerous in the Thebaid, the lightly-populated semi-desert area south of Alexandria where, in the first half of the fourth century, Anthony and, somewhat later, Pachomius, founded numerous monastic communities, in association with which as many suffragan dioceses had long been established.[531]
The Thebaid comprised two Roman administrative areas, separated by the Nile, beginning well below the Nile delta, and extending some hundreds of miles to the south, all within the diocese of Alexandria and subject to the jurisdiction of its bishop. The area of the diocese was enormous. As the maps provided by A. Martin show, by the first quarter of the fourth century it stretched nearly a thousand kilometres from Alexandria to the western border of Libya, and almost as much from Alexandria south to the First Cataract of the Nile at Syene (Assuan), the post of a military garrison and the southernmost of Alexandria’s suffragan dioceses, Athanasius visited Seyene during his first tour of his diocese shortly after his succession to the See of Alexandria, and demonstrated his authority over that remote village by providing it with its first bishop.[532]
The archdiocese of Alexandria had had seven known bishops prior to Alexander, beginning with Demetrius late in the second century and, after him, Heraclas, Dionysius, Maximus, Theonas, Peter, and Akhillas, who died within a few months of his succession.[533]
Whatever Athanasius’ early formation may have been,[534] while still in his youth he sufficiently impressed Bishop Alexander of Alexandria as to be ordained by him to the diaconate, and appointed his secretary, in which rank Athanasius, then about thirty years of age, accompanied his Bishop to the Council of Nicaea. It is clear that Alexander was preparing him for the succession. Before Nicaea he had displayed sufficient theological competence and sophistication effectively to support Bishop Alexander’s excommunication of Arius and, at the Council, to support Alexander’s opposition to the bishops who had allied themselves to Arius, and who looked to the Council for the vindication of Arius and his doctrine. Athanasius’ significant contribution to the defeat of the Arian program earned him the perduring enmity of the two leaders of the Arian party at Nicaea: the “two Eusebii,” bishops of Caesarea and of Nicomedia.[535]
Alexander died in 328, three years after his return to Alexandria from the Council of Nicaea. It was customary for the bishop of Alexandria to choose his successor from the Alexandrine clergy, as Theonas had chosen Peter thirty years earlier and Peter had chosen Achillas. Alexander chose Athanasius to succeed him, despite his relative youth and his not having been ordained to the priesthood. At the time, neither his youth nor his diaconal rank were canonical obstacles to his succession, while the loyalty of the Alexandrine bishops to Alexander’s choice of Athanasius made his election by them virtually certain, but not for lack of opposition. Athanasius’ election was bitterly resisted by the Melitian schismatic bishops who, unreconciled to the rejectiom by the Council of Nicaea of their denial of the authority over them of the bishop of Alexandria, now contested his choice of a successor. Two-thirds of them were located in the heavily populated Delta and in the metropolis itself, and the remainder in the Thebaid. There were none in Libya [536] as distinct from Egypt, although both of the Libyan provinces were within the Archdiocese of Alexandria. Libya did not interest Melitius nor, as it appears, did it interest his followers.
The Melitian schism, so named for is leader, Melitius. the bishop of Lykopolis, a major See in the Thebaid, had begun about 305, during the prolongation, by Galerius, of Diocletian’s persecution of the Oriental Church, whom prior to his abdication in 305 Diocletian had chosen to be the Emperor of the East. Galerius was an ardent opponent of Christianity; he may have inspired Diocletian’s decision to persecute the Christians. At any rate, from 305, when Galerius succeeded to the throne and began his persecution, to 311, when he ceased it with the issue of his Edict of Tolerance, the Oriental Church suffered as never before.[537]
From its outset, the persecution of the Church of Alexandria forced Peter of Alexandria to find shelter in the outskirts of the city. Peter had succeeded to the See in 300. In 305, Galerius imprisoned within Alexandria four of the suffragan bishops and would soon execute them.[538] Melitius of Lykopolis in the Thebaid took advantage of their arrest and consequent absence from their dioceses, and immediately began to act autonomously, recognizing no local limits upon his episcopal authority, nor any subordination to Peter as the Bishop of Alexandria, whose suffragan he was.[539] He ordained priests within the dioceses of the four imprisoned bishops, and then proceeded to Alexandria, where he attempted, and failed, to persuade the Alexandrine clergy to recognize his authority. He appears to have wished to limit the diocese of Alexandria to the metropolitan area, claiming the remainder for himself as the “archbishop of Egypt,” having some undefined relation to the archbishop of Alexandria, but not that of a subordinate.
At least from the beginning of Demetrius’ episcopacy in the late second century, the Bishop of Alexandria had exercised an unqualified and unchallenged authority over the “Church of Egypt” from the Delta to Syene south of thebaiad at the first cataract of the Nile, and from Alexandria west to the Pentapolis in upper Libya. It is probable that Melitius’ schismatic assumption of authority over “Egypt” during the forced absence of Bishop Peter from Alexandria took advantage of a long-simmering resentment among the suffragan bishops of their taken-for-granted subordination to Alexandrine bishops, whom they felt to be alien to the “Egypt” comprising the Delta and the Thebaid: the traditional distinction between “Egypt” and the metropolis of Alexandria was rather more than nominal.[540]
Although the Melitian schism did not touch the two provinces of upper and lower Libya, some of the bishops in the Libyan Pentapolis, inclined or converted to Sabellianism, had challenged the doctrinal authority of Dionysius of Alexandria some fifty years earlier, albeit not his jurisdiction as their local ordinary. In 321, four years before the Council of Nicaea and seven years before Athanasius’ succession to the see, two Libyan bishops, Theonas of Marmarica and Secundus of Ptolemais, had refused to recognize Bishop Alexander’s condemnation of Arius, who was of Libyan origin. They continued that refusal at the Council of Nicaea and for their obduracy were deposed and exiled by Constantine.
Galerius’ persecution ceased with his publication, on his deathbed in 311, of the Edict of Toleration. Thereupon Bishop Peter returned to Alexandria from his exile, considering himself safe by reason of the Edict.[541] He was seriously mistaken: Galerius had died within a few months of its publication. and was succeeded by his nephew, Maximinus Daia, who ignored the Edict and resumed the persecution. On Peter’s return to his See, Maximinus summarily arrested him and ordered him beheaded.
During his exile from Alexandria, Peter had written a letter to his bishops excommunicating Melitius and those of his followers whom he had consecrated or ordained. Peter’s successor, Akhillas, perhaps also a former director of the catechetical School, died within a year of his succession. He was succeeded by Alexander in 313. Alexander continued his predecessors’ resistance to the schism, denying the legitimacy of the Melitian bishops assertion of ecclesial authority over dioceses in the Delta and the Thebaid, and contesting their exercise of it there and in the metropolis of Alexandria. In turn, the Melitian bishops appealed to the Council of Nicaea to approve their rejection of Alexander’s authority over them. In this they failed: the Council upheld the traditional jurisdiction of the Bishop of Alexandria over the whole of that vast diocese.
The Conciliar decree in the case permitted the bishops whom Melitius had consecrated to retain their rank as bishops, but barred them from exercising any episcopal authority within the archdiocese, whether in the Delta, in the Thebaid, or in Alexandria, unless it be granted by the Bishop of Alexandria. The Council also decreed that whenever a Melitian bishop also resided in a diocese having a resident bishop legitimately appointed by the Bishop of Alexandria, the Melitian bishop was subject to the authority of that Bishop. Were the legitimate bishop to die, the resident Melitian bishop could succeed him only with the approval of the Bishop of Alexandria, who would require that bishop’s personal affirmation of loyalty to him, not to Melitius. Melitius himself, already personally barred from the exercise of episcopal authority, was also personally barred from any such succession.
Inasmuch as The Council’s decree denying the Melitian appeal had entailed no denial of the validity of the episcopal orders of the schismatic bishops, nor any sentencing of them to exile; they returned to their former suffragan Sees, and most of them continued to exercise de facto an episcopal authority which the Council of Nicaea had refused to recognize. This insurgency required of the Bishop of Alexandriavigilant implementation of the Conciliar legislation simply as the condition for the continued existence of the diocese of Alexandria for, at the time of the Council of Nicaea, a clear majority of thebishops in that diocese, together with a similar proportion of the monks established in the monasteries in the Delta and the Thebaid, were Meletian schismatics. Thus the Bishop of Alexandria, soon to be Athanasius, needed not only to assert his authority but to do so in such wise as vigorously to counter the continual disintegration of his diocese threatened by the schism in which the majority of Egyptian bishops were enrolled. The bulk of the Melitians refused reconciliation with Alexander after their return from the Council, and proceeded to oppose the election of his approved successor.
Therefore, although the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Alexandria over the whole of his Archdiocese was confirmed by the Council of Nicaea against the Melitian challenge, its effective exercise another matter entirely. This demanded a continued pastoral vigilance by the Bishop of Alexandria against the Melitian bishops who, at the time of the Council of Nicaea, already constituted two-thirds of the bishops within the archdiocese. [542]
The Conciliar rejection of the Melitian appeal from the authority of the Bishop of Alexandria was of course relied upon by Athanasius and his electors, traditionally the clergy of the city of Alexandria, particularly in that the Council’s decision had barred any Melitian participation in the election of Alexander’s successor. Athanasius ensured that there would be none: he was elected by that minority of loyal priests resident in Alexandria, to whom the Alexandrine tradition reserved that authority. He was consecrated by a few Alexandrine bishops who recognized him as Alexander’s choice to succeed him.
Once in office, Athanasius continued Alexander’s resistance to the unrelenting efforts of the Melitian bishops to exercise episcopal authority in the Delta and in the Thebaid. His own exercise of authority over them was contested, disputed, and physically resisted. If it were succeed, to be effective, it could do so only at the expense of countering that opposition on its own terms wherever, whenever, and however it occurred, accepting that this would enhance an already institutionalized resentment, enmity, and reaction.
Melitius disappeared and presumably died shortly after the Council of Nicaea, twenty years after initiating his schism and thus having had ample time and resources to render it permanent by ordaining to the priesthood and consecrating to the episcopacy the most committed of his followers.
The indictment by recent historians of Athanasius’ campaign against the Meletian effort to fragment his diocese as cruel, barbarous, murderous, and so on, as though confirmed by the Synod of Tyr, relies upon nothing more than a preference for the Eusebian-Melitian account of that campaign over Athanasius’ vindication of it. The Eusebian criminal prosecution of his administration, unimpeded by moral scruples, was intent upon his destruction. That persecution failed; Athanasius preserved and integrated his diocese. By the end of his life, its clergy and laity were solidly loyal at once to him and to the Nicene Creed.[543].
Upon succeeding to the See of Alexandria in 328, three years after the Council of Nicaea closed, Athanasius upheld Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine, insisting upon the Nicene affirmation of the “mia hypostasis,” i.e., of the absolute unity of the Trinity, the radical context controlling the interpretation of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Only-Begotten Son. On that basis, the consubstantiality of the Son could only be Personal, a consubstantiality with the Father, and not substantial, as Eusebians insisted, a Sabellian consubstantiality with the divine substance. Athanasius, following Nicaea and thereby following Origen as well, grounded this Christology upon the communication of idioms in Christ, underwritten by the most radical Scriptural expression of the Church’s historical faith: Jesus Christ is Lord: Dominus Deus (Phil. 2:13). Meletius was succeeded by Arkhap, probably the bishop of Memphis in thebiad.
i. The Development of Athanasius' Theology
Athanasius’ development of his theology is at one with his witness to the truth of the apostolic tradition of the Catholic faith that Jesus is the Lord. He taught and defended the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth, Revelation who is Christ, throughout his service to the Church of Alexandria, first in assisting Bishop Alexander as his deacon and his secretary, in Alexandria and at the Council of Nicaea. Upon succeeding Alexander in 328, he continued so to teach the faith for the rest of his life as the Bishop of Alexandria, the major See of the Orient. He fulfilled his preaching office, his official communication of the faith of the Church to his people, protecting them from attacks upon it by its enemies, Arian, Jewish and pagan, over the course of nearly forty-five years. His theology is then indivisible; it intends to affirm and defend the unity of the faith itself. While its Trinitarian and Christological elements are of course conceptually distinguishable, they are not separable; an isolation of any part from the whole compromises the entirety of his theology.[544]
This intelligible unity, the analogia fidei, is particularly explicit in Athanasius’ fidelity to the Nicene Creed, whose proclamation of the Personal homoousios of the Son with the Father has its strict corollary in the indivisible unity, “mia ousia , mia hypostasis” of the substantial Trinity. To reject either is to reject both, while to affirm either is to affirm both.
The Eusebian rejection of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son relies upon a subordinationist rejection of the substantial unity, mia ousia , of the Trinity. Athanasius’ Christology is an affirmation and defence of the Nicene Creed against the Arian and Eusebian denials of the homoousios of the Son with the Father. Particularly, it stresses the mia ousia , mia hypostasis of the Trinity taught by the Nicene Creed. Unlike the other Oriental theologians of the fourth century, he had no interest in the cosmological criticism by the Eusebians of the doctrine of Nicaea. For him, the Creed was foundational, quite as was its equivalent, the apostolic tradition, for Origen. Consequently, as with Origen, he holds firmly to the communication of idioms as inseparable from the apostolic tradition that Jesus is the Lord. His Christology and Trinitarian theology find an expression of nuclear density in the mia ousia of the Trinity. His early emphsis upon this tag should never be read, as it often has been, as a disinterest in the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father. Rather, it met head-on the Eusebian subordinationism, and was precisely so understood by the Eusebians. Athanasius was a theologian of far greater profundity than was recotnized during his lifetine. He pinned the anti-Nicenes with a single phrase.
The major sources of Athanasius’ Christology are the three Orationes contra Arianos, the four Letters to Serapion, the Tome to the Antiohenes, and the De Fide, his affirmation of Nicene orthodoxy written at the request of Emperor Jovian.[545]
Enabled by the Christological reflection set out in the Discourses against the Arians, particularly in the third, which he had perhaps just finished, Athanasius insists on the union of man and of God in the Son. “It is why an other was not the Son of God before Abraham and no other than he came after Abraham; no other than he who raised Lazarus, no other than he made inquiries regarding him; but it is the self-same who asked, as man, “where does Lazarus rest?” and who, as God, resurrected him; the same was he who, corporeally, as man, spat, and divinely, as the Son of God, opened the eyes of the man born blind; and having suffered in the flesh, as Peter has said (the self-same) has, divinely, opened the tombs and resurrected the dead.” Had he not already affirmed, in the Third Discourse, precisely that “if we see and think that these two sorts of acts” (those which he has produced as God and those which he has produced as man) “have been done by one alone, our belief is correct”? Or again this, that “in becoming man, he has on that account not ceased to be God, no more than in being God, he has not fled from his humanity; quite to the contrary! And further, being God, he has assumed the flesh, and being in the flesh, he has divinized the flesh.”
Annick Martin, Athanase, 556. [546]
This enconium is supplemented by another:
The particular importance that should clothe such a doctrine consists precisely in its central construct, founded entirely on the unity of the Word and of the flesh in the Christ, a unity not so much of the intellectual order as linked rather to a kind of mystical intuition which recalls the formula elaborated at Chalcedon. Nourished upon Scripture and upon the traditional image of the economy of salvation, it has taken concrete expression in the formula of Jn. 1:14, “and the Word was made flesh,”, which it has developed in the same sense and in a simple language in parallel with its theological œuvre, as “the fundamental Christological affirmation”327 for the bishop and the pastor. The latter will leave to others, more the philosopher and theologian than they,328 the task of resolving the mystery of the conceptual relation of the God and the man in Christ.
327 A. Grillmeier, Le Christ dans la tradition chrétienne, I, trad. fse, 1973, p. 253-256, Sur Jn 1, 14, on rapprochera Or.c. Ar. III, 30, Tomos, 7, Ep. ad Adelph., 2, ad Epict., 8 et 11, et ad Max., 2 et 3. Sur l’importance de l’exégèse johannique chez Athanase, v. T.E. Pollard, Johannine Christology and the Early Church, Cambridge, 1970, chap. 7, p. 184-245, uniquement consecré à l’analyse des 3 Or. c. Ar.
328 J. Lebon, art. cité, p. 746, n. 1; A. Grillmeier, o.c., p. 257-272; et le jugement d’ensemble positif porte par R.P.C. Hanson sur la théologie athanasienne, dans The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, p. 446-458.
Annick Martin, Athanase, 635 [547]
The final note of the last quotation from Prof. Martin’s Athanase invokes the generally positive assessment, “le jugement d’ensemble positif » upon Athanasius theology found in Hanson’s now classic study, Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, frequently cited in these pages. There Hanson certainly speaks approvingly of Athanasius’ theology, particularly of his Christology.
With respect to Athanasius’ Trinitarian doctrine, Hanson acknowledges that Athanasius never subordinates the Son to the Father; but is less sure that he avoids Sabellianism:
Athanasius however, does his best to avoid Sabellianisn, though he can find no term to express what God is as Three in distinction to what he is as One.
‘for they are One…not like a One named twice over, so tat he is sometimes the Father and sometime the Son…’ (they are One) ‘in the peculiarity and propriety of their nature and in the identity of the one Godhead’ (τῇ ἰδιότητι καὶ οἰκειότητι τῆς φύσεως καὶ τῇ ταυτότετι τῆς μίας θεότητος). Everything that can be said of the Father can be said of the Son, except being called the Father.38
38 Or. con. Ar. III, 4
Hanson, Search, 429.
In reply it should be observed that Athanasius takes for granted the truth of the Church’s radically liturgical tradition of the revelation , regarding it as foundational, and has every right to do so. Hanson requires “terms,” which cannot but be abstract, theological rather than doctrinal, to explain what is one in God as opposed to what is three. Athanasius identifies what is three in the Trinity with the Trinitarian Names, which not only cannot be abstractions, but whose correlative Personal significance, recognized by Tertullian, is inescapable, as is Theophilus’ recognition that they form a “τρíας,” Tertullian’s Trinitas, and Origen’s equivalent terms; for he rarely uses trias.[548] Once the Trinitarian τάξις is submitted to abstract analysis, read abstractly, its historically revealed, liturgically mediated unity is lost, and the cosmologically conundrum of the one and the many takes over.
Origen had faced the same Trinitarian problem and resolved it by distinguishing the concrete mia ousia of the Trinity from the concrete treis hypostaseis who are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, to the extent that he preferred to speak of a communication of Names rather than of idioms. In the West, Tertullian’s una substantia, tres personae had anticipated Origen’s Trinitarian theology, but its use of persona, whose Greek translation, πρόσωπον, familiar to Tertullian and Hippolytus, was unavailable to Origen. His substitute for prosōpon, i.e., hypostasis, suffered then and for long after from the ambiguity which allowed it to be understood as identical with ousia . This ambiguity would permit Eusebius of Caesarea to read into Origen’s theology of the Trinity, whose single substance, mia ousia , comprised the three Names, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, to which Origen referred as treis hypostaseis, in the sense of three subistences, a subordinationist doctrine of treis ousiai, (τρεῑς οὐσíαι) three substances, only the first of whom can be divine. This total distortion of Origen’s trinitarian doctrine thereafter dominated the Oriental Church apart from the See of Alexandria, where Athanasius upheld the tradition of Origen, as had the Council of Nicaea.
Hanson has recognized the radical historicity of Athanasius’ Christology, if without grasping the implication of that foundation, viz., that Athanasius upholds the Spirit Christology of the Apostles and of the Apostolic Fathers: Athanasius also recognizes the strict ontological unity of this Christology with the Trinity: the Son is of one ousia with the Father, who manifests himself in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, who is active in the world through the Son. This may be more clearly affirmed in the traditional statement that the Son is sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit. The Father’s Mission of the Son and, through the Son, of the Holy Spirit, is the Mission of the primordial Jesus the Lord, sent to pour out the Spiritus Creator by which outpouring the Son is the head of the universe created in him. But to proceed:
When he comes to interpret the crucial text, Proverbs 8:22 ff, he insists that its terms apply to the incarnate, not the pre-existent Christ.19 It is a ridiculously far-fetched interpretation, learnt perhaps from Marcellus, but at least it shows that Athanasius placed the mediating activity of the Son, not in his position within the one God, but in his being incarnate. This was a new, indeed revolutionary theological idea and one entirely consonant with Scripture. Athanasius is often wholly astray on the details of the Bible, but he has a remarkably firm grip, indeed in view of his career one might say the grip of a bull-dog, on its main message.
Hanson, Search, 424.
The consequence of this far-reaching innovation introduced by Athanasius, is that the doctrine of the Trinity is not just a necessary corollary of the Christian view of God’s relation to the world, but at the heart of his theology of the Incarnation, as it ought to be. . . .The correct doctrine is that the Son is ‘peculiar to and inseparable from the One by reason of the character and intrinsic nature of his ousia .22 A little earlier in the same work Athanasius had thus described the Trinity:
‘There is one form of Godhead, which is also in the Logos, and there is one God the Father existing in self-sufficiency because he is over all, and also manifesting himself in the Son because he (the Son) extends through the universe, and in the Spirit because he is active in the universe in him (the Spirit) through the Son.23
19 Ibid. (= Or.con Ar. I.63.) Or. con. Ar. II.73, 74 ; but the whole of Book II is devoted to the opening verses of Proverbs 8.
22 Ibid. (= Or.con Ar. I.63.), III,16l the last words are κατà τὴν ιδιότητα καί οἰκειοτητα τῆς οὐσίας
23 Ibid. (= Or.con Ar. I.63.), 15.
Hanson, Search, 425.
Hanson cites and paraphrases Loof’s summary of Athanasius theology, observing in a note that Loofs’ pays too little attention to the influence of Alexander of Alexandria upon Athanasius:
To sum up Athansius’ general theological position in a paraphrase of the words of Loofs:24 As early as his first work (Contra Gentes et De incarnatione) Athanasius had adopted the Origenistic concept of God’s indivisibility and had rejected all emanationist theories. He maintained the eternity of the Logos and his eternal generation, and had never adopted Marcellus’theory of the limitation of the Son to the Incarnation. He distinguished himself from Eustathius by identifying firmly the historical Jesus and the Logos without denying that the Logos was impassible. He never accepted the Origenistic concept of the Logos as a mediating agent within the one God and in fact overcame the obstacle presented by the idea of a Logos borrowed from philosophy. He linked the Incarnation and the redemption firmly. In order to communicate immortalitυ to the human race which had become subject to decay (φθόρα), the Saviour must become man. He saw at an early stage the latent polytheism in Arianism and was a convinced monotheist; that is why he so resolutely linked the Father and the Son, and insisted continually that the Son was the Father’s own (ἴδιος).
24 ‘Arianismus’ 17, 18. But in his preoccupation with the thought of Origen Loofs has here failed to give credit to Alexander of Alexandria as the main influence on the young Athanasius.
Hanson, Search, 425.
Here we notice Loofs and Hanson asserting that Athanasius accepted the impassibility of the Logos, whom both have identified with historical Jesus, who was sufficiently “passible” to die on the Cross. Athanasius, in his anti-Arian polemics, was concerned to deny what Arius taught, viz., that the Logos could suffer; see Hanson, Search, 428. Hanson and Loofs agree however that Athanasius’ central concern is the relation of the Son to the Father; he is certain that the Father has revealed himself in Christ.
In the second place, in admitting and praising Athanasius’ identification of Jesus Christ with the Logos, Hanson has approved the Spirit Christology of the Nicene Creed, the Creed of I Constantinople, the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus, and the Symbol of Chalcedon, all of which, in teaching that Jesus is the subject of the Incarnation, understand him to exist prior to the Incarnation, the event in which he “becomes flesh.” In sum, Athanasius’ theology, whether of the Christ or of the Spirit, is an historical quaerens into the mystery of Christ as taught at Nicaea. He had no interest in establishing the prior possibility of the consubstantiality of Jesus the Lord with the Father, it being obvious that the Mysterium fidei, the historical object of the Church’s faith, the fullness of gratia capitis, can have none. Thus convinced, Athanasius stood in permanent opposition to the spontaneous subordinationism and implicit Arianism of the Oriental theologians of his time. He denied the authority of the Arian emperors, from Constantine to Valens, to impose their heresy upon the Christians of the Roman empire. Even today, insofar as the academy is concerned, his refusal, under constant pressure, to depart from the dogmatic tradition set at Nicaea stands athwart the commonplace supposition that the proper task of Christology is incomepatible with the Chalcedonian exposition of the implication of Jesus homoousios with the Father taught by the Nicene Creed.
Athanasius’ Christology has been generally reckoned, as by Grillmeier, to be of the Logos-sarx school, despite the incompatibility of that dehistoricized analysis of the subject of the Incarnation with Athanasius’ adamantine commitment to the historical communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, and consequent incompatibility with his recognition of Mary as the Mother of God. Athanasius’ refusal to mitigate theological import of the communication of idioms in the Christ alienates him from the Logos-sarx Christology, which was then, as now, incapable of resolving its diophysite vs. monophysite dilemma from its third century exploration by Tertullian in the West[549] and Malchion[550] in the East, down to its presentation by Nestorius of Antioch and Cyril of Alexandria nearly two centuries later.
Grillmeier’s assessment of Athanasius’ Christology rests upon the hermeneutical confusion induced in Christology by the universal use of the Logos-sarx vocabulary in mid-fourth century.[551] No other Christological vocabulary was then available in the East. In the West, this confusion had been barred by Tertullian’s Apologeticus, whose attribution of “una persona, duae substantiae” to Jesus the Christ, the first theological assertion of the communication of idioms, preserved the Latin Church from the confusion which Grillmeier instances. In the same final decade of the second century, Irenaeus of Lyon had coined the nuclear Christological summary which recognized in Jesus “one and the same Son,” which phrase became the leitmotif of the Symbol of Chalcedon.
This historical Christology has its origin in verses 1 and 14 of the Prologue of the Gospel of John, and in Phil. 2: 5-7, as is obvious. Its first coherent systematic expression was given it by Origen in his Peri Archon, during the last decade before his exile. A decade after Origen’s death in 254, his greatest disciple, Dionysius of Alexandria, defended his Christology against the Sabellian heresy then troubling Libya, first in correspondence with Pope Sixtus II and, shortly thereafter, in correspondence with the Sabellian bishops of Libya, whose conversion to that heresy entailed a rejection of the Christian faith that Jesus is the Lord. The aftermath of this latter correspondence is not entirely clear. Evidently the Libyan bishops were able to persuade Pope Dionysius of Rome that something was amiss in his namesake’s governance of his See of Alexandria, apparently entailing tritheism and a failure to accept the homoousion of the Son, which was the mainstay,“the watchword,” as J. N. D. Kelly puts it (Creeds, 246) of the Sabellian heresy. Under what misimpression it is impossible to discern, the Pope wrote a nominally impersonal letter of rebuke to the See of Alexandria, and probably a personal letter to the bishop of Alexandria, who was in any case prompted by the papal correspondence to write a work of four books in defense of his orthodoxy. The prejudicial assessment of the orthodoxy of Dionysius of Alexandria by Basil of Caesarea in his Ninth Letter is discussed elsewhere in this volume, as is Athanasius’ defense of his famous predecessor in the See of Alexandria. Athanasius’ immediate predecessor, Alexander of Alexandria, was a convinced Origenist, and Athanasius upheld and defended that doctrinal tradition throughout his episcopacy.
Well before the Council of Nicaea, the famous Church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, who was also the most learned commentator on theology of Origen, having inherited Origen’s library, had persuaded himself, on cosmological grounds, that Origen’s doctrine of the substanial unity of the Trinity (mia ousia ) could not be true. Eusebius was concerned, not for the salvation worked by Jesus the Lord, but for upholding the cosmological rationality of the faih. That monadic rationality, which Eusebius regarded as a necessity of thought, persuaded Eusebius that the one God, the divine substance, is the Father, who is alone divine; the Son, as begotten, is less than the Father, and the Holy Spirit, as the second emanation from the Father, must be still less, hardly divine. Consequently, any assertion of the divinity of the Son or the Spirit implied their identity with the divine substance, the one God. Eusebius read this as simple Sabellianism; he insisted on this rationale throughout his life. The Council of Nicaea condemned him for this denial of the Trinity, but within a few years he had recovered his standing with the Emperor, Constantine, and allied himself to another Eusebius, the bishop of Nicomedia, the city in which Constantine had established his capitol before removing in 330 to the more strategic location of Byzantium, which he renamed as Constantinople. Eusebius of Nicomedia was an excellent politician; in alliance with Eusebius of Caesarea, he was able to obtain from Constantine the deposition and exile of the pro-Nicene Oriental bishops (notably Eustathius of Antioch and Marcellus of Ancyra) with such effect that a decade after Nicaea, onlyAthanasius of Alexandria upheld the faith of Nicaea, resisted the “Eusebian” deformation, and denied the authority of the civil authority, i.e., the Emperor, to reject the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea.
The cosmologization of theology, its dualist dehistoricization, bars a priori the foundational Christological postulate of the radical union, and the complete distinction, of divinity and humanity in the Person of the Christ, apart from which the historical faith that Jesus is the Lord has no ground in history. The cosmological alternative to the apostolic affirmation that Jesus Christ is Lord is the a priori rejection of the communication of idioms in the Lord Jesus, This requires a choice between the diophysism which would later typify the later Syrian theology.[552] and the denial, by Arius and, in a more sophisticated form, by Apollinarius, of a human soul in Christ. These correlative errors are so rationally inseparable from the Logos-sarx analysis as to have been foisted upon Athanasius‘ supposedly Logos-sarx Christology by Alois Grillmeier and J. N. D. Kelly, although Athanasius’ commitment to the communication of idioms in Christ is obvious and simply excludes that interpretation of his theology.
In sum, his theology, whether of the Christ or of the Spirit, is an historical quaerens into the mystery of Christ as taught at Nicaea. He had no interest in establishing the prior possibility of the consubstantiality of Jesus the Lord with the Father: obviously the mysterium, the historical object of the Church’s faith, the gratia Christi capitis, can have none. Thus convinced, he stood in permanent opposition to the spontaneous subordinationism and implicit Arianism of the Oriental theologians of his time, and to the imperial policy which in 360 had imposed that heresy upon the Christians of the Roman empire. Even today, insofar as the academy is concerned, his refusal, under constant pressure, to depart from the dogmatic tradition set at Nicaea stands athwart the still commonplace supposition that the proper task of Christology is the renegotiation of the Chalcedonian exposition of the full implication of the Nicene Creed.
His Christology has been generally reckoned, as by Grillmeier, to be of the Logos-sarx school, despite the incompatibility of that dehistoricized analysis of the subject of the Incarnation with Athanasius’ adamantine commitment to the historical communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, and consequently with his recognition of Mary as the Mother of God. Athanasius’ refusal to mitigate theological import of the communication of idioms in the Christ frees him from the Logos-anthrōpos vs. Logos-sarx dilemma inherent in the rationalization of Christology, which was incapable of resolving its diophysite vs. monophysite dilemma[553] in the East, down to its presentation by Nestorius of Antioch and Cyril of Alexandria nearly two centuries later.
As Hanson has pointed out, the supposition that Athanasius’ Christology employs the Logos-sarx analysis is a product of the hermeneutical confusion induced by the universal use of the Logos-sarx vocabulary in mid-fourth century; no other Christological vocabulary was available, whether in the East or the West. Its Christological foundation in the καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγενέτο (and the Word was made flesh) of v. 14, of the Prologue of the Gospel of John is obvious, but apart from its first use in the West in Tertullian’s Christological treatise, the Apologeticus, and in the East, by Origen Christology in the Peri Archon and, in the latter third century, by Malchion in his prosecution of Paul of Samosata, it fell under the cosmological influence either of the Stoicism dominant in the learned culture of North Africa in the second and third centuries, or of the Middle and Neo-Platonism which pervaded the learned culture of the Greek East. The consequence was a commonplace theological dehistoricization of the Johannine Logos sarx egeneto, as has been sufficiently pointed out.
The sophisticated pagan cultures of the Greek world assumed that truth is not to be found in history, and thus that the quest for it entails a flight from history toward its absolute unity in a timeless empyrean, which barred a priori the doctrinally indispensable theological postulate of the complete distinction between the fullness of divinity and of humanity in the historical Personal unity of Jesus the Lord. Because this a priori rejection of the communication of idioms in the Lord Jesus is rationally inseparable from the Logos-sarx analysis, Athanasius’ use of its vocabulary made it easy for historians such as Alois Grillmeier and J. N. D. Kelly to foist upon him the Logos-sarx Christology, although his commitment to the communication of idioms in Christ is obvious and simply excludes that interpretation of his theology.
Apart from Alexandria, the Christian tradition fell under the cosmological influence of the Stoicism and middle Platonism dominant in the learned culture of the Greek Orient in the second and third centuries [554] but, due to the influence of Tertullian’s Apologeticus, had little impact in the West. apart from Hilary of Poitiers whose De synodis transmitted to the Latin West the homoiousian doctrine he had assimilated, during his three years of exile in Phrygia (356-359-’60); even before his exile, he had not understood the difference between the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of Jesus the Lord with the Father, and its homoiousian surrogate, the Son’s similarity to the substance of the Father, the “homoios kat’ousian.”
In the East, the pagan world-view began to be overborne in the latter half of the second century by the Apologists, notably Justin, Theophilus of Antioch and Athenagoras. Apart from them, during the last decade of the second century and the first half of the third, only Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen refused the solicitations of the cosmological wisdom, and upheld instead the Christian faith that Jesus is the Lord and that there is no other.
Tertullian’s Apologeticus gave the Church in the West a Christological and Trinitarian paradigm of true genius: it needed but two words, persona and substantia, to express the full truth of the Trinity and of the Christ: the former constituted by una substantia, tres personae, and Christ by una persona, duae substantiae. The depth and clarity of this language guarded the Latin world from the metaphysical welter which so paralyzed the Oriental Church as to leave only Alexandria upholding the Trinitarian and Christological faith. So little is left of Hippolytus’ works that we know only of his agreement with that vocabulary: he may even be its source.
Enough remains of Origen’s enormous output to recognize in him a mind whose Christological-Trinitarian insight, like Tertullian’s, has never been surpassed. He also had the audacity to affirm the full humanity, i.e., the human Name of Jesus the Lord, and his full divinity, his divine Name, the Logos, of Jesus the Lord, concrete in the single subsistence who is Jesus Christ, the Lord. This constitutes the solid foundation of this doctrine of the “communication of Names;” see endnote 506, supra. The cosmological impossibility of the Personal fullness of humanity and the Personal fullness of divinity united and undivided in the Christ troubled Origen no more than it had troubled Tertullian: both had rejected the cosmological tradition in favor of the apostolic tradition, exhibiting a courage and a confidence incomprehensible to their critics. At the time of writing the Peri Archon Origen’s vocabulary lacked the precision lent Tertullian’s theology by the term “persona.” Its Greek equivalent, “πρόσοπων” had not yet entered into Greek theological discourse; he had to use “ὑπόστασις” instead, but in the sense of subsistentia rather than of substantia. (see Crouzel’s discussion of this interpretation of ὑπόστασις in the text cited in endnote 294).
Crouzel thinks to have found, in a Neo-Stoicism that evolved into the Neo-Platonism of the latter third century, the earliest expression of the blend of Stoicism and Middle Platonism upon which fourth century Greek theology relied. This conjecture may explain the equivalent usage at Nicaea of the Platonic “ousia ” and the Stoic “hypostasis” to designate alike the actual realization of being: i.e., concrete rather than abstract. This semantic equivalence appears in the Council’s condemnation of the Arian denial of the divinity of the Son.[555] Origen’s decision, a century earlier in the Peri Archon, (available only in Rufinus’ translation, the Peri Archon) to use “ousia” to designate the Trinitarian unity of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, while reserving “hypostasis” to designate their irreducible distinction within the Trinity, provided an indispensable hermeneutic which, after much misinterpretation, would become standard in Trinitarian theology, but Origen’s Christological application of hypostasis, i.e., to the Henōsis of the hypostasis of the Logos and the hypostsasis of the primordial Jesus, has continued to be read mistakenly as adoptionist, and has found little acceptance. Its Occidental counterpart, the una substantia - tres personae of Tertullian’s Trinitarian hermeneutic would became standard in Latin theology well before Nicaea, and may have in fact influenced that Council by way of Ossius of Cordoba, but it finds no echo in the letter sent by Dionysius of Rome to Dionysius of Alexandria. Its Christological application, duae substantiae, una persona, protected the Western Church from the speculative confusion which, always apart from Alexandria, overwhelmed the Orient in the next century.
With no evident grounds for doing so, historians of doctrine have commonly read Origen’s treis hypostaseis, mia ousia idiom as at least implicitly subordinationist.[556] Crouzel has shown that there is no justification for this inference. He reads Origen’s Trinitarian theology as soteriologically, i.e., doctrinally rather than cosmologically governed, the reading that is followed here.[557] Origen’s assertion of the henōsis (ἕνωσις) of humanity and divinity in the Christ, foundational for his Trinitarian theology and his Christology, attracted little attention from his early-fourth-century critics, whose criticism focused rather upon his doctrine of the pre-existence of souls and upon the distinction he drew between the historical and the risen body.[558] His Trinitarian use of mia ousia, treis hypostaseis was given a subordinationist interpretation by the spontaneously cosmological rationality of the later fourth-century Origenists, notably the Eusebian opponents of Athanasius’ insistence upon the mia hypostasis of God. It is with Eusebius of Caesarea, a permanent and highly effective opponent of the Nicene homoousios, that the interpretation of Origen’s Trinitarian treis hypostases as subordinationist in such wise as to require a Sabellian interpretation of the mia ousia, became established in the Orient and, following upon it, the correlative reading, as Sabellian, of the Nicene doctrine of the Son’s homoousion with the Father.
This misinterpretation of Origen and of the Nicene Creed was effective to the point that Athanasius saw that his own stress upon the necessity of the absolute, i.e., substantial unity of the Trinity was a clear rejection of the accepted Eusebian reading of Origen’ “treis hypostaseis.” The subordinationist interpretation of this expression, established by the greatest Origen scholar of the age, was taken for granted in the Orient, unchallengeable other than by those whose Sabellianism would in Eusebius’ view thereby be exposed. Athanasius upheld the Nicene condemnation of subordinationism simply by incessantly insisting upon the absolute unity, mia hypostasis, of the substantial Trinity, which the Eusebian subordinationism of course denied.
Athanasius summoned the meagre remnant of his Nicene bishops to the Council of Alexandria immediately upon his return to Alexandria after receiving permission to do so from the new Emperor, Julian; he arrived early in 362. These few surviving Alexandrine pro-Nicene bishops, mostly from the Delta northeast of Alexandria, were joined at the Council by two similarly pro-Nicene bishops who had also returned from exile in the Thebaid; Eusebius, the bishop of Vercelli in Italy, exiled by the Synod of Milan in 355, and Asterius, a bishop from Arabia; exiled by reason of having allied himself with the pro-Nicene bishops who met under delegates of Pope Julius at the Council of Serdica nearly twenty years earlier[559]. They were to have been accompanied to Alexandria by Lucifer of Cagliari who, with Eusebius of Vercelli, had been exiled by the Council of Milan seven years earlier. An impatient personality, he decided, evidently abruptly, to skip Athanasius’ Council and go directly to Antioch, knowing of Athanasius’ hope to unify the Antiochene homoiousians by a persuasive presentation to them of the Nicene Creed as the sole possible foundation for their return to communion with him and so with the Latin bishops. The latter were incensed by Constantius’ Arianizing program for their subordination to his imperial authority to appoint their bishops. This was manifest in 355 by his installation of the Arian Auxentius as Bishop of Milan. From that bully pulpit, for nearly twenty years Auxentius provided a vivid illustration of the meaning of imperial authority over the Church. He never bothered to learn the Latin language, recognized no ecclesial authority other than his own, and presented a powerful threat to the freedom of the Church. The alternative was the ecclesial authority exercised at Nicaea. In short order, the Latin bishops chose it. Eusebius of Vercelli and Lucifer of Cagliari in Sicily led the way, and paid the price: seven years of exile from their dioceses. .
Athanasius learned on his return to Alexandria of an ad hoc alliance between his pro-Nicene, anti-Arian suffragans and the anti-Arian schismatic Alexandrine homoiousians at the Council of Seleucia. It led him to hope, even to anticipate, that the homoousian bishhops’ still subordinationist understanding of the treis hypostases, was sufficiently mitigated by their faith in the divinity of Jesus the Lord as to induce in them a recognition that only the Nicene Creed sufficed to uphold their faith in the divinity of Christ. As he had pointed out to the homoiousians in the De synodis, 53, and would continue to insist, there can be no medium between the Nicene homoousion and the neo-Arian (Eunomian) heteroousion, which is applicable solely to a creature.[560] Consequently, knowing the homoiousian’s faith in the full divinity of the Christ to be at odds with their lingering sympathy with the Eusebian subordinationism, he hoped to wean them from their theology. To this end he pointed out, in the Tome to the Antiochenes, that the treis hypostaseis language to which they were committed need not entail a subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, and that in fact it was entirely compatible with the Nicene homoousion, which he had come to realize need not be read in the subordiationist sense insisted on by the Eusebians.
Therefore he found reason to hope that many of the homoiousion community, those committed to the divinity of the Son and the Spirit, had in fact abandoned their subordinationism and were therefore ready to accept the Nicene Creed, with its inclusion of the Holy Spirit within the Church’s Trinitarian faith. Rallying his few surviving loyal suffragans to this cause at the Council of Alexandria, along with two Occidental bishops, Lucifer of Cagliari and Eusebius of Vercelli, in company with a Bishop Asterius, from an Arabian diocese, he transformed this prospect into a program whose full expression is the Tome to the Antiochenes.
However, the project of the Tome had been doomed from the outset. Lucifer’s characteristically decisive but allegedly irregular consecration of Paulinus, the leader of the Eustathian minority in Antioch. This consecration of the leader of the Eustathian resistance to the Arian and quasi-Arian bishops who succeeded to the See of Antioch after Eustathius’ deposition and exile has generally been thought to have realized, made actual and concrete, a schism in Antioch between the Eustathians and the homoiousians which until then had been merely potential. While Athanasius’ hope for the conversion of the Antiochene homoiousians was definitively disappointed by the calling of the Council of Antioch in 363, which purported to affirm the Nicene homoousios but did so only by assimilating it to the homoiousian subordinationism, there is no basis for supposing that the homoiousian clergy would ever accept the authority of Nicaea. Their founder, Basil of Ancyra, had accepted the ecclesial authority of the emperor Constantius as a matter of course, and rejected the authority of the Council of Nicaea. This forced him to seek a political alternative to the Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father, which could only be a denial of the Trinity. The consequent subordinationism of the homoiousian party was for them a political necessity; they were unable even to consider accepting the Nicene Creed.
Before bypassing Alexandria and immediately departing the Thebaid for Antioch, Lucifer delegated two of his deacons, Herennius and Agapetus, to represent him at the Council of Alexandria. Paulinus, although a priest, had become the leader of the few pro-Nicene Christians in Antioch. These were a relatively tiny group of Eustathian loyalists who, over the thirty-odd years since Eustathius’ deposition by the Eusebians, had refused to recognize any other Bishop of Antioch. Particularly, they refused to recognize Meletius. Paul, their leader, sent two deacons, Maximos and Kalerimos, as his representatives at the Council which Athanasius had called.
Meletius had been appointed to the See of Antioch in 360 by the influence of homoean bishops close to Constantius, only to be exiled a year later for having deliveed an insufficiently homoean homily before Constantius and his palace bishops.[561] He returned a year later. During this brief exile from Antioch, Meletius had been replaced by Euzoios, an Arian who was unacceptable to the homoiousian majority at Antioch and yet more so to the minority party of Eustathian homoousions. The homoiousians favored Meletius, and had been awaiting his return. When a year later, in 362, Meletius was released from his exile by Julian’s decree and returned to Antioch, he immediately supplanted Euzoios, whom he had previouly attacked for his extreme Arianism, indicating thereby that, whatever were Meletius’ theological position, he did uphold the divinity of the Son, although on Eusebian rather than Nicene principles, for he did not accept the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father. Having easily displaced Euzoios, whose Arianism he had already attacked with sufficient vigor to have won the approval of the homoiousian majority in Antioch, Meletius was restored to the See of Antioch by the authority of the emperor Julian. The homoiousian clergy of Antioch thereafter gathered around him. They had earlier accepted him as the bishop of Antioch despite his homoean antecedents, which he was known clearly to have renounced in 361 and to have been punished by Constantius for doing so.
The pro-Nicene Eustathians led by Paulinus refused to accept Melitius as they had refused to accept Euzoios, by reason of his close association with the homoean court bishops, notably Acacius of Caesarea, Eustathius of Sebaste and Eudoxius of Constantinople, who had been given their sees by Constantius, and to whom Meletius owed his original appointment to the See of Antioch. For the same reasons as the Eustathians, Athanasius of Alexandria refused recognize Meletius as the authentic bishop of Antioch, a judgement which would be vindicated when Meletius called the Council of Antioch in 363. There he attempted to meld the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, with the anti-Trinitarian homoiousianism, at once subordinationist and implicitly binitarian, of Basil of Ancyra, who understood his homoios kata ousian to be a “single concept of likeness,” applicable only to the Son.
The Eustathians, loyal to the memory of Eustathius, upheld the doctrine of Nicaea, as also did Athanasius, by that particular stress upon the Nicene doctrine of absolute unity of the divine substance, “mia ousia ,” fidelity to which had issued in Eustathius’ condemnation as a Sabellian, his deposition and exile by Constantine, and his death in exile. This stress upon the Nicene doctrine of the absolute unity of the divine substance had been emphasized eighteen years after Nicaea in the putative “Western Creed” of the Council of Serdica in 343, perhaps influenced by Marcellus, the deposed bishop of Ancyra who had attended it with Athanasius.
The emphasis of the Western bishops at Sardica upon the unity of the divine substance may have been sufficient to persuade some of the Eustathians to rely upon the authority of that Council rather than the authority of the Creed of Nicaea, although this flies in the face of Eustathius’ loyalty to Nicaea, recognized three years later by Athanasius when in 346, visiting Antioch during a brief period when he still had some hope of a peaceful relation with Constantius, he sought from him a church of their own in Antioch, bur without success.
Athanasius’ Tome provides some ambiguous evidence on this point: particularly, it requires the addressees of the Tome, those bishops selected as its emissaries to the Antiochenes, and the Eustathian delegates sent to the Council of Alexandria by Paulinus, to disavow the doctrinal authority of the “Creed of Serdica,” and to rely exclusively upon the doctrine of Nicaea [562]. This requirement may be understood to have been directed at the Eustathians in Antioch, supposing them to have been tempted prefer the Western Creed of Serdica over the Nicene Creed : Annick Martin, upon whose massive and comprehensive study of Athanasius’s episcopacy this summary is heavily reliant, has particularly stressed this interpretation of the Tome’s demand that the authority of the Council of Serdica be denied.
On the other hand, Athanasius had been in communion with the Eustathians since his attempt in 346 to obtain a church for them in Antioch from an unwilling Constantius, further, in the Tome, he refers with satisfaction to their long-sustained doctrinal consensus with him. [563]
Lucifer, the Bishop of Cagliari in Sicily, had been exiled by Constantius first to Palestine, then to the Thebaid, the semi-desert area southeast of Alexandria, after refusing to condemn Athanasius at the Council of Milan. Eusebius of Vercelli had been similarly exiled to the Thebaid after the Council of Milan, where he had insisted on the authority of the Nicene Creed. A third exiled bishop, Asterius, an Oriental from Arabia, had been deposed by Eusebian influence and exiled to the Thebaid after siding with the Western bishops at Serdica. They had each been released from their exiles by Julian’s decree, and so were free to attend the Council of Alexandria which Athanasius had just called and to which his few remaining pro-Nicene suffragan bishops had been summoned. However, Lucifer decided not to accompany Eusebius of Vercelli and Asterius of Arabia to Alexandria for the Council; rather, after delegating two of his deacons, Herennius and Agapetus, to represent him at the Council, he travelled directly to Antioch. Prof. Martin understands Lucifer and Paulinus to have been the selected agents with whom Eusebius of Vercelli and Asterius, the emissaries of the message of the Tome, were to cooperate in so reforming the Eustathian party in Antioch as to enable them persuasively to address the Meletian homoiousians who, Martin believes, presented a lesser obstacle than the Eustathians themselves to the acceptance of the Nicene Creed as the only possible basis for union. Prof. Martin supposes Athanasius by his rejection of the doctrinal authority of the Council of Serdica to have required the Eustathians definitively to dissociate themselves from its so-called Western Creed, apart from which they would be rejected by as Sabellians by the homoiousian party in Antioch.[564] On the other hand, the Tome requires that the Meletian homoiousians understand themselves, in affirming the Nicene Creed, to affirm the divinity of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit’s consubstantiality with the Father and the Son. The divinity of the Spirit, understood to be that of a distinct hypostasis, had been ignored and implicitly rejected by Basil of Ancyra, the founder of the homoiousian party and the author of its doctrine; it would be particularly rejected by the Pneumatomachians among them. In 362 their heresy was only beginning to emerge, although it had long been latent in the homoiousian reservation of the homoios kat’ousian to the Son. Their denial of the Personal divinity of the Holy Spiritt was first condemned in the Tome to the Antiochenes. In the same year, Didymus of Alexandria, long a teacher in the School of Alexandria and perhaps for a time its head, upon being alerted by Athanasius’ Letters to Serapion, published his own defense of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. This work became known to the West by way of the Latin translation, De Spiritu Sancto, provided by Jerome, who had been a student of Didymus. Athanasius had been alerted to the Pneumatomachian heresy during his third exile by his correspondence with Serapion of Thmuis, whose diocese was troubled by its appearance among the schismatic Alexandrine homoiousians in the Delta sometime before 355, the date of Athanasius’ first reply to Serapion.
The Council of Alexandria’s commitment to Nicene orthodoxy has its full expression in the Tome to the Antiochenes, written at the close of the Council by Athanasius in collaboration with Eusebius of Vercelli and Asterius of Arabia. Athanasius had long been the foremost upholder among the Oriental bishops of the “one hypostasis” doctrine of Nicaea—the affirmation of the absolute unity of the divine substance, as foundational for the Nicene definition of the homoousios of the Son with the Father, and for the consequent condemnation of the Arian heresy.[565] The Nicene insistence upon the absolute unity of God was heard by Eusebius of Caesarea and the bishops adherent to his subordinationism as a Sabellian identification of the Father, Son and Spirit.[566] Annick Martin believes that among the Eustathian party a fair number were in fact led by their adherence to the Council of Serdica to a doctrine which she has read as close to Sabellianism.[567] However, this cannot be said of Paulinus, nor of the deacons whom he sent as his delegates to Alexandria. If Basil of Caesarea’s condemnation of the Eustathians as Sabellian, root and branch, did not entirely lack justification, it is still difficult to dissociate his animus against the Eustathian “mia ousia ” from his own homoiousian background. The Eustathians were of course so named for upholding the tradition of the eminently pro-Nicene Eustathius of Antioch, whose condemnation as Sabellian by the pro-Arian Eusebius of Caesarea ca. 327 can no more be taken seriously than can his condemnation of the Nicene Creed. .
Prof. Martin’s suspicion—for it is no more—,that Eustathius, the bishop of Antioch, the city in which, sixty years earlier, Paul of Samosata’s modalism had been condemned, where he would himself be similarly condemned well before the Council of Serdica, had so stressed the Nicene “mia ousia , mia hypostasis,” as to permit the inference that he understood the Nicene homoousios in a modalist or Sabellian manner, is untenable[568]. It amounts to maintaining that in fact Eustathius did not subscribe to the definition of the Personal consubstantiality of the only-begotten Son with the Father, as defined at Nicaea, but rather understood the Son’s consubstantiality to be impersonal, i.e., substantial, with the divine substance rather than with the Father. For this, there is no evidence whatever, nor did Eusebius offer any in his assault upon Eustathius. The only evidence of Eustathius’ Sabellianism is that his bitterest enemy, once vested with the imperial authority of a court bishop, insisted on so interpreting the Nicene homoousios and, on that ground and solely with that authority condemned Eustathius for being one of its most outspoken supporters, at Nicaea and thereafter to his deposition and death in exile shortly thereafter. If Athanasius had so understood him, his support of the Eustathian party in Antioch twenty years later is without explanation. For both of the two Eusebii, as for Arius, the divine substance could only be a Monas: their cosmological fixation rendered a substantial Trinitas unthinkable. Paul of Samosata had been condemned twice at Councils of Antioch for that Sabellian identification of each of the divine Persons with the divine substance. The charge that Eustathius, the archbishop of of Antioch, the dominant diocese in Syria and Palestine, would have failed to recognize that famous heresy precisely as heretical, cannot be sustained. Eustathius upheld the Nicene definition of the substantial unity of the Trinity (“mia ousia ,” “mia hypostasis”) in its condemnation of Arius, and the Creed’s dogmatic affirmation of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father. There is no evidence that Eustathius ever wavered on thesed points, and no reason to believe Athanasius to have thought either him or his disciples to have done so. Suspicion of heresy, unsustained by evidence, is itself suspect.
Athanasius’ principled rejection of the Eusebian subordinationism, his trademark insistence upon the mia hypostasis of the Trinity, is at one with Eustathius’ mia ousia . If Eustathius is suspect of Sabellianism, no less is Athanasius, which is absurd. Both men adamantinely refused, during and after the Council of Nicaea, equation of the Nicene homoousios and Sabellianism. Their refusl drew upon each the enmity of most of the Oriental bishops and, of course, , of Constantius, which became evident after the killing of Constans, the pro-Nicene Augustus of the West, in 350.
Athansius’ firm ally at the Council, Macarius of Jerusalem, died sometime prior to the Eusebian attempt to depose Athanasius at the Synod of Tyr in 335. With the condemnation of Marcellus in the year following, practically the whole of the Orient apart from Alexandria had submitted to Eusebius of Caesarea’s ruthless imposition of the subordinationism which brought him into close association with the powerful Arian court bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia. With Aetius and Eunomius, the Eusebian dissociation of the Son from the divinity of the Father became rationalized and explicit: its rigorous logic left no possibility of compromise, whether homoean or homoiousion. As Athanasius insisted in the De synodis after the debacles of Ariminium and Seleucia, there is no room for manoeuvre between identity of substance, homoousios, and difference of substance, heterousios. It is curious that the Arians could see this so clearly, but the homoiousians could not. This failure, or refusal, of the homoiousians to reognize the doctrinal indispensability of the homoousion goes far to explain why Athanasius’ rock-solid commitment to the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father throughout the whole of his episcopacy was so unavailing as to be vindicated only at I Constantinople, where the Eusebian resistance to the Nicene “homoousion” finally collapsed for lack of imperial support. Its subordinationism lingers still in the Orient, and to an extent in the Occident, as has been seen.[569]
Annick Martin has pointed out that Athanasius saw in the doctrinal and theological division of the Oriental Church following the death of Constantius in 361,scarcely a year after his imposition of homoeanism upon the empire, an opportunity to restore the homoiousian Christians to Nicene orthodoxy.[570] The homoiousian anti-Arians were then for the most part gathered at the ancient See of Antioch, awaiting Bishop Meletius’ return from exile.[571] Athanasius, intent on taking full advantage of their disarray, upon his return to Alexandria early in 362, immediately the Council of Alexandria.
He had recognized, in his De synodis, that the majority of the Oriental bishops had rejected Arianism, as they had long rejected Sabellianism, and that many of them had perceived in the homoean doctrine imosed by Constantius a year earlier only another way of being Arian. Antioch, the center of the Syrian Church and the most ancient of the Oriental dioceses, was serving as a rallying point for the homoiousian bishops whose compromise, devised by Basil of Ancyra; between the Nicene homoousios and the Arian homoios, seemed to afford a means of opposing the homoean Arianism while continuing to condemn the Nicene Creed as Sabellian. As we have seen, prior to the Council of Rimini, Hilary of Poitiers, a close associate of Basil of Ancyra from 356 to 360, had high hopes that it would succeed.
For a short time, Valens and Ursacius, Constantius’s theological advisors vice the deceased Eusebius of Nicomedia. had approved the homoiousian compromise, probably cynically, for almost immediately they withdrew their approval. Seeing in it a device by which their enemies ;might be divided, they persuaded Constantius entirely to change the ecumenical council which, at the request of Basil of Ancyra, he had just approved, by dividing it into two regional councils, both to meet in 359; the Western bishops at Rimini on the east coast of the Italian peninsula, the Oriental bishops at Seleucia on the southern coast of Phrygia, thus eliminating any occasion for collaboration between East and West.
With the opposition thus divided, Valens and Ursacius promoted Constantius’ program for the achieving the religious unity of the empire by the imposition on each of the regional councils of the lightly-camouflaged homoean Arianism, presented as a compromise between Arianism and orthodoxy. They succeeded in forcing the homoiousian majority at Seleucia to subscribe to the homoean creed; and were similarly successful by deceit and coercion in persuading the pro-Nicene majority at Rimini, even the Ossius of Cordoba then past ninety, also to accept the homoean doctrine. In the following year, 360, to consolidate this achievement, Constantius called the Council of Constantinople, by which homoeanism was officially imposed upon the whole of the Empire, and dissident bishops exiled.
At Seleucia the schismatic Miletian bishops, whose predecessors had allied themselves with Eusebius of Nicomedia, had over the ensuing quarter cenury become homoiousian and anti-Arian, had formed a pro-tem alliance with the few pro-Nicene Alexandrine bishops who, deposed and exiled by Constantius’ decree of 360, were with them attending the Council of Seleucia. On their return to Alexandria, the pro-Nicene bishops immediately informed Athanasius of this anti-Arian alliance. The information heightened his hope, even his expectation, that the Antiochene homoiousians could be persuaded to accept the Nicene Creed as the principle of ecumenical union.
Constantius died in 361, a year after the Council of Constantinople, after willing control of the empire to his already rebellious cousin, Julian, whose hidden desire to see paganism restored throughout the empire led him, once enthroned, to cancel the depositions and exiles of the homoousian and homoiousian bishops which had been ordered by Constantius at the close of the Council of Constantinople. Julian hoped that the exiled bishops, once returned to their Sees, would launch an internecine struggle against the Arians whom Constantius had appointed to replace them, with the consequent destruction of both of these Christian sects. This program entirely failed in the diocese of Alexandria, the loyalty of whose people, clergy and monks to Athanasius had if anything been strengthened by the conduct of the Arian usurper of that See, George of Cappadocia, who had been killed by a mixed mob of the Christians and pagans whom he had mercilessly persecuted. His demise left Athanasius an untroubled return to his See, where he remained untroubled long enough to call the Council of Alexandria, and to compose and publish its Tome to the Antiochenes. By that time however, although the pagan emperor Julian had not much mourned the death of George of Cappadocia, whom he regarded as a Christian,.he was incensed to learn that Athanasius was effectively evangelizing prominent Alexandrines whom Lucian wished to bring back to paganism. Athanasius was forced to leave Alexandria and take refuge in a variety of parishes and monasteries quite near the city. Julian’s minions were unable for long to pursue him, for Julian was called to war upon a Sassanid intrusion, and died in a battle fought at Adrianople in 363. Athanasius was soon notified of Julian’s death, and of the accession of a Christian emperor, Jovian. He immediately set out for Antioch, where Jovian was resident, to respond to a request, sent by Jovian to all the major Sees, requiring of each of their bishops a statement of their faith. There were several claimants to the See of Alexandria, a couple had arisen during Athanasius’ latest exile by Julian, but Athanasius was chiefly concerned to speak to Jovian and make to him the case for Nicene orthodoxy which he knew would be contersted by the host of Arian, Homoean, and Homoiousian bishops eager to win Jovian’s confirmation in office. But Athanasius was there before them: in dprsenting his Letter to Jovian he made the case for the faith of the Nicene Creed to Jovian with a clarity sufficient to obtain from his full approval, expressed concretely in his confirmation of Athanasius in his See of Alexandria. He dismissed the other petitions with little ceremony, including a sophisticated creed proposed by Meletius, around whom the homoiousians had gathered, and whose legitimacy they endorsed, closing ranks in response to Lucifer of Cagliari’s irregular consecration of Paulinus.The Western addressees of the Tome, Lucifer and Eusebius of Vercelli, had departed Antioch to return to their Sees; the three Oriental bishops make their peace with Meletius, who called in 363 the Council of Antioch, whose doctrine had been anticipated in his own letter to Jovian. In brief, he professed faith in the Nicene Creed, and specifically in the homoousion of the Son with the Father, but understanding the homoousion of the Son as a similarity of substance, not an identity, as Athanasius had forseen. There was no possibility that the Eustathians under their new Bishop, Paulinus, would accept this deformation of the Nicene Creed; neither of course would Athanasius, who responded to it by recognizing Paulinus as the legitimate bishop of Antioch; .
Athanasius would not return to Alexandria until 364. By the time of his arrival in Antioch in late 362, the Antiochene schism had already solidified; it would end only with the Eustathian recognition, ca. 414, of Alexander as the legitimate bishop of Antioch, on a day of great celebration.
Thus restored to their Sees, without the imperial unity which since the Council of Serdica they had understood to be ecclesial as well as political, the homoiousians in Antioch now, faute de mieux, looked to the homoean or quasi-homoean Bishop Meletius for some semblance of unity, of communion. He also had just returned to the diocese of Antioch from which, in 360, he also had been exiled by reason of having preached before a congregation including Constantius a homily manifesting inappropriately homoiousian persuasions. [572] Meletius’ return to Antioch in 362 appeared to the homoiousian bishops and clergy to afford an opportunity to recover an ecclesial unity until now thought dependent upon imperial sanction, but Melitius had been able to return because the new emperor, Julian, had cancelled the exiles of non-homoean bishops which his predecessor had decreed. With the death of Julian in the same year, and the appointment of Jovian, the prospect opened, so it seemed, of a unity more ecclesial than political, founded on an assimilation of the Nicene homoiousios to the homoiousian homoios kat’ousian formula. Because this assimilation still understood the Nicene Creed to be a Sabellian document, the unity in prospect looked still to an imperial approval, hoping to obtain it from Jovian:
By this time however, the fracture of the Eusebian religious unity between Arian and anti-Arian enclaves, the sustaining political unanimity also had fractured. The imperial homoeanism inadequately camouflaged the underlyng Arianism of Eusebius of Nicomedia, which itself had fractured, for: the radically rationalized hetero-ousian doctrine of Aetius and Eunomius had alienated many who had been content with the homoean camouflage, but could not accept this flat denial of the divinity of Christ.
The Antiochene homoiousians, anti-Arian in their refusal of the radical Arianism of Aetius and Eunomius, and of the homoean “compromise” with Arianism offered by Constantius and his court bishops, sought a yet further compromise in loyalty to Meletius, who tried to bridge the gap between his homoean associates such as Acacius of Caesarea and the Nicene Creed.
Athanasius totally disagreed with this ultimately political project: ecclesial unity could only be doctrinal and, as doctrinal, could only be ecclesial, which is to say, Nicene. He wrote his Tome to the Antiochenes in the hope of persuading the homoiousian anti-Arians in Antioch of the necessity of basing their ecumenical hopes on a universal subscription to the faith proclaimed by the Council of Nicaea in the Nicene Creed. He addressed the Tome to five bishops, the intended emissaries of the Tome to its prospective Antiochene audience, the homoiousian community. Two of the addressees, Eusebius of Vercelli and Asterius of Arabia, had been in attendance at the Council of Alexandria, and assisted in the composition of the Tome. The other three, Lucifer of Cagliaria and two pro-Nicene Oriental bishops who, during the Council, had remained in Antioch, were also addressed as emissaries of the message of the Tome to the Antiochene homoousian anti-Arians, similarly charged with the communication of its invitation in such wise as to move the homoiousions to discover among themselves and to elect a Nicene bishop, although certainly not Meletius, who would serve as the unifying authority of a common subscription to the doctrine of Nicaea, which Anathasius had long known to be the sole possible principle of doctrinal unity of the Antiochene Christians, simply because it is that of the Church as such.
The homoiousian majority of the Oriental bishops in Antioch customarily gathered for worship “ἐν τῇ παλαιᾷ” [573], literally “at the old:” a reference to the “old place,” meaning the central district of Antioch where the “old Church” was located and which, nominally held by Meletius’ replacement, the Arian Euzoios, would be reoccupied by Meletius upon his return from exile in 362. Once in place, Meletius, along with the rest of the Antiochenes, simply ignored and overrode Euzoios. However, the Tome’s reference to “the old” in the Tome identifies the homoiousian community by its customary gathering at this ancient place of worship, without reference to Bishop Meletius, in whom Athanasius had found no possibility of bcoming the center of Nicene orthodoxy in Antioch. Although the homoiousians accepted Meletius’s authority as the bishop of Antioch, the Nicene homoousions in council at Alexandria, notably the authors of the Tome, Athanasius, Eustathius of Vercelli and Asterius from Arabia, as well as Lucifer of Cagliari, refused recognize him as the legitimate archbishop of Antioch. The Tome deliberately avoids any reference to Meletius, although the official bishop of Antioch, for had never dissociated himself from the homoean Arianism of the court bishops to whom he owed his appointment. Contaminated by that association, he could never serve as the rallying center of the conversion of the homoiousian bishops to the Creed of Nicaea. Athanasius, mistrusting his antecedents and more than doubtful of his orthodoxy, regarded him as entirely unqualified for the project of leading the hommoiousian community at Antioch into Nicene orthodoxy, ing the homoiousiaby which conversion the confessional unity he sought with the Antiochenes would be possible. Dismissing Meletius from consideration, the Tome addressed those who worship Ἐν τῆ παλαιᾷ: homoiousians who clearly reject Arianism together with its radical restatement by Aetius and Eunomius, and who consequently may be understood to affirm, suo modo, the divinity of Jesus the Son, but who still reject, as Sabellian, the Nicene affirmations of the homoousion of the Son and its correlative, the indivisible unity of the Triune God.
Athanasius regarded the homoiousian anti-Nicenism as due largely to an lis de verbis,generated by the profusion of credal affirmations which had produced the confusion manifest in the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia. There the majority of the bishops of the West and the East alike had been coerced and deceived into signing homoean creeds despite their common conviction of the divinity of the Christ.[574] Athanasius hoped to use this common conviction that Jesus is Lord as the foundation for their conversion to the Nicene Creed, convinced beyond all doubt that the homoiousian alternative to the Nicene homoousion denies what it would affirm.
To this end, the unification of the Oriental Church around a return to Nicene orthodoxy, Athanasius gathered in the Council his fourteen surviving pro-Nicene suffragans, first in order to manifest their solidarity with his own unqualified adherence to the Nicene definitions of the substantial unity of the Trinity, of the Personal homoousion of the divine Son with the Father, and the Creeds recognition of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. The doctrinal unanimity of the bishops assembled at Alexandria enabled Athanasius to take advantage of the perceived opportunity to unify aroumd this Nicene consensus the contesting homoiousian Christians in Antioch, where they had gathered around bishop Meletius, recently returned from exile.[575] The Alexandrine bishops were joined in their Nicene consensus by Eusebius of Vercelli who, with Lucifer of Cagliari had been exiled by Constantius to the Thebaid a decade earlier, and another similarly exiled Oriental bishop, Asterius of Arabia, who had aligned himself with the Western bishops at the Council of Serdica twenty years earlier and been exiled with them.by the Oriental majority These bishops, together with two deacons, Maximos and Kalerimos, sent to the Council of Alexandria as his representatives by Paulinus, the priest who was the leader of the Eustathians in Antioch and had remained there, and another two deacons, Herennius and Agapetus, similarly deputed by Lucifer of Cagliari, who had himself gone directly to Antioch instead of accompanying , Eusebius and Asterius to Alexandria, constituted the Council of Alexandria.
After the deposition of Eustathius around 327, the bishops appointed to the patriarchal See of Antioch were were either Arian or homoean down to the appointment of Meletius in 360. His appointment was due to the influence of homoean bishops, but in 361, having exhibiting homoiousian tendencies in a sermon delivered before Constantius, he was exiled by Constantius. He was replaced as bishop of Antioch, briefly, by an Arian bishop, Euzoios. When a year later, in 362, Meletius was released from his exile by Julian’s decree and returned to his diocese, he supplanted Euzoios, whom he had previouly attacked for his extreme Arianism, indicating thereby that, whatever Meletius’ theological position, he did uphold the divinity of the Son, although on Eusebian rather than Nicene principles, for he did not accept the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousion of the Son
The pro-Nicene Antiochenes, called Eustathians by reason of their loyalty to the long-since deposed and exiled Eustathius, had refused to recognize Euzoios as they had refused to recognize any of Eustathius’s successors/ They refused also to recognize Meletius upon his return to Antioch. The Eustathians considered Antioch to have been without a bishop since the trial and deposition of Eustathius in 327 or a few years later. Athanasius had long recognized their Nicene orthodoxy and, in 346, during the brief period in which Constantius had been distracted from his persecution of the pro-Nicene bishops, had attempted to persuade him to provide the Eustathians with a church in Antioch, although without success. He knew them to be unwaveringly pro-Nicene.
During their thirty-five years of resistance to the Arian or homoean bishops of Antioch, and of enduring continuing persecution by them, the number of Eustathians had dwindled from an original majority to a small minority which, in the absence of a pro-Nicene bishop, had come to be led by a priest, Paulinus, whom Athanasius regarded as a firm ally. It is thus that Paulinus’ delegates were welcome at the Council of Alexandria. They affirmed the homoousion of the Son, as Eustathius had affirmed it at the Council of Nicaea and, following Eustathius, particularly stressed its correlative, the “one hypostasis” (mia ousia ) doctrine, for insistence upon which Eustathius had been condemned as a Sabellian. They themselves were similarly condemned in 362 by their opposite numbers in Antioch, the homoiousian bishops, particularly Basil of Caesarea. . It is consequently noteworthy that Paulinus’ delegates to the Council of Alexandria made no objection to the Tome’s condemnation of Sabellianism. Together with the delegates of Lucifer of Cagliary, they signed the Tome. Their condemnation as Sabellian by Basil of Caesarea reflects the Eusebian subordinationism of the homoiousians, evidenced also by the emergence of Pneumatomachianism among them.
The homoiousians had been so named for their recent rejection of the Nicene homoousion as Sabellian, and their substitution for it, by Basil of Ancyra, of a novel doctrine of the Son’s “similarity of substance,” with that of the Father: “homoios kat’ousian.”[576]. The “homoiousian” label neatly named at once their rejection of the Nicene doctrine of the absolute unity of the divine substance as Sabellian, a rejectioon all but unanimous in the Orient since it had first been insisted upon by Eusebius of Caesarea. At the same time, their subscription to the “homoios kat’ousian”:distinguished their doctrine from the homoean interpretation of the Eusebian subordinationism, and yet more from its rationalization by Aetius and Eunomius. As had Basil of Ancyra, the homoiousians rejected the Nicene doctrine of the “one hypostasis” (mia ousia ) of the Trinity, but with some ambiguity for, although the hypostasis and ousia had been used as equivalents by the Council of Nicaea, they had earlier been distinguished by Origen who, with particular application to his Trinitarian theology, referred the Stoic term, “hypostasis,” to the distinct subsistences within the Trinity, equivalently the Trinitarian Persons, and referred“ousia ” to the divine essence comprising them. Thus for Origen the Trinitarian hypostases are the Father, the Son and the Spirit.
However, with the rise of the Eusebian corruption of the doctrine of Origen into a Trinitarian subordinationism having no ground in Origen’s theology, there arose a continuing confusion among the Eusebian subordinationists over whether “hypostasis” should apply to the substantial and supposedly monadic unity of God as Father-Monas, or to one of what is three in God: the Father, the Son and the Spirit. The homoiousian party, basically subordinationist, affirmed “three hypostases“ in the Trinity but, having understood “hypostasis” in the Eusebian or subordinationist sense,could provide no way of distinguishing the Father, the Son and the Spirit which did not entail either denying their substantial equality or asserting their personal identity. Consequently, they understood the Nicene assertion of the equality or co-divinity of the Father, Son and Spirit to require their identification at the level of substance. Thus they rejected: the Nicene ascription of mia hypostasis, mia ousia ,” to the Trinity as a Sabellian reduction of the three hypostases to a Monas, and so as a denial of the three hypostases in God.
The homoiousian party at Antioch therefore regarded the Eustathians as Sabellians: Basil of Caesarea, their dominant theologian, continued that condemnation, whose only justification was a radical failure to recognize the free unity of the Trinity: i.e., to understand that the Trinity, the divine substance, is a free community of free Persons.
The communitarian reality of the divine substance had been intimated by the Greek Apologists, notably in the use of trias by Theophilus of Antioch; it was taught at the end of the same second century by Tertullian, and entered the Alexandrine tradition in Origen’s recognition of the relational unity of the Father and the Son. Unable to account for the distinction of the Spirit, Origen nonetheless affirmed the distinct divinity of the Spirit as affirmed by the faith of the Church.[577] Basil of Caesarea, the leading proponent of the homoiousian theology from his elevation to the episcopacy of Caesarea in 360, appears never to have clearly understood the Nicene doctrine of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son and the consequent substantial unity of the Trinity. This is to say that he never grasped that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, not with the one God. Basil’s support of Meletius’ melding of the Nicene homoousios and the homoiousios at the Council of Antioch in 363 is anticipated in his Ninth Letter, written in 361. As has been seen; this confusion continued to his death.[578]
The homoiousian party, i.e., the Antiochenes who, gathering at “the Old,” regarded Meletius as the legitimate bishop of Antioch, were repelled at once by the radically rationalized Arianism, the ‘hetero-ousianism,’ of Aetius and Eunomius, and by the Arian homoeanism represented by Eudoxius of Constantinople and Acacius of Caesarea. Nonetheless they remained under Eusebian influence, continuing to read the Nicene homoousion as inherently Sabellian, and willing to recognize in Meletius the legitimate bishop of Antioch, despite his homoean associations.
Basil of Caesarea saw in Meletius the only possible source of unity for the Oriental Church, and even for the Church at large, but was unable to persuade Athanasius to accept communion with Meletius. The difference between them is perhaps best understood as ecclesiological. Basil was willing to negotiate doctrinal differences, implicitly to politicize them. Athanasius was not, He held as paramount the authority of the teaching Church, refusing the negotiation of it for political ends first proposed to him by Constantine and repeated by his successors.
As to the homoiousians whom the emissaries of the Council of Alexandria hoped to find open to ecclesial communion with the pro-Nicenes, their conversion had as its pre-requisite their explicit subscription to the homoousion of the Son with the Father, together with their explicit recognition of the divinity of the Spirit, which was then being denied by the Pneumatomachians among them, as Athanasius had learned from Serapion of Thmuis a few years earlier. Athanasius understood the doctrine of the divinity of the Spirit[579] to be contained in the inclusion of the Holy Spirit in the object of the faith set out in the Nicene Creed: if “implicit” there, it is made explicit in the Tome only to the extent of affirming that the Spirit is not a creature, and that He possesses the ousia of the Son. Athanasius had by this time developed a Trinitarian doctrine of treis hypostaseis, mia ousia , without having found it necessary to resolve the question of the manner of differentiation between the treis hypostaseis: no vocabulary adequate to that task was yet in hand, as it had not been for Marcellus.[580] His steadfast adherence to the Nicene “mia hypostasis” entailed the consubstantiality of the Names of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, whose divinity was not in issue. It has been noted that he rarely used “homoousios” in this connection, but he found no need to do so, it sufficed that the “mia ousias” of the Trinity be affirmed.
The intended audience of the Tome is not obvious, as.Prof. Martin’s account of its audience has shown. The chief author of the Tome is of course Athanasius, assisted by Eusebius of Vercelli, who had been exiled for refusing to condemn Athanasius at the Council of Milan in 355, and by Asterius, the Oriental bishop from Arabia who had been exiled by reason of having agreed with the Occidental bishops at the Council of Serdica in 343. Its explicit audience is simply its named addressees: Eusebius of Vercelli, Lucifer of Cagliaris, Asterius of Arabia, Kymatius of Paltus, and Anatolius of Beroia.
As Athanasius indicated later in his Letter to Rufianus,[581] the Antiochenes could unite only under a bishop whose loyalty to Nicaea was explicit. This criterion ruled out Meletius who, suspect of Arianism by reason of owing his appointment to the See of Antioch to leading members of the Arian establishment, Eudoxius of Constantinople and Acacius of Caesarea, was unacceptable by the pro-Nicene Eustathians. The demand of the Tome to the Antiochenes for doctrinal purity in the prospective leader of the Antiochenes did not rule out of consideration those Oriental bishops who, like some among the Occidentals at Rimini such as Ossius of Cordoba, after having subscribed to the homoean creed under pressure from the two Arian bishops, Valens and Ursacius, whose imperial authority carried the day by fraud and force at Seleucia as at Rimini, had thereafter rejected and repented of that weakness, and reaffirmed the faith of Nicaea. Sorting out the sheep from the goats required a certain acumen, but was not impossible. Human weakness was one thing, conversion to Arianism quite another. The Tome to the Antiochenes required no more of the anti-Arian Oriental bishops who might become Antiochene centers of Nicene orthodoxy than the condemnation of Arianism, Sabellianism, Gnosticism and Manichaeanism, the affirmation of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and subscription to the Nicene Creed.
On the other hand those bishops who were and remained in the imperial camp, homoeans whether by conviction or by ambition, were excluded from consideration. The Tome held that they should in fact be reduced to the lay state. Meletius of Antioch was such a bishop. His inability to unite the Antiochenes under the criteria set by the Tome to the Antiochenes was evident from his long association with and dependence upon the Arian bishops, Eudoxius of Constantinople and Acacius of Caesarea.
Martin considers the primary audience intended by the Tome to have been the Nicene Eustathians, those whose Nicene faith Athanasius knew never to have wavered from the beginning. It was through them that the Tome looked to achieve in Antioch the conversion of the anti-Arian homoiousians to the Nicene Creed which Athanasius thought now to be possible, once the petty theological lis de verbis was dropped and the incoherence of the homoiousion doctrine, as reductively heteroousian, recognized. However, as we have seen, Prof. Martin insists that the Tome required something on the order of a conversion of the Eustathians themselves to the Nicene Creed as prerequisite to their undertaking of that office. She is convinced that the Tome requires of them an explicit disavowal of what she regards as the quasi-Sabellianism of the Western Creed of Serdica which, thus read, would be alien to the unqualified commitment to the doctrine of Nicaea required by the Tome. The leader of the Eustathians, the priest Paulinus, was an ardent pro-Nicene and had long been a friend and ally of Athanasius, but Prof. Martin believes some of his followers, “disciples of Eustathius,” [582] to have based their opposition to Arianism upon the inadequate doctrine which she believes to have been pronounced at Serdica in 343, which affirmed the distinction between the divinity and the humanity of Christ without attention to his Personal unity; and which condemned as subordinationist the assertion of three hypostases in God. Eusebius of Caesarea had long taught a subordinationist interpretation of Origen’s “treis hupostases” and was been condemned for Arianism for so doing at the Council of Antioch in 325, a verdict upheld a month or two later by the Council of Nicaea; there is nothing startling in hearing that Eusebian heresy condemned at Serdica.
Thr Eustathian rejection of three hypostases in God is entirely in conformity with Nicaea’s mia ousia , mia hypostasis, and thus is at odds with the Letter of George of Laodicea which interpreted the homoiousian doctrine of the Council of Ancyra in 359 as teaching the existence of three hypostases in God.
The Tome had recognized the legitimacy of the attribution of three hypostases to God, but without canonizing it.[583] The supposed commitment of these Eustathians to Serdica not only supposes their stress on the Nicene mia hypostasis to savour of Sabellianism,[584] but also intimates their adherence to the doctrine of Council of Serdica ( a doctrine whose existence, by reason of a long loyalty to Athanasius, theEustathians would not have admitted in the first place) over the Nicene Council whose doctrine the Tome found indispensable. Thus Prof. Martin understands the Tome to have required of them the condemnation of Sabellianism and complete commitment to the doctrine of Nicaea as alone adequate to unity in the faith of the Church, and thus their forsaking their supposed allegiance to Serdica. Conformity to these prerequisites by the members of both Antiochene parties, the Eustathians and the homoiousions, was seen to be prerequisite to their commitment to the faith affirmed at Nicaea:. There would then remain, for the Eustathians and the homoiousian party, only their joint approval of a bishop of unquestioned Nicene orthodoxy capable of bringing together the Oriental bishops, Antiochene and Alexandrine.
Athanasius regarded the Antiochene homoiousian as prospects for conversion to the Nicene creed largely because on or before his own return to Alexandria he been informed of the ad hoc alliance of his own bishops with the homoiousian schismatics of his diocese against the Eunomians at Seleucia three years earlier, and so had come to interpret the anti-Arianism of most members of the homoiousian party as at least intimating a faith in the full divinity of Jesus the Lord. He proceeded in the Tome to point out, as he had earlier in the De synodis, the impossibility of attributing divinity to a Son who, as “similar in substance” to the Father’s substance, therefore is substantially different from the Father, and consequently cannot be divine.
However, the Antiochen homoiousians, assembling in the “old place,” there awaited Meletius’ return, and on his arrival accepted him as the bishop of Antioch, ignoring his reputation for sympathy with the imperial homoeanism, The homoousian doctrine had been proposed and promoted by Basil of Ancyra three years earlier in reaction to the homoean doctrine of the First Council of Sirmium. Basil was under the influence of the subordinationism of Eusebius of Caesarea, and thus relied upon the latter’s a priori rejection of of a Trinitarian divine substance which both of the “two Eusebii” had rejected at the Council of Nicaea as Sabellian, and which they thereafter continued to condemn as Sabellian. Their subordinationist interpretation of Origen’s treis hypostaseis in God required a divisible divine substance, entailing a tritheism which they could not consider affirming. The homoiousian subordinationism was only masked by Basil’s homoios kat’ousian. Athanasius’s Tome looked to the persuasion and conversion of the wavering homoiousian party to the faith of Nicaea. Prof. Martin has argued that, the Tome was a “gloss on Nicaea,” an exposition of its doctrine not intended by Athanasius and the members of his Council to go beyond the Nicene Creed, but rather to bring out its full content, not its further implication, which would amount to a development of its doctrine. Thus Prof. Martin maintains that the Tome, under the rubric of ‘gloss,’ affirmed the Nicene homoousios of the Son with the Father, and its doctrinal correlative, the absolute unity of the divine substance, but also, and in particular, explicitly affirmed the full divinity of the Spirit against the Pneumatomachians among the homoiousian party who as explicitly denied it, condemning them along with Egyptian “Tropikoi” whom Athanasius had earlier excommunicated.
The Tome condemns those doctrines which are incompatible with Nicaea: viz., the aforesaid denials of the Spirit’s divinity, the correlative Sabellian and Arian rejections of the homoousion of the Christ, as well as the more radical Gnostic denials of the Good creation as such and consequently of the Christian revelation and the Nicene Creed. These errors, condemned well before Nicaea, needed no refutation by the Tome; their inconsistency with the Nicene Creed is obvious, but the Tome emphasizes it nonetheless.
The Tome so insists upon the indispensability of the Nicene Creed as also to refuse to recognize an adequate profession of the faith of the Church in the sof-called Western Creed of the Council of Serdica, at which Athanasius had been present nearly twenty years earlier. Prof. Martin is convinced that some of the Eustathians had come so to regard it, on which account she explains the Tome’s insistence that doctrine expounded at Serdica cannot substitute for the doctrine of Nicaea, whose Creed can alone serve as the full expression of the faith of the Church and is alone capable of unifying the Christians in Antioch.
Thus the Tome’s intended audience, as Martin has shown, comprises two distinct parties, whose distinction each understood to be on the level of doctrine. In the first place, the Tome regards the Eustathian party, adherents to the “mia ousia ” of Eustathius, as capable of presenting the doctrine of the Tome—i.e., the Nicene Creed—to the homoiousians who were accustomed to gather in worship at the old church in the heart of Antioch over which the archbishop, Meletius, quasi-officially presided. However tempted by a quasi-Sabellian reading of the Western Creed of Serdica the Eustathians may have been, they alone of the Antiochenes had representatives at the Council of Alexandria. Paulinus, their leader, had sent two deacons to represent him and his party at the Council. Meletius of Antioch had not been invited to the Council; Athanasius did not recognize in him, a court bishop, consequently the ally of the Homoean establishment which Julian had not yet repudiated, the doctrinal orthodoxy prerequisite to the legitimate exercise of epicsopal authority whether at Antioch or elsewhere. The Eustathian deacons sent by Paulinus to the Council also refused to recognize in Meletius the legitimate bishop of Antioch. They had made no objection to the Tome’s rejection of the authority of the Council of Serdica in favour of the Council of Nicaea, nor did they express any affinity with the Sabellian interpretation of the “mia ousia ” which the Tome explicitly condemned. They simply signed the Tome.
Second but not secondarily, the Tome was aimed at the anti-Arians gathered at Antioch who not only did not accept the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Christ but condemned. also as Sabellian, the Eustathian stress upon its strict correlative, the absolute unity, “mia ousia ,” of the Trinity. These anti-Arians were members of the homoiousian party whose personal orthodoxy, i.e., professed belief in the full divinity of Christ, Athanasius had come to respect sufficiently to feed a hope that they might be persuaded to recognize in the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Christ with the Father the sole doctrinal affirmation capable of restoring unity to divided Church of Antioch. The anti-Arians whose conversion the Tome sought did not include the “Spirit fighters” within the homoiousian party; Athanasius read their denial of the divinity of the Spirit as simply Arian. Those who held to it were no more open to conversion to the faith of Nicaea upon which the Tome was intent than were those homoeans who denied or refused to affirm the divinity of the Son, and so were excluded them from those whom the Tome would address. Further, he considered the divinity of the Holy Spirit to have been settled at Nicaea as a fact no more open to discussion than any other element of the Church’s faith.
Athanasius knew that the doctrinal unity he sought, summarily subscription to the Nicene Creed, required a Nicene bishop, one whose adherence to the Creed was beyond question, who was thereby in communion with himself, the famously pro-Nicene bishop of Alexandria, and with the Church, thus an authentic voice of the faith of the Church upheld at Nicaea. He knew that the Catholic faith in the full divinity of Jesus the Lord, taught at Nicaea against Arius, could not be accommodated to the “homoios kat’ousian” of the homoiousion creed: he knew that its affirmation of a similarity in substance of the Son to the Father—a “homoios kat’ousian”—is inescapably also the affirmation of a difference in substance and therefore an implicit denial of the full divinity of the Son. He had used earlier in the De synodis the mutual exclusion of the Nicene “homoousios” and “hetero-ousios” to prove that the homoiousian denial of the homoousios of the Son with the Father affirms by immediate implication an absolute distinction between them on the level of substance, thus the “heteroousios,” of the radical Arianism of Aetius and Eunomius.
The homoiousions were in fact trapped in this dilemma. Although they had entirely rejected the Arian heresy, whose rationalist clarification by Aetius repelled them, particularly in that, as followers of Basil of Ancyra, they had already rejected the “homoean” effort at its amelioration, something more than logic would be required for their conversion. This “something more” was to have been provided by the preaching of the Council’s specified emissaries of the message of the Tome: the Nicene Creed. These emissaries, Eusebius of Vercelli and Asterius of Arabia who had attended the Council, and those addressees of the Tome and spokesmen for it who were already in place in Antioch, the two Syrian bishops, Kymatius of Paltus, and Anatolius of Beroia, both pro-Nicene. Lucius of Cagliari also was present in Antioch; he had sent his diaconal representatives to the Council, but forgone its personal attendance in order to travel directly to Antioch.
It is generally supposed that Athanasius’ argument that the Arianism of an Aetius is the sole alternative to affirming the homoousios of the Son defined at Nicaea, the only possible statement of the divinity of the Son, might well have succeeded had not Lucifer of Cagliari’s “impetuous” and “irregular” consecration of Paulinus to the episcopacy so radically altered the interrelation of the intended addressees of the Tome as to have made it obsolete on arrival. We have pointed out the flawed presupposition of this interpretation of Lucifer’s action and need not repeat them here.
On the other hand, although the logic of Athanasius’ invitation in the Tome to communion in the Catholic faith affirmed at Nicaea was impeccable, its unity was a free truth, not a necessity of thought, for the truth of the faith is historical and not cosmological, which is to say that it rested on the free foundation of the faith that Jesus is Lord, whereas the homoiousian faith was finally Parmenidean, i.e., in the logically necessary monadic unity of being and therefore of God, who cannot but be the Monas, the cosmological absolute Self.
The intellectual conversion which the Tome required of the homoiousians, that they accept the Trinitarian substance of God, thus that they affirm the indivisible divine ousia , comprising three nonetheless intrinsically distinct hypostases, was for many of them something of a Kierkegaardian “leap in the dark” for, given their unreflective, spontaneous commitment to the Eusebian subordinationism, the Council of Nicaea and the Tome affirmed what could not be true. This conviction had long since led them to accept the ecclesial authority of the emperor and the consequent politicization of the faith of the Church.
From the stance of Nicene orthodoxy, this is the basic heresy: to suppose the immanent necessities of cosmological rationality, of autonomous rationality, to be criteriological for what the Church may teach, and thus to constitute a higher truth than the truth of the faith that Jesus is the Lord.
Because cosmological rationality is a quest for the necessary causes, the necessary reasons intrinsic to nonhistorical truth; it possesses of itself no intrinsic capacity for conversion and so, of itself, can offer no basis for the requisite conversion to the free truth historically revealed in Christ, and no argument can provide it. At best, as the Tome urges, that ancient pessimism presents only the dilemma of “the one and the many,” whose resolution, as free, is incapable of reduction to a cosmological inference, which can only rest upon logical necessity, whereas the resolution of the dilemma is the faith that Jesus is the Lord, in whom the fullness of divinity and the fullness of humanity are Personally united. Conversion to this mystery can only be free, for the truth is free: it cannot be demonstrated.
There could be no alternative to this free conversion to the freedom of the truth of Christ taught at Nicaea except those which are regressions to “necessary reasons,” i.e., to the monist postulates proper to cosmology as such. These can only restate the original dilemma: one the one hand, the subordinationist denial of the Trinity, on the other, outright Sabellianism. This is the Eusebian alternative to the Nicene Creed.
The Nicene affirmation of the indivisible unity of the divine Substance, and the full divinity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, challenged by Arius with respect to the Son, and by the Macedonians and the Tropici with respect to the Spirit, concludes inexorably to the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and consequently, of the unity of the substance of the Son and the Spirit.
However, because the homoiousian party in Antioch, comprising the bishops who had now rejected the imperial homoean Arianism to which most of them had ascribed, arguably under pressure, at Seleucia in 359, but who still adhered to the Eusebian subordinationism as a necessity of thought, were disposed thereby to find in Meletius rather than in Athanasius the center and source of ecclesial unity, a unity which they still understood to be the product of negotiation and thus of political compromise rather than as nonnegotiable doctrine. In this conviction and this practice they were sustained and vindicated, not by communion in the faith of the Church but rather by an ever-elusive cosmological synthesis of auctoritas sacerdotum and potestas regalis. The subordinationism was itself an incoherent compromise of the Christian faith with cosmology, a negotiated consensus, and therefore political rather than doctrinal: it rested upon an incoherent melding, doctrinally impossible, of the homoousion and homoiousion Christologies, and thus a finally Eusebian refusal to accept their radical incompatibility.[585] This refusal is inexorably a flight from the irrationalities of history to gnostic certitudes whose foundation is finally pagan.
The homoiousioans in general remained too immersed in cosmological confusion to understand the Nicene homoousion as the rejection of that confusion. A. Martin remarks that this confusion afflicted the two pro-Nicene Syrian bishops, Kyatius of Paltos who, like Asterius, had joined the Western delegates at Serdica, and Anatolius of Beroia, were resident in Antioch; the Tome addressed them as co-emissaries with Eusebius of Vercelli, Asterius and Lucifer. With the perceived failure of the Tome to the Antiochenes, one of them, Anatolius of Beroia joined the homoiousian assembly around Meletius; his name appears on the list of those who attended the Council of Antioch in 363. The other Syrian bishop, Kimatius, was by then no longer the bishop of Paltos; his successor, Patrikius, sent a delegate to represent him at the Council of Antioch. Both doubtless saw that Lucifer’s consecration of Paulinus, with its the establishment of two opposed bishops of Antioch, had eliminated the possibility of ecumenical union between the pro-Nicene Eustathians and the Meletian homoiousians.[586]
These latter were already accustomed to worshipping at the Old Church in communion with the Bishop Meletius. Their material solidarity with him had been ignored by the Tome, which looked to the unification of the Antiochenes under a Nicene bishop possessed of the credentials set out in Athanasius Letter to Firmianus. Meletius, even if regarded as a homoiousion rather than charged the homoeanism of the bishops who had seen to his appointment to the See of Antioch, did not meet the criteria set by the Letter to Firmianus. This personal appraisal of Meletius would be vindicated by Meletius’ approval, as president of the Council of Antioch which he called in 363. That Council’s affirmation of the homoousion of the Son was negated by its assimilation to Basil of Ancyra’s “homoios kat’ousian,” a meaningless compromise totally unacceptable to Athanasius as well as to the Eustathians. But Meletius’ ambiguous approval of the Nicene Creed had lent him a pro-Nicene aura, which may explain his selection as the convening president of the First Council of Constantinople, He died in same year in which it met, 381.
The Tome had made its case, inescapably, to any Catholic in Antioch convinced of the truth of the faith that Jesus is the Lord, sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit. The Tome’s authors, chiefly Athanasius and Eusebius of Vercelli, had had good grounds for optimism: the Antiochene anti-Arians were in disarray, and there was no real prospect of their achieving communion among themselves through any means other than a common subscription to the doctrine of the Tome, simply that of Nicaea. Their total refusal of Arianism could only lend force to Athanasius’ insistence that the Eunomianism which repelled them was the sole alternative to affirming the Nicene Creed. However, when the emissaries of that Tome, Eusebius of Vercelli and Asterius of Arabia, arrived in Antioch at the close of the Council to join those who awaited them there—Anatolius of Beroia and Kymatius of Paltus, together with Lucifer of Cagliari—they discovered that the Tome’s program for the unification of Eustathians and Meletian homoousians around the doctrine of Nicaea was no longer possible. Lucifer’s regular albeit perhaps imprudent consecration of Paulinus of Antioch had made concretely explicit the opposition long effective in Antioch, where the Eustathian party had ignored Meletius’ appointment to the See of Antioch as they had ignored all the bishops appointed to that See since the deposition of Eustathius shortly after the Council of Nicaea. Meletius’ close association with the Eunomian Acacius of Caesarea and the homoean party led by Eudoxius of Constantinople could not but strengthen the Eustathian conviction of his heterodoxy and consequently of the illegitimacy of his assertion of Episcopal jurisdiction over Antioch. On the other hand, the homoiousian party had long upheld the Eusebian condemnation of the Nicene Creed as Sabellian, with a particular focus upon Marcellus and Eustathius as prime instances of that heresy. They regarded the Eustathians as Sabellians tout court, and found themselves supported in this by Basil of Caesarea, by 362 the most influential voice of the homoiousian party. Lucifer’s unforeseen consecration of Paulinus formalized the existing opposition into the so-called the Schism of Antioch, an expression masking the implacable opposition between the Eustathian refusal of the religious authority of the homoean-homoiousian Meletius and his insistence upon that authority, with the support at once of those court bishops who had appointed him, and the homoiousians who gathered around him in acceptance of his authority. With his elevation to the episcopacy, Paulinus, until then the de facto leader of the Eustathians, became their formal leader, in whom they recognized the first lawful bishop of Antioch since Eustathius, as would Athanasius a year later, and shortly thereafter, Pope Damasus. The homoiousions automatically rallied to Meletius, in whom their antipathy to the Eustathians found immediate sympathy. This consensus of the homoiousian bishops, including Basil of Caesarea, the foremost among them, effectively legitimated Meletius’ doubtful appointment to the See of Antioch. The reconciliation of the homoiousians with the Nicene orthodoxy aimed at by Athanasius’ pro-Nicene Tome to the Antiochenes had never been a possibility.
Athanasius’ early and continually reinforced experience with the Eusebian subordinationism had led him to read its affirmation of “three hypostases” in God as the Eusebians had themselves understood that emphasis: i.e., as denying the substantial unity of the Trinity. Clearly it entailed the subordinationism, insisted upon by the homoean and homoiousian parties, of the Son to the Father, and the reduction of the Holy Spirit to creaturely standing. Although very few of the oriental bishops had failed to subscribe to this subordinationism when under imperial pressure to do so at the homoean Council of Seleucia in 359, Athanasius recognized that many if not most of them remained loyal to the Church’s faith in the full divinity of Christ.[587] When he came to recognize the basic agreement of the homoiousians’ recognition of the full divinity of the Son with the Nicene definition of homoousion of the Son, he recognized also the futility of arguing over theologoumena such as the appropriate Christological and Trinitarian use of ousia and hypostasis, for these served only as irrelevant obstacles to the doctrinal unanimity achievable only by the affirmation of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, and of the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit, after which semantic issues would not arise.
For the brief time in which the prospect of the homoiousian conversion to the doctrine of the Tome to the Antiochenes endured, a “Cappadocian Settlement” would be its corollary, but with the collapse of that hope, so also collapsed the prospect of that doctrinal synthesis. Eight years after he death of Athanasius, the First Council of Constantinople, although it proclaimed the divinity of the Holy Spirit, was unable to affirm the homoousian of the Holy Spirit, for that entailed his Personal subsistence, which the homoiousians could not accept.[588]
There were to two irreconciliable Christian groups in Antioch, the few Eustathians, led by Paulinus, who had recognized no bishop of Antioch since Eustathius’ deposition three decades earlier. In the eyes of the homoiousian clergy, their Nicene convictions were Sabellian, At the same time, Paulinus and his followers, as also Athanasius, regarded Meletius and his assembly as debarred by his homoean antecedents from any exercise of episcopal office. Meletius’appointment to the See of Antioch had been arranged by Acacius of Constantinople who, if not a Eunomian Neo-Arian, was certainly a homoean. Clearly, neither Paulinus nor Meletius were possible sources of ecumenical union; rather the Antiochene Christians themselves were divided as between them.
Athanasius knew that there was no possibility of the restoration of ecclesial unity which the Antiochenes looked for under Meletius. He had long argued that the homoiousian doctrine made the Son to be of a different substance than the Father, thereby reducing it to Eunomianism; further, he recognized in Meletius at best a wavering homoiousion and, at bottom, a court bishop whose view of ecclesial unity was Eusebian and finally political: doctrine was for him negotiable. Under no circumstances could he qualify as a rallying point of Nicene orthodoxy in Antioch: therefore the Tome ignored him, despite the gathering of the homoiousians at his “old Church.” Athanasius had seen in the doctrinal and theological confusion of the anti-Arian Syrian bishops, Eusebians who, while acknowledging the full divinity of the Son, refused the Nicene homoousios, an opportunity nonetheless to reunite the Oriental Church on the only possible foundation, the unity of the Catholic faith taught at Nicaea.
To this end, the Tome prescinded from the disputed disciplinary issues to concentrate entirely on the doctrinal. It was formally addressed to five bishops, two of whom, Eusebius of Vercelli and Asterius of Arabia, had attended the Council of Alexandria, and the other three, Lucifer of Cagliaria and two pro-Nicene Oriental bishops who, during the Council, had remained in Antioch as emissaries to Antioch of the Tome, charged with the communication of its invitation in such wise as to discover and elect a Nicene bishop, therefore certainly not Meletius, who would serve as the unifying authority of a common subscription to the doctrine of Nicaea, which Anathasius had long known to be the sole possible principle of doctrinal unity of the Antiochene Christians, because of the doctrinal unity of the Church as such. In sum, he knew the unity of the Church to be liturgical: her worship in truth of the Truth incarnate, Jesus the Lord. Her liturgical unity is inescapably doctrinal, as taught at the Council of Nicaea.
The Antiochene homoiousians persisted in the Eusebian refusal to accept the Nicene doctrine of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father as implicitly Sabellian, but had been forced by the institution of an official homoeanism at Sirmium in 357 to seek a middle ground between an effectively Arian denial of the divinity of the Son and the supposed Sabellianism of the Nicene homoousios. They approved the compromise proposed by Basil of Ancyra at a quasi-Council he called in 358 and, on that impossible subordinationist basis, affirmed the divinity of the Son against the Arian reduction of the Christ to a creaturely standing. The majority of them affirmed the distinct divinity of the Holy Spirit as well, following the Letter of George of Laodicea, but not the doctrine of Basil of Ancyra. Athanasius lumped with the Arians the Pneumatomachian minority, equivalently the Tropici whose heresy had troubled Serapion of Thmuis in the Delta. The subsequent conduct of Eustathius of Sebaste a decade later would vindicate this judgment.[589].
The Eunomian minority, whom Athanasius, in the De synodis, had labeled “Ariomanics”—an epithet repeated in the Tome—rejected out of hand the homoiousian attribution to the Son of a substantial similarity to the Father as well as the Nicene doctrine of his substantial identity with the Father and, in the dozen years preceding the Council of Alexandria, had rationalized the Arian refusal of the divinity of the Christ to the point of an explicitly “hetero-ousian” rejection of any similarity of the Son with the Father at the level of substance. This hyper-Arian refusal of any substantial association of the Son with the Father, incorporated in the official homoeanism proclaimed at Sirmium in 357; had prompted the uneasy compromise whose futility Athanasius addressed in the De synodis and which, by the Tome, he attempted to persuade its advocates to admit. Athanasius supposed the majority of the Antiochene Christians, still to be immersed in a futile, cosmologically-fueled disputation over the radically Eusebian misuse of hypostasis, ousia and prosōpon. He also knew that their faith in the divinity of Jesus the Lord and of the Holy Spirit must be delivered from this confusion and that only their assent to the homoousios of the Nicene Creed could provide the necessary clarification, one which would enable the disputing parties to be at once in agreement among themselves, and in communion with followers of Paulinus, as well as with the Alexandrines who had signed the Tome and were to be its emissaries. Therefore in the Tome Athanasius urged the homoiousions gathered around “The Old (church)” in Antioch, to transcend those interminable and unavailing disputes by the simple affirmation of the homoousion of Jesus the Lord, which in sum is to assent to the doctrine of Nicaea, and so to the Church’s faith in the mystery that is Jesus the Lord.
Athanasius made clear in the Tome that he understood the concluding words of the Nicene Creed, “and in the Holy Spirit” to be the Creed’s inclusion of the Holy Spirit in the Trinitarian object of the faith of the Church, and thus as a divine “hypostasis.’ Affirmed at Nicaea to be the object of the Catholic faith, the Holy Spirit cannot but possess the same divine ousia as the Son, which connotes, inescapably, the homoousion of the Spirit with the Father. The Trinitarian doctrine of the Tome, its assertion of the three hypostases comprised by and constituting the one divine ousia , is the corollary of the homoousios of the Son, and the co-equal divinity of the Spirit, by reason of his possessing the same ousia as the Son.
Athanasius was all too familiar with the Eusebians’ emphasis upon the “treis hypostaseis” in God, which he knew to be no more than the subordinationist corollary of their cosmological understanding of the divine substance as the Monas, identified with the Father. Throughout the Orient apart from Egypt, this Origenist deformation of Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine, and of his use of “treis hopostaseis,” was taken for granted. On that account Athanasius had long rejected the “treis hypostaseis” as implicitly subordinationist. In the context of the Eusebian condemnation of the Nicene homoousios as Sabellian, Athanasius’ abreaction to the “treis hypostaseis” was at one with his stress on the “mia ousia .” Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine, as opposed to its rationalization into “Origenism” by Eusebius of Caesarea, had used “hypostasis” to distinguish what is three in God from what is one, viz., from the indivisible divine substance, “ousia ,” and had done so to uphold, not to analyze, the Church’s Trinitarian faith in the full divinity of the one God, the Trinity comprising Father, Son and Spirit, knowing that faith to be the foundation from which further inquiry must proceed.
As it had not occurred to Origen to submit the Trinitarian faith to a rational verification in terms of Greek philosophy; neither did it occur to Athanasius, nor did he suppose the Catholic faith necessarily to be threatened by reference to the Trinity as “three hypostases.” All of this is clear in the Trinitarian doctrine of the Tome, whose theological foundation, the Creed of Nicaea, is the full expression of the Alexandrine tradition, which relies in turn upon Origen’s tradition of the apostolic Trinitarian doctrine in terms of mia ousia , treis hypostaseis. As Origen had not proceeded beyond that apostolic tradition, so neither did Athanasius. The apostolic tradition sufficed for Alexander’s condemnation of Arius, as well as his condemnation by the Council of Nicaea and it served for Athansius’s Tome to the Antiochenes.
The Tome’s Trinitarian doctrine, developed by Athanasius in his correspondence with Lucifer of Cagliari and with Serapion of Thmuis, affirmed the homoousion of the Spirit and in this went beyond the Nicene Creed. By 362, when the Council of Alexandria concluded with the publication of the Tome, Serapion had disappeared: he may not even have been present at the Council of Seleucia in 359, although Prof. Martin is not persuaded of this.[590]
The Tome, signed by all the bishops at the Council of Alexandria, viz., the fourteen Egyptians, mostly from the Delta, joined by Eusebius of Vercelli, Asterius of Arabia, and the delegates of Lucifer of Cagliari and Paulinus of Antioch, was formally addressed to five bishops. Two of them, Asterius of Petra and Eusebius of Vercelli, having attended the Council, were among its signatories; the other three, Lucifer of Cagliari, and two pro-Nicene Syrians, Kymatios of Paltos and Anatole of Beroia, both resident in Antioch, had not been present at the Council but, having met the criteria which it had established for responsible exercise of their episcopal responsebility for the Church’s worship in truth and hence for preaching the doctrine of Nicaea, were judged worthy and capable of mediating the message of the Tome to the Antiochenes.
Their loyalty, as Syrian, i.e., Antiochene, bishops, to the Nicene Homoousios of the Son with the Father, warranted their selection as emissaries from the Council of Alexandria to the homoiousians gathered around Meletius of Antioch.[591] Particularly, they were capable of presenting the faith of Nicaea, whose indispensability to the ecclesial unity sought, as it was hoped, by their fellow Syrian bishops, those supporting Meletius but not, so Athanasius hoped, supporting his heresy―for the Tome ignored Meletius.
The impact of Origen’s theology upon the Alexandrine tradition of the Catholic faith is indisputable.[592]
Instructed in the apostolic tradition and further schooled in the classical paideia (παιδεία) from his childhood by his father Leonidas, and thereafter by Clement, Origen led the School of Alexandria from Clement’s departure ca. 200-201 until his expulsion from Alexandria by Bishop Demetrius in 231, i.e., from his seventeenth to his forty-seventh year. After Demetrius expelled Origen from Alexamdria in 231. Heraclas succeded to that See as, after him, did Dionysius the Great.[593] Dionysius was followed by men of lesser talent, Pierius, perhaps Peter Martyr, and then by Achillas, who briefly succeeded the martyred Peter to the See of Alexandria, and in 313 was himself succeeded by Alexander. There is no record of Alexander of Alexandria having exercised any direction of the School, although his dependence upon Origen is evident in his Letter to all the Bishops. After Achillas, the status of the Catechetical School beca,e obscure until its revival, during the second decade of Athanasius’ episcopacy, under Didymus the Blind, who taught in it for half a century or more until his death about 395, a period comprising the last thirty years of Athanasius’ episcopacy.[594]
A follower of Origen, Didymus was a powerful defender of the Nicene Creed, including the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Richard Layton has observed of him that “the embattled Athanasius could not have asked for a stronger affirmation from a teacher within his own city.”[595]
Athanasius’ exposition of his theology is then integral with his preaching office, with his magisterial communication of the faith of the Church to his people, protecting them from attacks upon it by its enemies, Arian, Jewish and pagan, over the course of forty-five years, more than seventeen of which were spent in his five exiles. [596] The Nicene orthodoxy of his theology, and particularly of his Christology, has been defended by critics as dissimilar as Timothy Barnes, R. P. C. Hanson and Annick Martin.[597] Athanasius’ historical use of the Logos-sarx terminology, and of soma, sarx, and anthrōpos is not always maintained, particularly in his polemic against Arianism. His case is to an extent similar to that of another pro-Nicene theologian, Gregory of Nazianzen, whose unquestioned orthodoxy is troubled the same inadequate terminology, pagan and therefore cosmological in its inspiration, and unable to accept the immanence of the divine in history. This is reflected in Gregory’s use of the Logos-sarx Christology which, taken at the letter, can find no means of associating the divine Logos and the earthly flesh.
Athanasius used the same Logos-sarx terminology for lack of any other. This similarity is noted in Donald F. Winslow’s detailed analysis of the problem posed by the tension between theology and orthodoxy as encountered by the Cappadocians generally, but with a particular focus upon the only Nicene theologian among them, Gregory of Nazianzen.[598] Gregory was entirely convinced that our salvation required the Personal unity of the Saviour, Jesus the Christ, but he was unable to accommodate his theology to this Personal unity of Personal divinity and Personal humanity in Christ, however indispensable to the economy of salvation.
Gregory’s frustration, along with that of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, was the inevitable product of their uncritical acceptance of cosmological rationality of the classical tradition which they had studied in Athens, and which over and again imposed a functional and even a Personal diophysism upon their Christologies, requiring them to suppose a distinctive human agency for all that expresses Jesus’ kenōsis, the loss of Personal integrity and consequent subjection to our fallen human condition of flesh as opposed to spirit, and a distinctive divine agency for all that is marvelous in his revelation of himself to his apostles, all that transcends our human weakness.
The Nicene definition of the homoousion of Jesus with the Father rendered the problem acute for Gregory of Nazianzen, for its rationally coherent provision for the divinity of Jesus the Christ, i.e., his consubstantiality with the Father, for the full divinity of the Son entailed a flat rejection of the cosmological rationality which Arius had taken for granted, and upon which Gregory’s Nicene Christology also relied. Further, the Nicene Creed recognized no nonhistorical Logos, no non-human Son of God. The raison d’être of the Nicene Creed is its proclamation of the Catholic faith; its subject cannot but be the object of that faith, Jesus, the Son of the Father and of the Virgin. In short, the Nicene Creed affirmed the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus the Christ, which Gregory knew to be true, but believed to be theologically ineffable, thus transcending human reason as to be incapable of intelligible, i.e., theological statement. He was left between wind and water, between uncritical commitment to the cosmological rationality travelling as theology, and faith in the indispensable Personal unity of the Saviour, which he considered to transcend the capacity of our mind to grasp and therefore to recieve theological expression.
Yet it must be expressed, and for this Gregory relies upon the Personal unity of Jesus as indispensable to his redemptive office, invoking an ancient gnostic adage long since baptized, quod non assumptus non sanatus (What is not assumed is not healed). But here also his idiom is cosmological: it supposes the “assumptus” to be Jesus’ humanity, and consequently the nonhistorical “Trinity-immanent Logos” to be the “assumens,” thus the subject of the Incarnation. This leaves unexplained how it is that Jesus is human, and falls back on an axiom which supposes an impossible union of the divine Son with a merely human nature, using a krasis, mixus language which can have no application to the unqualified Personal unity of Jesus the Lord affirmed over and again in the New Testament and, in conformity to the New Testament witness, by the first four great Councils, and by those held thereafter.
As the radical Mysterium fidei, the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, cannot be explained, but to suppose on that basis that it cannot become the object of theological inquiry is to suppose an ineffable faith, a faith which cannot be preached, which has no historical foundation capable of utterance. At this point, we have returned to the docetism of the first century. It is then not surprising that, early in the article cited, Winslow refers to Paul’s attribution of the kenōsis to Jesus, in Phil. 2:6-7 as “metaphor:”
Faced then with scriptural evidence that Jesus was quite obviously subject to ignorance, pain, sorrow, hunger, and the like—all of them very undivine attributes—Gregory quite radically departed from his more theoretical stress on the unity of the one person of Christ. Such departures are numerous in the Gregorian corpus. One clear instance is Gregory’s response to the kenotic motif found in Philippians 2:7. At one point in theological Orations, Gregory refers to this metaphor as indicating that the Son of God assumed “what he was not” while at the same time continuing to be “what he was.”3
3. Oration 29.19. J. Barbel, ed., Gregor von Nazians: Die fünf theologischen Reden (Dusseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1963), p. 160.
Winslow, art. cit., 389-90 (emphasis added).
In this context, whatever Winslow may understand by “metaphor,” he certainly intends to dismiss the liturgically preached and consequently historically affirmed truth of Phil. 2:7, which recites the kenōsis of Jesus, and connotes, inescapably, his primordial pre-existence, quite as does the Prologue’s “In the Beginning was the Word, and “logos sarx egeneto” which, affirming of Jesus, the Johannine Logos, precisely the same entry into our fallenness, into our mortality, stands at the same level as Phil. 2:7, which is simply that of the apostolic faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:11).
Certainly Jesus’ primordiality had not occurred to Gregory, for it was ruled out by the cosmological presuppositions underlying his theological imagination as well as his theology. These required the non-historical, i.e., eternal, pre-existence of the divine Son, and at the same time barred his Personal humanity, and thereby barred as well the attribution to Jesus of eternal pre-existence, the only pre-existence conceivable by cosmological rationality. For Gregory, the subject of theology, i.e., the subject of the Prologue’s “Logos sarx egeneto,” and of the kenōsis of Phil. 2:7: “heauton ekenōsen morphēn doulou labōn” (but emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant) is always the non-human eternal Son who, in the Incarnation-Kenōsis, assumed what he was not, and remained what he was, the immanent Son, the nonhistorical, non-human Son, the Son sensu negante.
In contrast to Gregory’s, Athanasius’ Christology is historical, not cosmological. It intends and affirms the historical unity unity of the faith itself, inherent in the historicity of its object, the mysterium fidei who is Jesus the Lord. While the Trinitarian and Christological elements of the Church’s faith and its corollary, the fides quaerens intellectum of the apostolic Spirit Christology, must be distinguished as cause and effect, they are not separable, and Athanasius does not separate them. An isolation of either from the other would compromise their free unity and consequenly the free unity of Athanasius’ historical theology.[599] This intelligible unity of the faith, the intrinsic coherence which relates each of its affirmations to all the rest, the “analogia fidei,” is particularly explicit in Athanasius’ unbending fidelity to the Nicene Creed, whose proclamation of the Personal homoousios of the Son with the Father is the strict corollary of he indivisible unity, “mia ousia , mia hypostasis” of the substantial Trinity. To deny the substantial unity of the One God is to reject the homoousion of the Son with the Father, while to affirm the homoousion of the Son with the Father is to recognize that the substantial unity of the One God is Trinitarian. It is always to be kept in mind that which Athanasius always had in mind: the controversy with the Arians concerned Jesus the Christ, the Lord, and thus the faith of the Church, taught at Nicaea. [600]
In fact, during the first two decades of his episcopate, Athanasius rarely used the term “homoousios.” His unremitting assertion of the substantial unity of the Trinity defined at Nicaea, mia ousia , mia hypostasis, against the prevalent Eusebian subordinationism, was inseparable from the Personal consubstantiality of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit. Annick Martin has pointed out that even during his discussion of the Pneumatomachian heresy with Serapion of Thmuis. Athanasius affirmed the homoousion of the Holy Spirit only once, this at a time when he was vigorously defending the Holy Spirit’s divinity.[601]
Athanasius asserted and defended the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth, the Revelation who is Christ, throughout his service to the Church of Alexandria. This service began in his youth, when Bishop Alexander of Alexandria ordained him to the diaconate and made him his secretary. In that capacity, he aided Alexander in the composition of the circular letter condemning Arius’ subordinationist denial of the divinity of the Son. Shortly thereafter, present at the Council of Nicaea as Alexander’s secretary, his effective opposition to Arianism earned him the permanent enmity of Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia. Three years later, he succeeded Alexander in the See of Alexandria against the bitter opposition of the Melitian schismatics. He served the Church throughout the rest of his life as the Bishop of Alexandria, the major See of the Orient, from which he was exiled five times, totalling over seventeen of the forty-five years of his governance of the See of Alexandria. During this time conceded not an inch to the enemies of Nicaea. The anti-Nicene clergy in his diocese, mostly schismatics, were intent upon rejecting his authority, and to this end were entirely willing to accommodate the Catholic faith to the imperial politics, rejecting the authority of the Roman Church over its doctrine, and that of the Bishop of Alexandria as well. Athanasius’ refusal thus to politicize the faith incurred his persecution by emperors who counted his Nicene orthodoxy as treason, isolated him in the Orient, where, save the deposed and marginalized Marcellus of Ancyra, he had no allies after his condemnation and attempted deposition by the Council of Tyre in 335.
When he returned from his third exile in 362, only a handful of his loyal suffragans had survived the preceding thirty years of imperial persecution. Fourteen of the original nineteen, together with three other pro-Nicene bishops, Eusebius of Vercelli, Asterius of Petra in Arabia, and Lucifer of Cagliari in Sardinia, all similarly released from exile, gathered with him at the Council of Alexandria at once to affirm the faith of the Church and to support Athanasius in his foredoomed effort to convert the Antiochene homoiousians to the faith of the Catholic Church.
The cosmologization of theology, its dualist dehistoricization, rejects a priori the foundational Christological postulate of the radical union and the complete distinction of the fullness of divinity and of humanity in the Person of the Christ, apart from which the historical faith that Jesus is the Lord has no ground in history. The cosmological alternative to the apostolic affirmation that Jesus Christ is Lord is the a priori rejection of the communication of idioms in the Lord Jesus. This refusal entails a need to choose between the diophysism which would typify the later Syrian theology. and the denial of a human soul in Christ, as by Arius and, in a more sophisticated form, by Apollinarius,. These correlative errors are so rationally inseparable from the Logos-sarx analysis as to have been foisted on Athanasius‘ supposedly Logos-sarx Christology by Alois Grillmeier and J. N. D. Kelly, although Athanasius’ commitment to the communication of idioms in Christ is obvious and simply excludes that dehistoricization of his adamantinely pro-Nicene theology.
Crouzel thinks to have found the earliest expression of the blend of Stoicism and Middle Platonism upon which fourth century theology relied, in a Neo-Stoicism which in the latter third century had evolved into the Plotinian Neo-Platonism. Crouzel’s conjecture may explain the equivalent usage at Nicaea of the Platonic “ousia ” and the Stoic “hypostasis” to designate the historical realization of being: i.e., as individuated rather than abstract. This semantic equivalence enters into the Nicene condemnation of the Arian denial of the divinity of the Son.[602] A century earlier Origen’s decision, in the Peri Archon, to use “ousia” to designate the Trinitarian unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, while reserving “hypostasis” to designate their irreducible distinction within the Trinity, provided an indispensable hermeneutic which, after much misinterpretation, would become standard in Oriental Trinitarian theology. However, its Christological application was generally read as adoptionist, and found little acceptance: we have seen that even Crouzel made this mistake.[603]. Its Occidental counterpart, the Trinitarian hermeneutic of una substantia, tres personae provided by Tertullian’s Apologeticus, would become standard in Latin theology. Its alleged adoptionist latency, which finds no echo in the letter sent by Dionysius of Rome to the See of Alexandria and, by implication, to Dionysius of Alexandria,[604] is incompatible with the clear commitment of that letter to the apostolic Spirit Christology.
With no evident grounds for doing so, historians of doctrine have commonly read Origen’s treis hypostaseis, mia ousia as similarly subordinationist.[605] Crouzel has shown that there is no justification for this inference, and his reading of Origen’s Trinitarian theology as doctrinally rather than cosmologically governed is followed here.[606] Origen’s assertion of the Henōsis of humanity and divinity in the Christ, foundational for his Trinitarian theology and his Christology, attracted little attention from his early-fourth-century critics, whose attention was caught rather by his hypothesis of the pre-existence of souls and by the distinction he drew between the historical and the risen body[607] His Trinitarian use of mia ousia, treis hypostaseis was given a subordinationist interpretation by the spontaneously cosmological rationality of the later fourth-century Origenists, notably the Eusebian opponents of Athanasius’ insistence upon the Nicene doctrine of the mia ousia of the Trinity. Under the influence of Eusebius of Caesarea, a permanent and highly effective enemy of the Nicene homoousios, the interpretation of Origen’s Trinitarian treis hypostaseis, mia ousia as subordinationist became established in the Orient apart from Alexandria, together with its correlative, the reading of the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father as Sabellian.
Eusebius’ misinterpretation of Origen was thus authoritative in the Orient as to overrule for more than fifty years the authority of the teaching of the Council of Nicaea, viz., the substantial unity of the Trinity, and the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. It followed that Origen’s “three hypostases” came to be misunderstood as subordinationist throughout the Orient notably by Athanasius who, until his Tome to the Antiochenes in 362 refused its use, relying simply upon the affirmation of the substantial unity of the Triune God. His insistent affirmation of the substantial unity of the Trinity was recognized by the rest of the Orient as a direct contradiction of the Eusebian consensus and an affront to the imperial authority which attempted to impose it. This of course had made him a marked man, an outlaw, the object of persistent persecution.
Athanasius’ later acquaintance with the homoiousians’ rejection of Arianism led to his recognition that their erroneous understanding of the treis hypostaseis, while still Eusebian, was countered by their apparent faith in the full divinity of Jesus the Lord. He saw in this anomaly grounds for hope that their adherence to the Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy was hindered only by a felt need to identify that orthodoxy with the entirely incoherent homoios kat’ousian theology. As he had pointed out to the homoiousians in the De synodis, §53, and would continue to insist, there can be no medium between the Nicene homoousion of the Son with the Father, and the Neo-Arian (Eunomian) hetero-ousion of the Son, which is proper to a creature.[608] Consequently, knowing the homoiousians’ faith in the full divinity of the Christ to be at odds with their lingering sympathy for the Eusebian subordinationism, he hoped to wean them from that theology. Thus he pointed out, in the Tome to the Antiochenes, that the treis hypostaseis language to which they were committed need not entail a subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, that in fact it was entirely compatible with the Nicene doctrine of the consubstantiality proper to each of Trinitarian Persons. Therefore he found reason to hope that many of the homoiousion community, those committed to the divinity of the Son and the Spirit, were in fact ready to accept the Nicene Creed, with its inclusion of the Holy Spirit within the Church’s Trinitarian faith. Rallying his few remaining loyal suffragans to this cause at the Council of Alexandria, along with two Occidental bishops, Lucifer of Cagliari and Eusebius of Vercelli, together with Asterius from an Arabian diocese, he transformed this prospect into a program whose full expression is the Tome to the Antiochenes. The program was thwarted before it began by Lucifer’s perhaps impetuous but certainly regiular consecration of Paulinus; it can be regarded as irregular only on the assumption that the consecration of a pro-Nicene bishop of Antioch required the approval of an anti-Nicene claimant to that See, an absurd proposition. Lucifer of Cagliari’s consecration of Paul legitimated the Eustathian fidelity to the Nicene Creed, and denied the legitimacy of the homoiousian acceptance of Meletius as the bishop of Antioch. Meletius had just returned from Sebaste to Antioch after a brief exile due to Constantius’ perception of a homoiousian flavor in a sermon he had preached before before him. Relieved of that exile a year later by Julian’s decree, Meletius summarily ousted the Arian claimanrt, Euzoius, who had succeeded him, and resumed his role as bishop of Antioch. Before his departure, Euzoius had given a church to the followers of Paulinus and another to the homoiousians, probably the “old place,” where they would assemble with Meletius upon his return.[609] This treatment left the Eustathian and the homoiousian parties each facing the other as under color of office, the former led by Paulinus, the latter largely by Diodore, the founder and director of the School of Antioch; neither man was at that time a bishop. Paulinus, evidently invited by Athanasius to do so, had sent two delegates to the Council of Alexandria early in 362, where Athanasius welcomed them. At about the same time, on his return to Antioch, Meletius was received by the homoiousian party as the bishop of Antioch. Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes nonetheless ignored him. It was in this state of affairs that Lucifer, on surverying the situation at Antioch, decided to consecrate Paulinus, at once to restore the balance between the parties, and to provide a pro-Nicene bishop of Antioch. The division between the Eustathians and the homoiousians under Meletius was absolute per se; it had never been potential, for between the political credo of the homoiousians and the ecclesial Creed of the Council of Nicaea there stretched the unbridgeable contradiction which Athanasius in his De synodis had shown to exist between the homoousion of Jesus with the Father and the heterousion of a Jesus homoios kat’ousian to the Father. Lucifer was in a position to recognize the applicability of this assessment to the situation he encountered at Antioch, as the authors of the Tome to the Antiochenes were not: see Annick Martin, Athanase, at 534, note 302.
In 363, during during his visit to Antioch to enlist Emperor Jovian’s approval of the Nicene Creed, Athanasius endorsed Lucifer’s action. Meletius had by then called his Council of Antioch to reaffirm the homoiousian merger of their rejection of the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea with the Nicene Creed, seeking by this means to obtain the imperial warrant for their existence. Athanasius had already blocked this ambition by his precipitous trip to Antioch to pre-empt their doctrinal discussion with Jovian. He was able to convince Jovian of the indispensability of the orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed. He obtained Jovian’s approval of his conduct as bishop of Alexandria, and left the Arianizing bishops without recourse.
Athanasius’ apostolic faith that Jesus is the Lord is a radical affirmation of the communication of idioms in him; its corollary, that Mary is Theotokos, has its earliest witnesses in Alexandria. We have seen that Origen is among them.[610] Before his banishment from Alexandria by Demetrius in 332, he had given the didaskeleion of Alexandria an indispensable foundation, the communication of idioms in Christ, upon which must rely any theological quaerens into the Catholic faith that Jesus, the Son of Mary, is the Son of the Father, consubstantial with him.
When Arius scorned that apostolic tradition, the Alexandrines, led by Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, rose to its defence. Eusebius, the Bishop of Caesarea, early associated with martyred Pamphilius as his student, and probably his adopted son, published the first edition of his Ecclesiastical History at least a dozen years before he became the Bishop of Caesarea about 313. Eusebius inherited from Pamphilius his additions to the library which Origen established in Caesarea after his exile from Alexandria, and had given its contents serious attention, as is evident in his own commentaries on the Old Testament (he made none on the New Testament). His personal and academic reputation was well established; clearly, no one at that time had a better acquainance with Origen’s works than he. His reading of Origen then passed as authoritative among most of the Oriental bishops. Consequently his subordinationist “correction” of Origen’s apostolic and therefore historical Trinitarian doctrine, and thus his rejection of Origen’s apostolic and historical Christology as well, went unchallenged apart from a rapidly dwindling number of pro-Nicene bishops. Eusebius rejected Origen’s doctrine of the co-eternity with the Father and the full divinity of the Son and the Spirit, substituting for it their cosmological subordination to the one substantial God, whom Eusebius identified with the Father. This rejection of Origen’s attribution of substantial unity, mia ousia, to the Trinity, and thus the rejection of the Nicene Creed as Sabellian, changed the meaning of Origen’s identification of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as treis hypostaseis, and of the Trinity as the One God, the single and undivided divine Substance, mia ousia; Eusebius’ cosmological rationality eliminated the apostolic tradition, and with it the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord. Theology as Eusebian became a cosmological contemplation of the conditions of possibility of the Trinitarian doctrine at the heart of the Nicene Creed, and could find none. From the Eusebian stance, the doctrine of the substantial unity of the Trinity was obviously Sabellian; For Eusebiusm the subordination of the Son to the Father could alone serve the Church’s faith in the one God.
It was inevitable that Eusebius become a reliable supporter of Arius. He had a preliminary brush early in 325 with the provincial council called in Antioch and presided over by Constantine’s theological adviser, Ossius of Cordoba, to replace the deceased bishop of Antioch. It also issued an elaborate anti-Arian creed, to which three bishops among the fifty-nine attending the council, Eusebius among them, refused to subscribe. They were provisionally excommunicated, pending a final verdict by the Council of Nicaea, which a month or two later ratified the original condemnation.
Ossius’ council of Antioch had selected Eustathius, then the bishop of Beroea, a devout anti-Arian, to succeed to the See of Antioch to reinforce its opposition to Arianism. Once selected, his anti-Arianism was sufficiently effective during the provincial council of Antioch, and yet more at Nicaea, where he was a senior bishop, to earn the enduring enmity of Eusebius of Caesarea who, with the support of the Arian bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia, in the remarkably short time of two years after their joint condemnation by the Council of Nicaea, succeeded in condemning Eustathius and persuading Constantine to depose and exile him.
Athanasius, secretary to Bishop Alexander, and recently ordained by him to the diaconate, was of course the youngest of the Alexandrines at Nicaea. His unqualified commitment to the Nicene Creed is founded upon Origen’s postulate of the communication of idioms in Jesus. It rested firmly upon Origen’s Trinitarian and Christological doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Father at once with his only-begotten Son and with the Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son, as set out in Origen’s theology of the Son’s Henōsis with the fully human nous who, in that irrevocable union, is the primordial Head of his bridal Church, Jesus the Lord.
The alternative to a dogmatic concentration upon the communication of divine and human idioms in the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord is their dissociation, whether imaginative or rationalized. This temptation to rationalize arises out of the still nearly universal cosmological assumption that Jesus, as God, cannot suffer, and that therefore the ascription to him of suffering, ignorance, infancy, childhood and, in fact, of the Catholic faith that he was “like us in all things but sin” applies to his humanity, not to his divinity, i.e., not to his Person. This error entails an impossible division of Jesus’ Personal agency into human and divine actions: i.e., it is as divine that Jesus performed miracles and raised the dead, and as human that he suffered, wept, was ignorant, and so on. Reductively, this is a refusal of Jesus’ Personal unity as the “one name by whom we may be saved.” Logically, this error must proceed to infect the theologian’s fides quaerens intellectum Church’s historical faith that Jesus is the Lord, fully human and fully divine, with the ancient problem of ‘the one and the many, which has no solution. Theologians accepting it as rationality itself must then choose either the monophysism which denies the humanity of the Lord in order to save his Personal unity, or the diophysism which denies his Personal unity in order to save his humanity.
Athanasius’ Christology was simply that of the Council of Nicaea; he never went beyond it. He saw what no other theologian of his time appears to have seen, that the core affirmation of the Council is the substantial unity of the Trinity: mia hypostasis, mia ousia. The corollary of this credal affirmation is the Council’s affirmation of the Personal homoousios of the Son with the Father. For Athanasius, despite his use of the Logos-sarx idiom in which it was latent, the problem of the one and the many did not arise. He used the Logos-sarx idiom historically, as founded upon the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, and thus upon his Personal free agency in raising the dead, and upon his Personal free obedience to his Mission from the Father, the kenōsis that is his becoming like us in all things save sin. This includes his ignorance of the future and his suffering and death on the Cross. Athanasius insisted instead that Jesus is the single agent of our redemption, the single subject of the Incarnation, of the kenōsis, and finally of Christology as such.
If it was effectively impossible for Athanasius to avoid speaking of the Logos without being heard to invoke the dehistoricizing connotation of this term and, with it, the fragmentation of the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, the Logos. Nonetheless he refused to accept this dehistoricization of the Nicene Creed, insisting upon speaking of the Logos historically, as does the John the Evangelist in Jn. 1: 14: the subject of the Logos sarx egeneto, for the Apostle John, and therefore for Athanasius, is Jesus, the Father’s only-begotten Son who is at once Personally human and Personally divine.[611]
Athanasius used, perforce, the only Christological vocabulary available; its accepted denotation was cosmological, entailing an a priori dehistoricization of the Logos, and so of the Incarnation. However he never permitted this customary cosmology to deflect him from his unconditioned commitment to the Nicene Creed. Once the Logos-sarx idiom had been delivered from its Arian interpretation at Nicaea, it was not suspect of heresy, nor would it become so much prior to the condemnation of its rationalization by Apollinarius at I Constantinople in 381. No fourth century theologian, whether of the East or the West, escaped the cultural influence of the pervasive the Middle Platonism which had served the learned with a world-view epitomized by the response of the Athenians to Paul’s preaching of the Resurrection: a flat rejection of any assertion of a divine immanence in the world, in history. This pagan commonplace demanded the reduction of the historical Jesus Christ, the “one and the same Son” of Irenaeus’ Christology, to an abstract and nonhistorical Logos, a quasi-divine emanation which could not be the subject of an Incarnation.
This dehistoricization had not much afflicted the West, due in part to the Greek Apologists (Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and Theophilus of Antioch, and perhaps rather more to Tertullian’s publishing of the Apologeticus in the last decade of the second century. It must be kept in mind that the Apologists’ conversion to the Trinitarian unity of God presaged Tertullian’s. His firm reliance upon and commitment to the apostolic tradition as mediated by the apostolic Churches dismissed outright the cosmological rationality which would so fascinate the Oriental Church. He gave the Western Church a terminology of genius; he needed only two words, substantia and persona, to proclaim the Christian faith in the mystery of the Trinity, una substantia, tres personae and the mystery of Jesus the Lord: una persona, duae substantiae. This utterly novel systematic theology was free, as its subject, the faith of the Church, is free; it is then conjoined to the correlative assurance that preaching of the faith needs no defense for, as Tertullian made very clear, his own imagination was baffled by the historical truth of the apostolic tradition, its foundation in the Event of the revelation who is the Christ, who was conceived by a woman, subject to the indignities of infancy. His faith in the apostolic tradition transcended this bafflement in a triumph famously summarized in the tag, credo quia impossibile. This insouciant faith that Jesus is the Lord confounded the skepticism of the gnostics, the Monarchians, and the Jews, who could deny it, but could not challenge its free historicity, whether in its prophetic anticipation, or its vindication in Christ the Lord. Justin, particularly in his Dialogue with Trypho, anticipated and doubtless contributed to Tertullian’s utter confidence in the Christ, but Tertullian’s recognition that the Father is a member of the Trinity, not the divine substance, and that Jesus is consubstantial with him, were impossible to Justin, whose concentration upon the Absolute Father’s Naming of the Son to bestow upon him a total authority over a creation of which the Father as absolute was incapable, had no accesss to a doctrine of the Trinity.
Until the middle of the fourth century the Logos-sarx Christological vocabulary was the only one available. It immediately induced the Logos-sarx Christological analysis for, by this time “Logos” was no longer understood to be a title of the Jesus Christ, apart from the embattled pro-Nicene Church of Alexandria. About then however, ca. 360, Diodore began to insist upon the full humanity of Jesus. From his youth he had been the director of the School of Antioch, and on this basis became a close ally of Meletius, the Bishop of Antioch, and a loyal supporter of his homoiousian doctrine. Long afterward, in 378, Meletius rewarded his fidelity by appointing him to the See of Tarsus. Diodore’s insistence upon the full humanity of Jesus the Lord was inspired less by Eustathius of Antioch’s similar anti-Arian stress upon the full humanity of the Christ than by his own personal aversion to then novel Apollinarian monophysism.
Julian the Apostate Emperor, had been schooled in Christian doctrine and paid a considerable attention to Diodore’s Christology. While residing in Antioch in 362, he charged Diodore with having proposed a “two Sons” Christology. In defense of Diodore, it should be noted that at this time the distinction between a concrete ensouled human nature and a human person was hardly clear. Therefore Julian’s inference, however accurate, begged questions which had not then been clearly posed.
The diophysite alternative, later characterized as Logos-anthrōpos, to the monophysism threatening the Logos-sarx Christology would characterize the Antiochene theology until the condemnation of Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus, and would be echoed in the Eranistes of Theodoret of Tyre down to the Council of Chalcedon. The historical focus upon Jesus the Christ of the Symbol of Chalcedon, the last of the four great ecumenical Councils, rejected both the Alexandrine monophysism and Antiochene diophysism, quite as definitively as had the Nicene homoousios doctrine rejected the Eusebian Trinitarian subordinationism and its Sabellian antithesis.
Prior to Chalcedon, throughout the fourth and the first half of the fifth century, the Eusebian cosmology, travelling as theology, supported the facile dehistoricization of the concretely historical Logos of the Prologue of the Johannine Gospel, of the Pauline Letters to the Romans and to the Philippians, of the Synoptic Gospels, as implicit in and correlative to the Eusebian rejection of the authority of the Nicene Creed. The consequence was the reduction of speculative Christology to three characteristic failures to account for the historical unity of Jesus the Lord: viz., a denial of his humanity, a denial of his divinity or, as with Apollinarius, a denial of both.
Underlying these failed Christologies is the Eusebian dehistoricization of (1); the subject of the Incarnation, who thereby is no longer Jesus but the “Trinity-immanent Son,“ of (2), the subject of the Son’s Mission from the Father, which becomes that of the nonhistorical ‘immanent Son,” and of (3), the pre-existence of Jesus the Son, upon whose primordial historicity as the subject of the Incarnation depends the redemption worked by his One Sacrifice
The New Testament affirms the Son’s primordiality over and again. The Apostolic Fathers took it for granted. They had understood the “In the Beginning” of Jn 1:1 to designate Jesus’ primordial pre-existence which, as human and created, has and in fact is the “Beginning.” Paul in Col. 1:18 used “the Beginning” as a title of Jesus in the same sense of primordiality, while the John and the Synoptics simply understand “Logos” historically, as naming Jesus the Lord, while Paul, in naming the risen Lord a “life-giving spirit,” (I Cor. 15:45) gave to the Apostolic Fathers a term by which to distinguish Jesus’ historical existence in the flesh from his risen reality, that of the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega, sacramentally mediated by personal participation in the Church’s Eucharisticl worship.[612] The rationalized abstractions of the Son from history also (4) dissociate his human headship of all creation from his concretely historical primordiality, that of the “Beginning,” reducing that primordial Event to the pre-existence ab aeterno of the “immanent Logos.” Romans 5-8 thereby becomes unintelligible, and with that loss there also vanishes the transhistorical efficacy of the redemption achieved by the Christ’s One Sacrifice, by which he transcends history as its Beginning and its End. He is the Alpha as well as the Omega, the Beginning and the End of history which is salvific by his Eucharistic immanence in history..
Thus Athanasius uses the Logos-sarx language of the Alexandrine tradition, rendered historical by Origen’s rejection of the abstractly analytical cosmology associated with it by Greek philosophy, i.e., the Middle Platonism of the learned class from which Eusebian theologians had been unable to free themselves. The apostolic “Spirit Christology” had been taught by Justin in the second century; he was followed by Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Hippolytus and Origen. Assailed by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Contra Marcellum, the Spirit Christology had been affirmed at the Council of Nicaea, the subject of whose Creed was not, as is too often supposed, the non-historical “immanent Son,” but the primordial Jesus the Christ, whose “becoming flesh” initiated the economy of salvation. [613]
Athanasius made no speculative use of the Logos-sarx terminology; he found its dehistoricization of the Logos convenient only in polemic confrontation with the Arian reduction of the Logos to a creaturely standing. In this polemic Athanasius denies what the Arians maintained, that the Logos was a creature, subject to change. Otherwise, as in the three Books of his Orationes contra Arianos, Athanasius’ Christology was rather preached than argued, and the preaching is informed by his radical conviction of absolute unity of God and the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father as proclaimed at Nicaea, buttressed by the ecclesial, i.e., liturgical, reading of Scripture, and by immersion from his youth in the Alexandrine tradition of his bishop Alexander.
Athanasius’ Christology, as pastoral, as preached, is resolutely historical, focused upon the union of the Personal divinity and personal humanity in the one Person, Jesus the Christ, as taught at Nicaea. This Personal unity can alone support the communication of idioms by which Jesus is the Lord, and his mother the Mother of God, Theotokos. It alone can sustain the teaching office of the bishops, whose permanent subject is the revelation given us in Jesus the Lord..
The Catholic doctrine of the Trinity and of the Christ is totally soteriological. The Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father is indispensable to the Church’s faith in Christ the Lord, the Redeemer, and it was thereby foundational for Athanasius, as it had been for Origen, simply as the communication of idioms in Christ, his very Person. Athanasius’ Christology, as Annick Martin has stressed over and again, was soteriological and pastoral: his anti-Arian, anti-Melitian and anti-Judaic polemic was charged with that concern alone. Thus he refused the Christological analyses, whether Logos-sarx or Logos-anthrōpos, whose fascination with the false problem of establighing the abstract possibility of the Incarnation was entirely irrelevant to his exclusively soteriological theology.
Athanasius’ often-noted failure to explain the Personal differentiations in the Trinity, similar to that criticized in Marcellus of Ancyra, is irrelevant to his pastoral concern for communicating the faith of the Church, which does not wait upon its theological elaboration. The manner of theologically differentiating the divine Persons was of no pastoral importance once the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and substantial identity of the Holy Spirit with Father and the Son, was affirmed by the Nicene Creed. As Prof. Annick Martin has emphasized, Athanasius’ personal concerns as the Archbishop of Alexandria were for the preservation of the Catholic orthodoxy of his huge diocese, an orthodoxy summed up in the Nicene Creed, beyond which disputes over “treis hypostaseis” could only mislead. Thus, with all due respect to Annick Martin’s meticulous exposition of the doctrine of the Tome to the Antiochenes, as supplemented by her commentary upon his earlier Discourses against the Arians, and his Catholic Letter, her assertion that Athanasius’ Christology remains “within the line of the Alexandrine Logos-sarx tradition,” needs qualification. The Logos-sarx tradition, which she aptly characterizes as holding “that which gives life to the human nature of Christ is the Logos, and it is the Logos himself who assures the salvation of man” cannot be attributed to Athanasius, for whom the Redeemer who “assures the salvation of man” is Jesus the Lord.[614] The distinction thus placed between the Logos and the Christ does not exist. Further, its incompatibility with the Nicene Creed is immediately evident: the Nicene Creed has no interest whatever in a Logos who is not Jesus the Lord, nor in a Jesus who is not the divine Son of the Father and the human Son of the Theotokos: one and the same. All this is well known to Prof. Martin. Her synopsis of the Logos-sarx Christology, i.e., wherein “Logos” refers to the eternal Son sensu negante, is proper only to the fifth-century corruption of the Alexandrian tradition, i.e., to the Christology of Theophilus, of the early Cyril of Alexandria and, after him, of Dioscorus, rather than to the Spirit Christology of Athanasius and the great Councils, which, in contrast to Cyril’s Logos-sarx analysis, are intent upon the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord over against the rejection of it by the cosmologically-contaminated theologies condemned at Ephesus and Chalcedon.
Cyril’s insistence at Ephesus upon the communication of idioms in Jesus, and thus upon entitling Mary Theotokos, finds no support in his early use of the Logos-sarx Christology, which understands the dehistoricized Logos to be, paradoxically, the agent of our historical redemption. On the other hand, there are many places in Athanasius’ works in which the Logos-sarx Christological vocabulary provides the framework for a soteriologically-driven discussion in which cosmological considerations simply do not enter: this is fairly clear in his earliest writing, the Contra Gentes et de Incarnatione, whose date is contested.[615]
The Word perceived that the corruption of men could be undone in no other way whatever, but only by death. Neither could such a one as the Word suffer death, being immortal and Son of the Father. For this reason then He takes to Himself flesh capable of dying, so that this flesh, by partaking of the Word who is superior to all, might be worthy to suffer death in the place of all, and might, because of the Word dwelling in it, remain incorruptible, so that from then on corruption might be stayed from everyone, by grace of the Resurrection.
Treatise on the Incarnation of the Word (De Incarnatione), 9, 1. (P. G. 25, 95-198, at 112); tr. W. A. Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 322, §751. This extract is taken from Tertullian’s Treatise on the Incarnation by the kind permission n of S.P.C.K.
This historical understanding of the Word is also evident in Athanasius’ major dogmatic work:
“In the beginning was the Word.” Even if no works had been created, it still were true: the Word of God was, and the Word was God. His becoming man would not have taken place if the need of man had not become a cause.
Discourses against the Arians 2, 56 (P. G. 26:266-67; tr. W. A. Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 329, §765. The phrase, “his becoming man,” is an evident reference to the Nicene Creed’s “σαρκοθέντα, ἐνανθρωπήσαντα”.
The historicity marking Athanasius’ use of the Logos-sarx idiom is here particularly apparent, linked as it is to creation. We find this major defender of the Son’s co-eternity with the Father applying the “in the beginning” of Jn 1:1 to the eternal Son whom the cosmological Logos-sarx analysis—but emphatically not Athanasius—understands to be divine sensu negante, and thus must understand the “in the beginning” of Jn. 1:1 to refer to a nonhistorical pre-existence proper to that dehistoricized Logos: i.e., pre-existence ab aeterno, sensu negante.
It is not really possible to suppose that, fourteen years after the Council of Nicaea, Athanasius would ascribe a “beginning” to the Logos, sensu negante, particularly in that he had already affirmed the homoousios of the Son in the first Discourse[616]. He uses “Logos” as the Evangelist does: i.e., as a title of Jesus the Christ.
Athanasius’ Christology, as Prof. Martin makes very clear (see endnotes 539 and 540, supra) is that of the Council of Nicaea; he understands the Nicene definitions of the absolute unity of the divine substance and the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father to be affirmations of the faith of the Church in the Personal Lordship of Jesus the Christ, the eternal Son of the eternal Father and the human Son of Mary, whom the Alexandrine tradition had long since named Theotokos. Prof. Martin has lavishly documented Athanasius’ unqualified adherence to the doctrine of Nicaea.[617] His De synodis is a review of the sorry history of the cosmologically-driven opposition of the Oriental councils to the Nicene Creed. Their Christological confusion, prior the debacle of Rimini-Seleucia, only vindicated his conviction of the utter indispensability of assent to the Nicene definitions for communion in the faith of the Church, the sole alternative to whose definition of the homoousios of the Son with the Father was the Eunomian heteroousios, the reduction of the Son to a creature.
Athanasius’ commitment to The Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father to which Athanasius was committed had been clearly taught in Origen’s Christology, as set out by Crouzel’s Traité des Principes. Tertullian’s assertion of the concrete union of humanity and divinity in the Persona of Jesus is echoed by Origen’s assertion of their Henōsis, the union of humanity and divinity in Jesus whose antecedent possibility he never attempted to provide, quite as Justin had not, nor Tertullian, nor Hippolytus. Tertullian’s tres personae, una substantia Trinitarian analysis, like Origen’s equivalent treis hypostaseis, mia ousia analysis, affirmed the substantial unity of the Trinity; Both Tertullian and Origen also affirmed the unity of Personal divinity and Personal humanity in the historical Logos, whom the Prologue of the Joannine Gospel identifies with Jesus the Lord, and whose full historical Personal unity was taught at Nicaea to be consubstantial with the Father.
The Eusebians’ cosmological distortion of the apostolic tradition identified the subject of the Incarnation with the “immanent Son,” the eternal Son sensu negante. Inevitably, they similarly dehistoricized Jesus’ historical kenōsis, his Personal immanence in our fallen humanity, as taught in Jn. 1:1 and 1: 14, and in Phil. 2:5-8. The Eusebian subordinationism required that the kenōsis be understood abstractly, viz., as the “assumption” of a “human nature” by the “immanent Son. Under this cosmological a priori, the Johannine doctrine of the enfleshment of the Logos and the Pauline recognition of the Mission of Jesus no longer referred to the historical Jesus, as in the Prologue and Phil. 2:6-7, and this without much complaint from the exegetes, then or since.[618] The historical Event-foundation of the faith that Jesus is the Lord having been discarded, Christology became locked in the Monarchian dilemma of rehistoricizing a Logos who had become by definition a nonhistorical Absolute.
We have seen that this cosmologization of the biblical presentation of the historical Jesus the Christ has been understood by J. N. D. Kelly and John McGuckin to constitute the permanent task of Christological speculation. Once the postulate of a divine Son in need of historicization is accepted, the task of theology is not so much permanent as static. No inquiry into the doctrinal tradition is then possible, with the inevitable result of theological rejection of the doctrinal tradition, and a consequent immersion in controversies between the equally impossible reconciliations of the dehistoricized Logos and a correspondingly dehistoricized humanity. “Sarx”, which the Johannine Prologue had understood as Jesus’ incarnation in our fallen humanity, was read as “body,” posing an immediate quandary as to whether “sarx,” as reduced to “body,” is ensouled. The contradiction between the monophysite and diophysite resolutions of this difficulty could only be resolved as the Symbol of Chalcedon resolved it, by denying its major, the dehistoricization of Jesus the Lord.
The rationalization and dehistoricization of Origen’s historical theology had became a cottage industry in the Orient: Accused first of adoptionism, then of subordinationism, Origen’s theology became identified with Origenism, connoting an adoptionist Christology and a subordinationist Trinitarianism, and such other deviations as his generally untutored critics could read into his text.
We have pointed out that Tertullian’s Christology suffered no such dehistoricization. His basic Christological statement of the historical union of the divine substance of the eternal Word and the substance of historical humanity in the one Person who is Jesus Christ the Lord gave Latin Christology a depth of insight into the full humanity, the full divinity, and the Personal of the Christ which thereafter prevented the incursion of “nature” into Latin Christology. Tertullian’s Christological formula, duae substantiae, una Persona, expressed the historical faith in Jesus the Lord. It affirmed a concrete fact which he felt no more need to justify than had the Apostles who first encountered the Christ in the unity of his Person. Tertullian’s “una persona, duae substantiae” is not a metaphysical analysis, but his personal summary of what he understood the Church to believe of Jesus the Lord: viz., that Jesus is fully human, fully divine, and utterly unique, the Lord Jesus whose full unity can only be Personal, as factually conceived by Mary and born of her. Named by an angel before his birth (a little-recognized assertion of his primordiality), the man Jesus the Christ, he was Named Jesus the Christ by the Apostles upon their encounter with him.
Later on, disputing with the Monarchian Praxeas, Tertullian proved to Praxeas that his attempt to deal with the Incarnation analytically disintergrated the Personal unity inherent in the faith that Jesus is the Lord. The commonplace reading into Tertullian’s understanding of the Personal unity of the Christ as a krasis of the divine and the human is the product of a cosmological analysis of the prior possibility of the Incarnation, which did not interest him and which he did not attempt.[619]
The same must be said for Origen: he offered no account of the antecedent possibility of the Henōsis of the created and therefore corporeal nous of Christ with the Logos, the eternal Son of the Eternal Father. In fact, here Origen goes well beyond Tertullian, for the union he has in view supposes the Henōsis of the hypostasis of Jesus (for the creation of a nous cannot terminate in an impersonal physis) with the hypostasis of the Son. The Henōsis is Personal, and the Person of Jesus the Lord is the Henōsis. Two centuries later, this insight will be explicitly confirmed in Chalcedon’s affirmation of a single subsistence of Jesus, at once in the divine Substance and in the human substance, that by his subsistence in the Trinity, he is Personally consubstantial with the Father; and that by his subsistence in the human substance, he is Personally consubstantial with us.
Athanasius stood in the Alexandrine tradition, which is to say, under the influence of Origen. As Origen’s theology at once accepted the apostolic tradition as its subject and affirmed its truth, so also did Athanasius’ theology. The apostolic tradition is radically liturgical, and thus is soteriological and historical, an a priori rejection of cosmological rationality. Whether or not Athanasius introduced the term “homoousios” at Nicaea, it is inseparable from the Alexandrine tradition, whose source is Origen. His distinction between the divine Ousia that is the Trinity, comprising eternally and equally the three hypostases, the Father as the source of the Son by his eternal generation, and of the Holy Spirit, whose mode of origin from the Father Origen was unable to clarify, but whose divinity, and consequent consubstantiality, he accepted from the tradition and affirmed as a matter of faith, as inseparable from the apostolic tradition upon which he, as a century later also Athanasius, understood theology to have its ground and point d’appui. It must be stressed that for both, this foundation is liturgical; it is therefore historical, a free event which, in Origen’s case, Crouzel has linked to the historical Mission by the Father of the Son who is Jesus the Christ. Catholic theology cannot be dependent upon an abstract a priori. Its ground is the historical tradition which, as apostolic, is the Eucharistic anamnesis of the Last Supper, the Church’s worship in truth of Truth Incarnate in Jesus the Lord whose full expression of his Revelation is his offering of himself, the High Priest, as the one Victim, at the Last Supper and on the Cross, for the redemption of the Church and the world. The bishops, as successors to the liturgical office and authority given the Twelve at the Last Supper, succeed to the Apostles’ liturgical responsibility, summarily for the Church’s worship in truth, an integrating element of which is the magisterial responsibility for the apostolic preaching, the doctrinal tradition summed up in the faith that Jesus is the Lord. It is thus that the Church’s Ecumenical councils must be understood. They are exercises of liturgical responsibility by bishops who, at Nicaea and thereafter, have met to uphold and affirm the historical, liturgically mediated faith that Jesus is the Lord, and to condemn all denials of that faith.
Athanasius’ theology was liturgically grounded: he was impatient of theological analyses because all too often their unexamined cosmological assumptions contested rather than affirmed the Catholic faith. He had seen this in the tangle of the decrees by local councils consequent upon the Eusebian rejection of the Nicene Creed, ranging from the condemnation of Eustathius at Antioch in 327 to the twin debacles at Seleucia and Rimini more than thirty years later, and knew them for what they were: Arian solicitations, the only possible to which was liturgical: the Conciliar confirmation of the Creed pronounced at Nicaea.
Athanasius made no attempt to provide a theological foundation for the Christological doctrine defended in his Discourses, in the Catholic Letter and in the Tome, as Annick Martin points out; see endnote 620. For Athanasius, the agent of our redemption is Jesus the Christ, whose Personal unity he stresses. Athanasius concludes the often misinterpreted paragraph 7 of his Tome to the Antiochenes by citing the language of the Nicene Creed―
περὶ τῆς σαρκώσεως καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσεως τοῦ Λόγου
following the Nicene “σαρκοθέντα ἐνανθρωπήσαντα¨
―simply to affirm the Nicene Christology.[620]
J. N. D. Kelly, in Creeds, 215-216, has provided the full text of the Nicene Creed, following Dossetti’s text::
Πιστεὑομεν εἱs ἕνα θεόν, πaτέρα, παντοκράτορα, πάντων ὅρατων τε καὶ ἀορατων ποιητἡν.
Καὶ εἰς ἕνα κύριον Ἶησοῡν Χριστόν, τὸν υἱὸν τοῡ θεοῡ, γεννεθέντα ἐκ τοῡ παρτὸς μονογενῆ, τουτέστιν ἐκ τῆς οὐσιας τοῡ πατρός, θεὸν ἐκ θεοῡ, φῶς ἐκ φωτός, θεὸν ἀληθινὸν, ἐκ θεοῡ ἀληθινοῡ, γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοοὑσιος τῷ πατρἱ, δι᾿ οὗ τὰ πάντα ἐγέvετο, τά τε ἕν τῇ τῷ οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐν τη γῇ, τὸν δι’ ἡμᾶς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ διὰ τὴν ἡμετέραν σωτηρίαν κατελθόντα καὶ σαρκωθέντα, ἐνανθροπήσαντα, παθόντα, καὶ ἀναστάντα τῇ τρίτῇ ἡμέρα, [καὶ] ἀνελθόντα εἰς τοὺς οὐρανούς ἐρχόμενον κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς
Καὶ εἰς τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμα.
The anathemata of the Council of Nicaea read as follows:
Τοὺς δὲ λέγοντας .ἦν ποτε ὅτε οὐκ ἦν, καὶ πρὶν γεννηθῆναι οὐκ ἦν, καὶ ὄτι ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἐγένετο, ἢ ἐξ ἑτέρας ὑποστσεως ἢ οὐσίος φάκοντας εἶναι, ἢ τρεπτόν ἢ αλλοιωτὸν υἱὸν τοῡ θεοῡ ἀναθemατίζει ἡ καθολικὴ ἐκκλησία.
But as for those who say, There was when He was not, and, Before being born He was not, and that He came into existence out of nothing, or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or substance, or is subject to alteration or change—these the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes.
Whatever theological confusion arising out of his use of the Logos-sarx idiom, Athanasius upholds the Nicene Christology, for he understands “Logos” historically, as a title of Jesus the Lord, the Christ. The Fathers at Nicaea taught the full divinity of Jesus the Lord, for it was this that the Arians had denied. While Arius’ heresy was cosmologically inspired, dependent upon the Platonic emanationism; the Christological doctrine of the Council of Nicaea was that of the historical faith of the Church, which knows nothing of and has no interest in the abstract ‘immanent Logos’ presupposed by Arius’ heresy. Neither does Athanasius but, having affirmed with Nicaea the full divinity, full humanity and full unity of the Christ, at a speculative level controlled by the Logos-sarx analysis, he tends to ascribe distinct agencies to Jesus’ human and divine natures, failing as Origen often had, to remember their mysterious unity in the Person of the Christ. Nonetheless, like Origen, Athanasius affirmed over and again the one thing necessary, the unity of the Person of Christ, and thus of his Personal redemption of the fallen creation.
Apart from Origen, a cosmologically induced theological confusion was effectively universal among the pre-Nicene Fathers in the Orient. Its Trinitarian resolution at Nicaea was bitterly resisted for the rest of the fourth century by theologians thus influenced by Eusebius of Caesarea as to be committed to the Arian subordinationism and to prefer Constantius’ ecclesial authority to that of the Council of Nicaea. The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon would definitively affirm the Christological implication of the Nicene definition of the Personal homoousion of the Christ, and the Personal unity of the fullness of humanity and of divinity in Jesus the Lord taught by Irenaeus a century and a quarter earlier. After Athanasius’ death in 373, the Monophysism taught by Apollinarius, later condemned at I Constantinople, was renewed by Dioscorus via his "Robber Council of Ephesus" in 449. The Symbol of Chalcedon would condemn Dioscorus' refusal at his “Robber Council of Ephesus” to accept the definition by the Council of Ephesus of Mary’s motherhood of God.
There is a world of difference between Athanasius’ pastoral-soteriological-religious use of the Logos of John 1:14, and that of such a dévot of the Logos-sarx Christological analysis as Cyril of Alexandria, whose Christology assumed the agent of our redemption to be the immanent Word, not Jesus the Christ. Under the same cosmological misconception of the Johannine Logos, Nestorius faced the same dilemma and made what is ultimately the same mistake: the denial that the agent of our salvation is Jesus the Christ.
W. A. Jurgens, whose comment upon a passage in Athanasius’ Discourses Against the Arians 2, 70 is quoted in endnote 7 supra, reads it as affirming that “The Son then is homoousios or consubstantial with the Father, and we are homoousios or consubstantial with the Christ.” Unless we are to make of Athanasius’ Christology an anticipation of Nestorius’ diophysism, this language anticipates the doctrine of Chalcedon, the affirmaion of the Personal unity of Jesus as the “one and the same Son.’
Athanasius’ use of the Logos-sarx vocabulary to express his Spirit Christology subjects it to a semantic confusion upon which Hanson dwells,[621] but the final statements of his Christology in the Catholic Letter, in the Tome, and in the Letter to Jovinian is simply that of the Nicene doctrine of homoousion of the Son with the Father which, as Personal, invokes his Personal unity, not merely his divinity, as was recognized and taught at Chalcedon. This recognition of the Personal homoousion of the Son was implicit in Athanasius’ reliance upon the communication of idioms in the Christ and, if Msgr. Jurgens is correct, finds an earlier expression in the Second Discourse to the Arians.
The Eusebian subordinationism controlled the homoiousians response to the Arian denial of that consubstantiality barred their acceptance of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son. The persistent condemnation by Basil of Caesarea of Marcellus and the Eustathians as Sabellians, and his inability to understand Athanasius’ resistance to his effort to resolve the Antiochene schism by accepting Meletius, at best a homoiousian, as the Bishop of Antioch, were the product of his own homoiousian subordinationism and his consequent confusion over the meaning, even the intelligibility, of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of Jesus, the Son. The meaning of hypostasis and of ousia, the terms Origen had used to distinguish the Personal unity of Father, Son and the Holy Spirit from the substantial unity of the Trinity, had been obscured by the subordinationism read into them by Eusebius of Caesarea, whose influence throughout the Orient made their association with subordinationism so commonplace as to render its alternatives as either tritheistic or Sabellian: e.g., the Nicene doctrines of the homoousion of the Son and the radical unity, mia ousia, mia hypostasis, of the Trinity was intelligible outside Alexandria only as a Sabellian identification of hypostasis with ousia .
Athanasius’ Tome abandoned his earlier supposition that the use of these terms were prerequisite to ecclesial communion within the context of the doctrine of Nicaea; he had learned that such terminological disputes were irrelevant. Once the homoousion of the Son with the Father were accepted, it mattered not at all whether the unqualified unity of the divine substance were designated hypostasis or ousia . The Council of Nicaea had used these terms as equivalent designations of the divine unity, and while Athanasius had famously insisted on one “hypostasis,” with an eye to the Eusebian fondness for “three hypostases,” his Tome to the Antiochenes accepted “ousia ” as an equally appropriate designation of the Trinitarian substance. Thus, hoping to address the dissident anti-Arian clergy and faithful of that city, he could hope to persuade them that their objections to the doctrine of the Council of Nicaea were reducible to disputes over words, irrelevancies to be overridden by their faith in the full divinity of the Son. Athanasius, receiving reports early in 362 of an ad hoc alliance of a few of his suffragan bishops with Meletian homoiusians from the Delta who had attended the Council of Seleucia three years earlier, had thought to recognize, in their common front against the Arians, a common faith in the full divinity of Jesus the Lord. On this foundation, he hoped to persuade them to acknowledge in turn that the only adequate expression of that faith is the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father; for their homoiousion doctrine cannot avoid a heteroousian implication.
In the circumstances of the Archdiocese of Alexandria in the mid-fourth century, so exhaustively detailed by Prof. Annick Martin, Athanasius' preaching of the Nicene Creed inevitably had a polemic thrust, aimed at preserving and defending the unity of the faith against the Arian heresy, as also against the lesser threats posed by pagan. Jewish and schismatic communities in his diocese, and at preserving the indispensable unity of his authority over it and thus of the diocese itself, against the continual threat posed by the schismatic Melitian bishops who, from 335, supported the continuing Arian attack upon Athanasius. His eminently pastoral concern for his huge diocese entailed a close relation with the minority of orthodox monastic communities founded by Anthony and Pachomius, whose members, generally revered by the Catholic laity, provided a regular supply of fit candidates for consecration as bishops to serve both the urban and the outlying parishes under his authority. To these he addressed his annual Festal Letters, a rich source of information upon the man himself. Before all else, he was a bishop in full union with the bishops who had met at Nicaea to teach the truth of Christ against its Arian deniers, and whose Alexandrine counterparts met with him again thirty-seven years later at the Council of Alexandria, hoping to convert the Oriental bishops to the faith taught at Nicaea.
But by the time the emissaries of the Council of Alexandria arrived at Antioch with the Tome, Lucifer’s allegedly irregular consecration of Paulinus had armed the pro-Nicene Eustathians with their own bishop, balancing a doctrinal stand-off long since beyond repair. Each party of the Eustathian-Meletian schism was thereafter represented by a formally recognized bishop. Their irreconciliability was set in granite by the homoiousion Council of Antioch in 363, which affirmed the Nicene homoousios only by identifying it with the Antiochene homoiousios. Even at the First Council of Constantinople, nineteen years after Athanasius failed to convert the homoiusian bishops in Antioch, and eight years after his death, the leaders of the Antiochene homoiousians still refused the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, and prevented the definition of the homoousios of the Holy Spirith with the Father and the Son.
The extreme homoiousians insisted upon the full binitarian implication of the subordinationist formula of Basil of Ancyra, homoios kat’ousian, and consequently rejected the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit. These, the Pneumatomachians, the “Spirit fighters,” whose Egyptian counterparts were labelled“Tropici” by Athanasius, were condemned by him at the Council of Alexandria in 362, and would be condemned by the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed which, affirming the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit, was promulgated by the Council of I Constantinople in 381.
Basil of Caesarea evinced a diffidence in this matter: fully committed to the divinity of the Holy Spirit, he avoided attributing the homoousion, to the Holy Spirit: i.e., the hypostatic or Personal reality as a member of the Trinity, which he is willing to attribute to the Son, if only suo modo, i.e., homoios kat’ousian. His namesake of Ancyra, the originator of the homoiousion theology, understood the homoios kat’ousian to be unique to the Son precisely as Begotten, and so had denied outright the homoiousion of the Holy Spirit. Basil of Caesarea’s failure to affirm the consubstantiality of the Spirit reflects the lasting influence of Basil of Ancyra, which Hanson has insisted is foundational in the Cappadocians’ theology, naming Basil of Caesarea particularly in this connection.[622] Basil’s nephew, Amphilocius of Iconium, to whom Basil dedicated his De Spiritu Sancto, allied himself with Gregory of Nazianzen, who led the opposition to the Pneumatomachian heresy after Basil’s death in 379, and particularly after succeeding to the Presidency of the Council of Constantinople after Meletius’ death in 380 when, opposed by Gregory of Nyssa and Diodore of Tarsis, he failed to persuade the Council to affirm the homoousion of the Holy Spirit. The Council affirmed the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit but in a context marked by the failure to assert the homoousion of the Holy Spirit: the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed affirmed instead:
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
Who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
Who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
Who has spoken through the prophets.
While this confessional language does not ascribe “homoousios” to the Holy Spirit, its assertion of the Church’s faith in the Holy Spirit in fact requires that He be consubstantial with the Father and the Son.
Eusebius was an Origenist, in the sense of a disciple of that unmatched genius, but one who, in attempting to improve upon his mentor, succeeded only in radically misunderstanding him. As Kelly has observed, Eusebius was driven by cosmological rather than soteriological concerns, which is to say, he was a rationalist of the Middle or Neoplatonic persuasion. For him, the unity of being and of truth was a necessary unity, as it had been for Parmenides of Elea, a village in southern Greece, and for all Greek speculation thereafter Heraclides apart, for he did not speculate, but whose intuition of th e dynamic unity of being countered the Eleatic doctrine of its abstract unity. Locked within the Eleatic mentality, Eusebius was unable to grasp the historical freedom, the factual departure from cosmological necessity, of the doctrinal tradition proclaimed at Nicaea. Consequently, he was unable to understand how the One God, whom he supposed to be the Father, could have a co-eternal, co-equal, consubstantial Son. It did not occur to him that he had the wrong question in mind. The Fathers at Nicaea had no interest in the “how” of the Incarnation. The were interested only in proclaiming the cosmologically impossible but concretely historical fact that Jesus is Lord, that he is God, that he is therefore consubstantial with the Father. As Origen knew but as Eusebius denied, the Father is “Father” only by his eternal begetting of and relation to his equally eternal and equally divine Son. Their names are then relational, naming not the divine Substance, as Eusebius had taken for granted, but Personal subsistfnce in and possession of thefulness of the divine Substance.
Consequently, Eusebius has theological interest not by reason of any contribution which he made to Trinitarian doctrine or Christology, for he was incapable of any. Rather, he stands as a vivid, living example of cosmological confusion. His express convictions echoed throughout the Orient in the fourth century, and affected it profoundly by confusing all who engaged in his cosmologically infected and sub-theological speculation. Not all did, but there were few exceptions.
Marcellus of Ancyra was born not much later than 270: he lived to a great age, dying in 374, a year after Athanasius. As bishop of Ancyra, he presided over the Synod of Ancyra in 314, and supported Athanasius at the Council of Nicaea. A decade later he published a book condemning Asterius, a leading Arian, and included Eusebius of Nichomdedia and Eusebius of Caesarea in that condemnation. For this he was not forgiven. A year later they had persuaded Constantine that he was a Sabellian, and Constantine deposed him from his See in 336. He was able to return only at the end of his life, although his orthodoxy had been confirmed by Pope Julian I in 341 and by the provincial Synod of Serdica in 343. The charge of Sabellianism hung over him for the rest of his life: only recently has it been opened to discussion.
Marcellus appears to have had little or no metaphysical curiosity in an age wherein that curiosity, and familiarity with its conjoined vocabulary, were essential to theological communication. In this sense Marcellus must be regarded as a primitive theologian, whose unconcern for theological sophistication of his day and devotion to the apostolic tradition is reminiscent of the Apostolic Fathers. The surviving fragments of his writings evince their author’s disinterest in theological speculation, his absolute conviction of the unity of God, and his loyalty to the Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son, Jesus the Lord. By reason of having presided over the Council of Ancyra a decade earlier, he was already well known at the time of the Council of Nicaea, at which, with Ossius of Cordoba and Eustathius of Antioch, he showed himself an Athanasian loyalist. Together with Eustathius of Antioch, he was a sufficiently intransigent supporter of the Nicene definition of the unity of God as that of mia ousia , mia hypostasis, to have drawn the malign attention of Eusebius of Caesarea, who could find no middle ground between his own subordinationist interpretation of Origen and the unitarian modalism of Sabellius. It was inevitable that Marcellus would see in Eusebius of Caesarea and his namesake of Nicomedia impersonations of Asterius’ Arianism, and equally inevitable that they in turn would see in the stress of Marcellus, Eustathius and Athanasius upon the Nicene mia ousia, mia hypostasis doctrine of the absolute divine unity, the Sabellian alternative to their own adamantine subordinationism.
Consequently, once restored to imperial favor, the “two Eusebii,” of Caesarea and of Nicomedia, persuaded Constantine to convene synods at Antioch and at Constantinople at which both Marcellus and Eusebius were convicted of Sabellianism, and deposed: Eustathius in 330, and Marcellus in 336. Eusebius of Caesarea was also influential in securing the excommunication of Athanasius at the Synod of Tyre in 335. By invoking Constantine’s sympathy, the two Eusebii hoped to impose their heresy universally. Insofar as Constantine was concerned, theirs was a forlorn hope: having confirmed the excommunication of Athanasius, Constantine should have followed through and assigned a successor to Athanasius’ See of Alexandria, but he never did so. However, in another twenty years, at the second Council―”The Blasphemy”―of Sirmium, the Eusebian ambition appeared well on the way to realization.
Eusebius of Caesarea’ animus against Marcellus continued to his last years. In 335 Eusebius wrote his Contra Marcellum, and in 336 resumed the attack in his De Theologia Ecclesiastica[623]. Evans, generally unsympathetic to the Spirit Christology, and to Marcellus’ use of it in particular, has supplied strategic quotations from Eusebius’ indictment of Marcellus on this account, first quoting Eusebius’ rendition of a peccant passage from Marcellus, and then giving Eusebius’ interpretation of it:
Τἰ τοἰνυν ἤν τὸ κατελθὸν τοῦτο πρὸ τοῢ ἐνανθρωπῆσαι πάντγως που, φησὶν, πνεῢμα. εἰ γάρ τι παρά τοῢτο ἐθέλοι λέγειν, οὐ συχωρήσει αὐτῷ ὁ πρὸς τὴν παρθένον εἰρεηκὼς ἄγγελος, Πνεῢμα ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπί σε.
which may be translated as:
What, then, was the “this” that came down before the Incarnation? He says, (it is) cerτainly a spirit; for if someone should wish to say (it was) something other than this, the angel, who said to the virgin, “A holy spirit will come upon you,” will not permit him (to do so).
To this Eusebius responds:
εἰ δὲ πνεῢμα εἶναι φήσει, ἄκουε τοῢ σωτῆρος λέγοντος, Πνεῢμα ὁ θεός, ἐλέγχεται Μάρκελλος αὑτὸν τὸν πατέρα ἐνηνθροπηκἐναι εἰπών.
which may be translated as:
If he will say it is a spirit, listen to the savior who says, “God is a spirit”. Since the savior, then, clearly said “God is spirit” about the Father, Marcellus is convicted of saying that the Father himself became flesh.
With due respect to Evans, this retort is hardly discussable beyond pointing out that is a strictly subordinationist begging of the question. We are dealing here with a fragment of Marcellus’ theology in which the use of “pneuma” rests upon an exegetical tradition going back beyond Ignatius Martyr to Paul in I Corinthians and Romans, which Eusebius either ignores or of which he is ignorant. The excerpt casts a certain light upon Eusebius, but none upon Marcellus.
Evans cited Athanasius as the last exponent of the Spirit Christology taught by the Apostolic Fathers, citing the Oratio contra Arianos, IV, although aware that its attribution to Athanasius was then (1948) in question : Against Praxeas, p. 13. While its Athanasian authorship is no longer accepted, Oratio IV still attests the existence of a learned advocacy of the Spirit Christology in the latter half of the fourth century.[624] It has earlier been stressed that the Spirit Christology, which understands the subject of the Incarnation to be Jesus, and therefore interprets the “Holy Spirit” of Lk. 1:35 and Mt. 2:20 as referring to the pre-existent Jesus, can alone accept the literal truth of the doctrine of Jn. 1:14 and Phil. 2:6-7. It was by the fourth century already ancient doctrine in Alexandria, that by her conception of her Son, Mary is the mother of God. This would be defined at Ephesus and again at Chalcedon.
The author of the Oratio Contra Arianos iv is then a signal witness to the literal truth of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ, which suggests an Alexandrine source of that work: its early attribution to Athanasius is understandable, while its association by Hanson with the diophysite Antiochene school would be less so, were the polemic interest of its author Christological. However, his interest was Trinitarian, and the emphasis of the disciples of Eustathius upon the Nicene “mia ousia“ would have been enough draw upon them the suspicion of Sabellianism. Were he himself a Eustathian, the author of the Fourth Oratio would have been alert to any evidence of it.
The Spirit Christology’s identification of the “Spirit” of Lk, 1:35 and Mt. 2:20 with the primordially pre-existent Jesus gave way in the first half of the fourth century to a speculative commitment to the dehistoricization of the Logos; this typified the Eusebian theology, Christological as well as Trinitarian. It has been read into the Christology of Athanasius, but unsuccessfully, for it is entirely inconsistent with his continual emphasis upon the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord. The Symbol of Chalcedon eliminated that dehistoricization and confirmed the emphasis, by Justin, Irenaeus, Origen and Athanasius, upon historical “the one and the same Son,” whom the Symbol identified, definitively, with the historical Jesus, the Son of Theotokos.
This definition of the faith of the Church in Jesus the Lord has since baffled those theologians East and West, whose uncritical methodological fixation upon cosmology we have examined. They have persuaded themselves that the cosmologically necessary dehistoricization of the Johannine “logos sarx egeneto” is also a dogmatic necessity transcending the defined doctrine of the Council of Chalcedon. Were theological academy to convert from its current cosmological consensus to a truly historical consciousness, its members would recognize that only the restoration of the emphasis of the Apostolic Fathers upon the Lordship of Jesus, and thus upon the unconditioned truth of the communication in his Name of divine and human idioms, can satisfy the doctrine of the double homoousion of the Son, with the Father and with us, without which Jesus would not be the Lord, nor his mother the Theotokos.
The identity of the author of the Oratio ad Arianos iv is still undecided but the evidence it provides of the survival of this very early Christology into the fourth century remains authentic, and Eusebius’ condemnation of it in Contra Marcellum and De Theologia Ecclesiastica continues to depend upon the question-begging reading of Marcellus as a Sabellian heretic―this by a theologian who showed himself unable to imagine a path between his own Trinitarian subordinationism and the Sabellianism he thinks to have found in the few surviving pro-Nicene bishops who taught at once the substantial unity of the Trinity and the homoousion of the Son. While Eusebius' primary targets were Marcellus of Ancyra and, Eustathius of Antioch, he saw Athanasius’ fidelity to the Nicene Creed to be no less objectionable.
We have referred to Marcellus as a throwback to the thought-patterns of the Apostolic Fathers, dependent not upon the speculative categories of the fourth century, but rather upon the apostolic tradition of the doctrine of the Church, whose Nicene clarification he obstinately upheld against Eusebius’ equally determined rejection of it. Joseph Lienhard[625] points out the meliorative reading of Marcellus by current scholarship, which agrees that “The greatest shortcoming of (Marcellus’ theology was his inability to say what is three in God.”
This insight precisely counters another indictment of Marcellus by Eusebius, who in fact understands as Sabellian what Marcellus may have written and certainly believed about the one God, viz.,
‘that there are three names to be found in one hypostasis.’
Ecc. Theol. III, 4.(PG 24:1006A) emphasis added.
Hansen, “The Source and Significance of the Fourth Oratio Contra Arianos Attributed to Athanasius,” Vigiliae Christianae 42 (1988) 257-266, at 266, note 15.
Despite the Sabellians’ nominal use of ‘name” to designate the merely notional reality of the Father, Son, and Spirit in the divine Monas, there is a certain circularity in imposing it on Marcellus as evidence of a Sabellian penchant. We can be quite certain that Marcellus believed in the three Trinitarian Names. He had been baptized by their invocation and as a bishop of long standing he had for decades baptized in Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; further, the liturgical recitation of the Trinitarian doxology had informed his priestly life. His Trinitarian orthodoxy, contested by Arians and Arian sympathizers such as Constantine’s advisors, the two Eusebii, and Constantius’s advisors, Valens and Ursacius, passed unchallenged by Athanasius at the Council of Rome in 340. There it was confirmed by Pope Julius I, and confirmed again by the Julius’ acceptance of Marcellus attendance at the Western Synod of Serdica, as well as by Athanasius’ refusal, twenty years later, to join in his condemnation by Basil of Caesarea. Unless we insist upon reading Sabellianism into whatever is known of Marcellus―and most of the critique of his orthodoxy is surmise, an interpretation of fragments inspired by the Arianism of his Oriental critics―that heresy cannot reasonably be imposed upon him, for he did not possess the requisite speculative interest. Lienhard has suggested that Marcellus did not much differentiate between the meanings of ousia, hypostasis and prosôpon, for which he can hardly be blamed. Basil the Great had his difficulties distinguishing them for purposes of Trinitarian theology, as witnesses his fastidious reluctance to affirm the homoousion of the Holy Spirit, whose divinity he defends at length.
There is good reason to read Marcellus’ statement that “there are three names to be found in one hypostasis” as a literal affirmation of three Persons within the divine Unity. Tertullian, with no sense of innovation, had affirmed the liturgy’s strict association of “Name” with “Person;” Evans is explicit on that point, nor can it be challenged that Tertullian distinguished between the Names as between Personae within the substantial unity of the divine Trinitas. The Second Creed of the Dedication Council (341), written in reaction to Pope Julius I’s dismissal of the charges brought against Marcellus by the synod at Constantinople which had deposed him, condemned Marcellus equally with Arius, implying that Marcellus used “name” of the Father, Son, and Spirit, in a merely nominal sense.[626] This was no doubt the conviction of the Oriental bishops present. What evidence there is for it, beyond that offered by Eusebius of Caesarea, is not clear. In any case, this interpretation of Marcellus’ use of “Name” presupposes Marcellus’ Sabellianism; it does not substantiate it; Grillmeier has offered a cogent defence of Marcellus’ Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy.[627]
Were the inference of Sabellianism from Marcellus’ Trinitarian use of “Name” taken seriously, it would run equally against the Catholic liturgical tradition, which identifies “what is three in God” precisely with the three Names of the Baptismal formula. The tradition speaks also of “baptism in the Name;” it concludes its prayer with the doxology “in the Name of the Father, of the Son and the Holy Spirit,” and another doxology “in the Name of the Lord,“ and much more. Eusebius’ indictment of Marcellus rests upon an evident personal animus in combination with a persistent refusal of the Nicene Creed, rather than upon credible evidence. In sum, the faith of the Church has only a liturgical expression. It cannot be stated in the language of speculative theology, metaphysical or otherwise. Marcellus failed to satisfy his subordinationist critics, led by Eusebius of Caesarea, a great historian, but certainly not a theologian, despite his enormous influence over the fourth-century Oriental bishops, always excepting Athanasius, who died in communion with Marcellus.
Grillmeier reports[628] Aphrahat to have been born between 270 and 285, a period corresponding to the outer limits of the birth date of Marcellus, who died in extreme old age in 374, having been the presiding bishop at the Synod of Ancyra between sixty and seventy years earlier. As Jurgens observes, there were few thirty-year old Greek bishops at that time. Aphrahat did not live so long, he died in 345. He spent his life in effective isolation from the Greek and Latin theology of the time. He makes no mention of the Nicene Council. As Grillmeier puts it, “His opponents are not the Arians, but the Jews.” He developed his theology in response to the Jewish rejection of the Christian tradition, and it must be read in that context: the questions which agitated Greek and to an extent Latin theologians were not his.
Grillmeier describes Aphrahat’s Trinitarian theology as ante-Nicene:
Aphrahat’s subordinationism, like his name christology, is also ante-Nicene. It is quite clearly expressed in the typological explanations of Jacob’s vision of the heavenly ladder:
Sed et scala ipsa quam Iacob vidit, Salvatoris nostri mysterium est, per quem homines iusti ab imo sursum ascendunt. Mysterium insuper est crucis Salvatoris nostri, quae ad modum scalae erecta fuit, et in cuius summo Dominus (“God the Father” is meant) stabat. Nam supra Christum exstat Dominus omnium, quemadmodum beatus Apostolus dixit: Caput Christi Deus est (I Cor. XI: 3.206
206 Demonstrations IV, 5: Psyr I, 145-6; cf. A. Vööbus, OrChr 46, 1962, 26.
Grillmeier, op. cit., at 215.
Grillmeier thinks the subordinationism he attributes to Aphrahat to be evidenced by his reference to the Father as the “Caput Christi,” citing I Cor. 11:3, a citation rare among the Fathers, as has been seen. Its significance is hardly subordinationist, unless we wish so to describe the Pauline Gospel. Grillmeier does not further pursue this matter, passing on to affirm in Aphrahat a Spirit Christology, for which view he cites impressive evidence, and in further support of which he is able to cite A. Loof’s comparable interpretation of Aphrahat’s Christology. At the same time however, Grillmeier rejects Loof‘s reading of the Aphrahat’s Spirit Christology as a denial of the divinity of the ‘spirit,’ which Loofs supposes to have been given Christ (rather than identified with Christ) supposing that ‘spirit’ to be the same as the Holy Spirit given to us for our sanctification. Grillmeier, on the contrary, concludes that Aphrahat “shares the tradition of the early Church:”
Within the framework of a Christology of humiliation and exaltation we find the foundations which allow us to assume in Araphat belief in the pre-existence of Christ, in the incarnation and the exaltation. Here is the pre-existent Son of God who took the form of a slave and brought his manhood with him to the throne of glory. We are reminded of Phil. 2:5-11 in the framework of an admonition to the monks:
Exemplum ergo accipiamus, carissime, a Vivificatore nostra, qui, cum dives esset, se ipsum pauperum efficit (cf. 2 Cor. VIII, 9): Altissimus majestatem suam dedit ; in excelsis habitans non habuit locum ubi caput reclinaret (cf. Matt. VII: 20); in nubibus quondam venturus, pullo asinae insedit, ut Ierosolymam intraret; Deus et Dei Filius formam servi accepit (Phil. II:7)….Cui in tabernaculo Patris sui ministrabatur, ipse hominum ministerium accepit….Cunctorum mortalium Vivificator seipsum morti crucis tradidit.210
210 Demonstrations, vi, 9: PSyr. I, 275-8.
Ibid., at 216.
Aphrahat’s Christology is very much the Spirit Christology of Ignatius Martyr, in which “Holy Spirit,” who in Lk. 1:35, will “come upon” the Virgin, is the pre-existent Jesus, whom she conceives.
Commenting upon this Latin translation of the Syriac of an excerpt from Aphrahat’s Christology, Grillmeier stresses the enduring Christological significance of a Syriac term, “kejān” (equivalently the Persian “kyanā”) which Aphrahat uses sometimes in contexts which Grillmeier understands to be nontheological but nonetheless Christological─however that may be─and which Aphrahat uses also in specifically theological Christological contexts. Here Grillmeier observes that “Where the Greek term physis is used in the NT it is regularly translated by kejān in Syriac”, noting that since Aphraphat always uses kejān empirically and concretely, to denote an encounered empirical reality or a thing observed by men, in such wise that whenever physis is used to translate Aphrahat’s kejān, it should be understood concretely, never abstractly. “In theological and Christological sections, on the other hand, “kejān is often used where there is mention of humility”.
Grillmeier’s elaborate development of this theme suggests quite strongly that Aphrahat’s Christological use of kejān refers to Jesus’ fallen humanity, i.e., to the “form of a slave,” the morphe doulou which he has by reason of his kenōsis, with the specific reference to Phil. 2:5-11, where the subject of the kenōsis is the concrete Jesus whom the Apostles encountered, the Logos sarx egeneto. Thus Araphat’s reference, in the passage quoted supra, to the humiliation of “Deus et Dei Filius” is to be read concretely, i.e., of Jesus, not of an abstract cosmological Logos. The proper theological-Christological translation of kejān, in the historical context which it has in the Old Testament and in Paul, that of concrete fallenness, the “form of a slave,” imprisoned by the fear of death, as we read in Heb. 2:15, can only be sarx, not physis. However, in the footnote (211) in which Grillmeier surveys the scholarship bearing upon the “etymology and semantics” of kejān, “sarx” does not appear among the translations considered optional by the philologists.
Aphrahat’s insistent concreteness when speaking of Jesus the Lord is at one with his Spirit Christology, upon which Grillmeier does not dwell save to disagree with Loof’s relegation of the term “spirit” to a created grace. The exegesis of Lk. 1:35 is here in point, as Grillmeier indicates by his reference to Simonetti.[629] If, as Grillmeier believes, Aphrahat shares the tradition of the early Church, he shares that traditional exegesis: “Holy Spirit” is the Lord.
The “Tropici” or “Pneumatomachians” (“Spirit-fighters”) as they were called from about 380, accepted the logic of Basil of Ancyra’s limitation of the homoiousion to the Son, and therefore, denying that there is in God any relation conceivable other than that of Father-Son, must deny that the Spirit is distinct from the Father and the Son. Basil of Caesarea, the leader of the Cappadocians (i.e., Basil as bishop of Caesarea from 370 until his death in 379, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, Basil’s friend, Gregory of Nazianzen and, later, Basil’s disciple, Amphilocius of Iconium) preached and acted against this heresy, insisting that the Holy Spirit has the same glory as the Father and Son. However, echoing Basil of Ancyra’s restriction of the “homoiousion” to the Son, Basil of Caesarea did not attribute the Nicene homoousios to the Holy Spirit[630] nor did he explicitly refer to the Holy Spirit as God.[631] Either proposition would have attributed a hypostatic or Personal divinity to the Holy Spirit as consubstantial with the Father and the Son.
This avoidance has been explained by attributing to Basil a recognition of a need for tact: i.e., he did not wish to cause dissent where it was not necessary, for the divinity of the Spirit was no longer in dispute. This is a very weak justification: “divinity” need not be hypostatic and Basil never affirms a hypostatic Holy Spirit in his De Spiritu Sancto. Gregory of Nazianzen, however, went further than Basil had, Naming the Spirit “God,” which connotes a hypostatic divinity. Gregory of Nyssa had attributed to the Holy Spirit the same energeia or ousia as the Father and the Son, but these terms do not connote a hypostatic reality. Gregory of Nazianzen inferred from the hypostatic Name, “God” which he had given the Holy Spirit, its obvious implication, the homoousion of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. In saying this, he broke with Gregory of Nyssa, as Christopher Beeley has shown. Of the two Gregories, only Gregory of Nazianzen was in a position to explore the crucial distinction between Ousia and Hypostasis in God which Origen had long since proposed. Only upon that firmly apostolic Trinitarian foundation was it possible to distinguish an “identifying characteristic” or “distinguishing characteristic” (idios poion), viz., the unique “mode of origin” proper to each of the Persons, as contrasted to the koine poites or “specifying quality” which identifies the divine Substance simply as divine. This permitted the attribution to the Father of the “distinguishing characteristic of “ungenerateness,” and to the Son, of ”generateness.” The “distinguishing characteristic” of the Holy Spirit is more difficult to grasp, as Origen well knew: given that generation is unique to the Son, the Spirit’s relation to the Father through the Son may be named “procession” but not in the sense of prolation or emanation “Generateness” and “procession” fulfill the implicitly relational notion of “mode of origin,” while “ungenerateness” clearly does not. Amphilocius of Iconium had spoken of the affinity of “mode of origin” and “relation,” (see endnote 47, supra, citing J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 266) but the development of that crucial insight was left to Augustine. Gregory of Nazianzen’s clear recognition of the Trinity as the divine substance had been presaged by Origen’s recognition of the relational meaning of Father, and the distinction between the “substantial” reality of the eternal Father, Son, and Spirit, and the “accidental” reality .of all created reality.
Once again, these distinctions do not amount to the “Neo-Nicenism,” the change in Nicene doctrine, supposed by Loofs and Harnack to be an application to the one God of the universal-particular relation known to Stoicism and Aristotelianism. The Cappadocians knew nothing of a material divine substance; they insisted upon the indivisibility of the divine ousia, and thus insisted upon a single energeia or operation ad extra in the one God. They recognized that God acts outside the one God as a single Trinitarian substance, but without prejudice to the distinction between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Gregory of Nyssa’s failure to recognize with Origen that the Father is so Named as eternally begetting the Son and producing the Spirit, indicates that Gregory at least had not yet overcome the subordinationist supposition, instinctive to the cosmological imagination, that the divine Substance, as indivisible, has a necessary unity, that of a Monad, not the free unity of a freely Trinitarian Community of irreducibly distinct Personal Subjects.
This indivisible free substantial unity, the Trinitarian perichōresis, had long been unimaginable and inconceivable; in fact, it is so as a matter of necessity, for the immanent rationality of the fallen or sarkic mind reflects the fragmented condition of its own fallenness from free unity. Our conesquent quest for a necessary unity as the alternative to a necessary disunity can conceive of no free unity or free intelligibility, and so can hardly attribute free unity or free intelligibility and significance to any reality, whether human or divine. Yet the creation of free substantial unity is one of the first of the revelations in Genesis: the revelation that the final object of creation, that by which it is good and very good, and which cannot but be substantial, is the free unity of man and women which Adam celebrates in Gen. 2:23 and whose unity is affirmed in the next verse: the unity of “one flesh.” The truth of this revelation of the free, nuptially-ordered unity of historical being and of truth has long been veiled for Catholic spirituality and Catholic theology. Only within the past two decades has it entered explictly into the doctrinal tradition, with John Paul II’s teaching of the nuptiality of human existence, and consequently, finally, of the nuptial unity of our imaging of the Triune God. The nuptial unity of man and the Trinitarian unity of God are liturgically, doctrinally and theologically incapable of association with the monist reading of substance, which is per se the imposition of necessary fragmentation upon humanity, and therefore upon God.[632]
In fact, as we have seen, the monadic interpretation of the unity of the one God, the divine Trinitarian Substance, was practically universal with the ante-Nicene Fathers, Latin and Greek; it was particularly powerful in the Latin Church, inspiring the papal resistance in the early third century to the Trinitarianism of Tertullian and Hippolytus; see also J. N. D. Kelly’s discussion of the third century exchange of letters between Pope Dionysius of Rome and Dionysius of Alexandria.[633] This monist understanding of the unity of the divine Substance, then regarded by the conservataive Roman theologians as indispensable to the Christian faith in the One God, is merely a unreflective application of cosmological monism entirely inconsistent with the free historicity of the Father’s historical Missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit, which terminate in the historical New Covenant, and in the revelation in Christ of the free perichōresis of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Centuries will be needed to correct this mistake, which is still operative in recent Thomist theologians: notably, Karl Rahner, whose modalist dismissal of the apostolic tradition that Jesus Christ is Lord, was popularized in The Trinity,[634] and widely distributed. Its consequences are the modalism which we have seen to haunt current Catholic Trinitarian speculation, and the insoluble monophysite vs. diophysite dilemma which continues to enmire much of Catholic Christology, despite its dismissal at Chalcedon fifteen centuries ago..
On the other hand, the “identifying characteristic” proper to and even constitutive of each of the divine Persons was not understood by the Cappadocians to be a relation, although as has been noted this had been suggested as equivalent to “mode of origin” by Amphilocius of Iconium, the youngest of them. The Cappadocians had understood the identifying characteristic which distinguishes the divine Persons from each other to be a distinction of “origin” in the case of Son and in the case of the Holy Spirit, but that in the case of the Father, whose distinguishing characteristic cannot be a distinction of origin, but is rather the lack of any origin, i.e., the “unoriginateness” (agenetos) and “unbegottenness” (agennetos) proper to the Father as the Source (Archē). This quest for identifying reflects their persistent hesitation over the divinity of the Holy Spirit. The path to understanding the Personal “distinctions” concretely, i.e., as relations, and the consequent understanding of the Trinitarian Persons as subsistent Relations, was left open for exploration by Augustine, perhaps independent of the contribution of Amphilocius to the resolution of the Cappadocian quandary.
This continuity between the Greek and the Latin orthodoxy manifest at Chalcedon could not have been existed had not Athanasiuis and the Nicene Cappadocians, Gregory of Nazianzen and Amphilocius of Iconium, persisted in a radical affirmation of the Mia ousia of the one God as prerequisite to the homoousion of the Son and of the Spirit with the Father from whom they proceed in the ordo (τάξις)revealed by Jesus the Lord’s revelation of the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Holy Spirit.
It is from this liturgical affirmation of the consubstantiality and irreducibility of the divine Persons in the Trinity that the development of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine proceeded through the first four Councils, to culminate in the Chalcedonian affirmation of the divine and human consubstantiality of Jesus the Christ, the One and the Same Son of the Father and Theotokos. Theological resistance to the homoousion of the Son with humanity has amounted to a re-invention of a quasi-Neo-Chalcedonian refusal of the Nicene doctrine of he homoousion of the Son with the Father, an uncritical supposition that this dogmatically-defined term, resting on the indivisibility of the divine Ousia, has suddenly lost its meaning when applied to the human ousia , whose attribution to each human person has long been taken for granted. This naiveté makes the headship of Christ unintelligible, for the head is the source of the free unity of that substance of which he is the head: there can be no multiplication of human substances without a multiplication of the head, which is nonsensical. The head of humanity is the One and the Same Son whose Personal unity is defined seven times in the Chalcedonian Symbol.
A theological ‘reception’ of doctrine is an evident misnomer insofar as the term is applied to the Catholic fides quaerens intellectum. The personal faith from which the Catholic theologian’s inquiry arises has in any given case interiorized the doctrine which it proceeds to explore systematically in an ongoing quest for a yet more adequate expression of the quaerens, the intellectual dimension of integral personal participation in the ecclesial worship of the mystery.
Unfortunately, the turmoil occasioned by Vatican II has left few Catholic theologians who remain willing to regard their work in those Anselmian terms. The early medieval presupposition of theologian’s Catholic fidelity as the precondition and font of his theological quaerens is of late encountered as an ecumenical embarrassment, as a puerile subservience to a ”patriarchal” Magisterium, as an arbitrary affront to current political correctness, or as incompatible with an indiscussible view of academic freedom, borrowed long since from a definition published by the American Association of University Professors in 1940. Innocuous on its face, over the years its application to Catholic theology faculties has exploited J. S. Mill’s identifycation of freedom with irresponsibility, thereby liberating professed Catholic theologians from any need to recognize the professional’s fiduciary obligetion to the ecclesial community which now must affront the personal irresponsibility.which he confuses with academic freedom.
With that propriety in view, the academic’s professional responsibility for the teaching of truth is uniformly trumped by a fashionable relativism, with the easily predictable consequence that there is no point whatever in considering oneself a professor, much less a theologian, when both are understood to be in the service of power, not of truth, their dignity traded for a safe servility. Further, the institutional ban upon any intra-institutional discussion of academic freedom thus misconceived relieves its adherents of any concern for its inner logic: it has long been noted that the ‘concerned’ academic is immune to unfashionable temptations.[635] At this level, nothing remains to be discussed, so we return to the Cappadocians. .
Some consideration of the influence of Stoicism should preface the discussion of the Cappadocian attempts to develop a Trinitarian theology which would account for the distinction between the Persons in the Trinity. Middle Platonism had a considerable Stoic component, evident in Origen’s vocabulary, particularly his use of the Stoic notion of “hypostasis” to denote the concrete reality of each of the Trinitarian Persons. There is no evidence of any influence upon Origen’s Christology and Trinitarian theology of the Stoic emanationism wherein Logos is variously conceived as endiathetos, prophorikos, and spermatikos, for its underlying dualism was alien to Origen’s theological project. [636]
More than a century after Origen’s death, the Cappadocians were divided. The Trinitarian theology of Basil of Caesarea, as compiled in the famous Letter 38, traditionally ascribed to Basil but more probably the work of his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa, is influenced rather by Eusebius of Caesarea’s subordinationist rationalization of Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine than by the reality of Origen’s doctrine itself. Consequently, both Basil and Gregory of Nyssa were anti-Nicene, preferring to regard Jesus the Son as “similar in substance to the Father” (ὅμοιος κατ’οὐσίαν: homoios kat’ousian) rather than as Personally consubstantial with the Father; and consequently held the homoiousian theology, which was unable to affirm the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit.
Gregory of Nyssa relied to a considerable extent upon Stoicism in his development of the notion of the “distinguishing characteristics” which might identify and distinguish the Trinitarian Persons within the unity of the divine substance misconceived as subordinationist. To understand this influence, some acquaintance with the Stoic ontology and logic is useful. We summarize here only what is of immediate interest.
Underlying the Stoic cosmology is the mythical and dualist postulate of an eternal return by way of the submission of the divine Logos to a periodic ekpyrōsis, a cyclic purification by a universal conflagration, in which all finite reality is resolved into the unity of the Logos, who is Fire, but whose cyclic re-association with matter, the hypokeimenon─roughly, the Thomist materia in commune─is the source of the intelligibility of the physical universe by way of the procession of the Logos from its intrinsic immanence (the Logos endiathetos) to extrinsic utterance (the logos prophorikos, followed by the fragmented immanence of the Logos in the materially fragmented hypokeimenon (the logos spermatikos) whereby the Logos has become the intrinsic principle of intelligibility of every concrete physical entity. This procession of the Logos from integral immanence to extrinsic fragmentation is of course a continual degradation of the immanent perfection of the Logos, which is therefore increasingly in need of a cyclic purification by ekpyrōsis.
There are passages in Heraclitus’ aphorisms which may be read to connote an ekpyrōsis doctrine, but it is not certain that Heraclitus held this dualism. For the Stoics, as perhaps for Heraclitus, the primordial Logos-Fire, after its purification by the ekpyrōsis, is again received into the hypokeimenon, the underlying material substratum of all reality (Stoicism knows no immateriality, even in the unity of the immanent Logos), in a mingling of the two which thereafter is identified with the Logos, who is now Fire mingled with this feminine principle―until the next universal conflagration in which the contamination of the Logos by this mingling is again overcome.
This dualist pessimism is in parodoxical contrast with the monist ethical doctrine of Stoicism, very close to Islam’s ethos of kismet: i.e., unqualified submission to the absolute will of God─but with the considerable difference that the Stoic Logos, unlike the Moslem Allah, is an impersonal Intelligence rather than an absolute personal command which, as absolute, transcends rationality. The Stoic ethic of submission to the eternal rationality of the universe imparted by the Logos prophorikos, as transmitted to the West by Romans such as Seneca, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and Boethius, is the lasting contribution of Stoicism to theology. Its influence upon the Thomist natural law doctrine is evident and regrettable, for it entails the dualist supposition of the irrationality of free responsibility and so implies, if it does not require, a morality of conformity, a flight from the exercise of personal responsibility for a free future. However, the present interest is in the Stoic cosmology, and in its accompanying logical categoryizing of material being, a simplification of the Aristotelian categories by their reduction from ten to four.
Between the cyclic conflagrations, the Stoic Logos is emanationist: the immanent Logos (Logos endiathetos) utters itself into the hypokeimenon as the Logos prophorikos and, thus concretely immanent in the hypokeimenon, i.e., in matter, it is individualized, to become the “seed Logos,” (Logos spermatikos), the intelligible form, the ruling principle, (hegemonikon), of each of the concrete entities (hypostaseis) in which it is immanent.
Origen chose “hypostasis” to denote that which is three in God, the Trinitarian Names, but his insight encountered a flat incomprehension from the outset, and did not succeed, perhaps because of the evident difficulty of accounting for the absolute reality of the Trinity if “hypostasis,” in the traditional sense of “substance,” is reserved for the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Origen’s project was resumed by the Cappadocians, particularly Gregory of Nyssa, who attempted to account for the Personal unity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit in terms of relations of origin; given the Father’s lack of any origin, this approach could not succeed. Amphilocius, in a fragment to which too little attention was paid, (see endnote 47, supra) was the first to propose that the Persons were distinguished by their relation to each other, an insight which lay fallow until deployed, perhaps independently, by Augustine, who distinguished the relational unity of the Members of the Trinity from the absolute Substance that is the Trinity.
The Stoic logic rationalized these intelligible entities in a manner corresponding to the Aristotelian genera, species, and substances (particular material individuals). This categorization famously entered into Basil of Caesarea’s ousia-hypostasis distinction. Only the latter, the hypostasis, is concrete and actual. As with Thomism, Stoicism knows no concrete univerals, whether Platonic or Aristotelian. Only the concrete ‘object’ is a reality, a “hypostasis.” This explains the use of the term by Origen and by Basil of Caesarea after him to denote the concretely distinct Trinitarian “Names” who are the Father, Son and Spirit. Only these are actual, i.e., hypostases, distinguished each from each by unique differences which the Cappadocians strove to identify. Clearly, another term than hypostasis must be used to designate the divine unity. This substantial sense had been reserved to “ousia ” by Origen. This usage was followed Basil who, unlike Origen, had some trouble freeing himself from its categorical sense, i.e., that of a species which requires hypostases to exist; thus implying a material ousia which cannot be attributed to God.
In the Stoic cosmology, the concrete individual material entity is always constituted by the indwelling of the Logos in a quasi-material, quasi-feminine ordering principle. As abstract, this ordering principle is the hypokeimenon, which is abstract per se. But in the concrete thing, it is matter indwelt by the Logos spermatikos, the seed Logos. By that indwelling the notional materiality of the hypokeimenon is individuated, to become a concrete material hypostasis whose individuality is actualized by the indwelling Logos. By that indwelling, a “specific difference” (κοινέ πoitὲς ) and then an “individual difference” (ἴδιος πoιον) are added. These specifications may be seen to correspond to the “physis” (roughly, “nature”) and “hypostasis” (roughly, “person”), of the Cappadocian Christology.
In the Cappadocian application of Stoicism to Christology, the specifying quality that makes a given concrete individual to be a man rather than a mouse or a horse or a lion is ascribed to his human nature or physis. It is to the hypostasis, on the other hand, that Gregory of Nyssa ascribes the particularizing or individuating quality that makes a given man to be this unique human being who, as unique, has a personal name. It must be kept in view that in the Stoic cosmology, only the hypostasis is actual: “physis” is an abstraction, a concept rather than a reality.
Thus Jesus is a human individual, a member of the human category by reason of his human physis, while he is this particular human person, Jesus, by reason of his human hypostasis. This physis-hypostasis distinction will become normative in Greek Christology. It is disputed whether other implications of Stoic doctrine were accepted by Gregory of Nyssa. These could include a depreciation of the humanity of Christ as merely historical, merely fallen, thus as ceasing with the Resurrection. That would amount to a refusal to accept the economy of salvation as revelatory. The supposition that the Logos’ humanity is due to the fall is also Origenist, but cannot be attributed to Origen for whom the unfallen nous of the primordial Jesus is corporeal simply as finite, as integrally possessed of an unfallen body in a unity whose resurrection, whose transhistorical significance, he affirms. In any case, the doubt over Gregory of Nyssa’s reliance upon Stoicism will not be resolved here. Gregory understands the hypostasis of Jesus, or of any given human being, to be a synthesis of all the particular characteristics which constitute his unique humanity. The flaw in this Christology is that while this theory gives to Christ a human physis, it does not provide a human hypostasis or prosōpon because, for Gregory of Nyssa, it is only as identified with the divine eternal nonhistorical Logos that Jesus is Personal: “Logos” is his divine Personal Name, not his historical name: in short, Gregory of Nyssa took for granted the mistaken postulate identifying the immanent Word as the subject of the Incarnation. That “Jesus” is also the Son’s Personal Name had largely been lost to sight following the Arian controversy, which so focused upon the Son’s divinity, and thus upon the standing of the Logos-Son as divine, as the second Person of the Trinity, as to forget the Personal humanity of the Logos: Eustathius of Antioch was remarkable for having recognized and insisted upon Jesus' Personal humanity. However, in the second century, well before Tertullian and Origen developed the Christological doctrine which would be defined at Nicaea, the Greek apologists, Athenagoras, an Athenian layman, and Theophilus, the bishop of Antioch, had come to recognize that the Logos celebrated by the Christian liturgy had nothing in common with the non-human and consequently nonhistorical sense of “logos” given it by Greek philosophy, whether Stoic or Platonic. Their inspiration could only have been the liturgical celebration of the apostolic tradition, which established the triadic reality of the One God, and affirmed the unchanging order within the triad, the τάξις recited in the doxologies, inseparable from the celebration of the liturgy. The Apologists' influence upon later theology even in the same second century is difficult to assess, for theologies of Tertullian, Hippolytus and Origen must also have been liturgically inspired. Only the liturgical preaching of the bishops mediated the apostolic tradition in their time.
Should the docetic gnosticism condemned by the Gospel and the Letters of John the Evangelist be thought perhaps to linger as a dehistoricizing temptation afflicting the liturgical mediation of the apostolic tradition, this notion is corrected by Tertullian’s Apologeticus and Adversus Marcionem. This docetic temptation can be associated with Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine and his Christology only by a literal reading of that “moment of reason” in Adversus Praxean 27, wherein he muses upon the prior possibility of the mystery of the Incarnation whose factual, historical incomprehensibility he had earlier memorialized in his meditation in the De Carne Christi upon the humility of Christ, famously summarized in his “Credo quia impossibile.”
In the third century, Origen’s Peri Archon viewed the Logos as so in union with the corporeal (because created) nous which─with the fall and consequent kenōsis─is identically the human soul of the Christ, as to require in him the communication of idioms. However this insistence upon the primordial (not ab aeterno) union of the Logos with the created nous of the primordial Christ is generally ignored in discussions of Origen’s Trinitarian theology, rationalizing its famous incandescent-iron imagery into an abstract, nonhistorical analysis which presupposes a dehistoricized Christology, whether of the Logos-anthrōpos or Logos-sarx persuasion. Both Catholic and Orthodox Christology have uncritically accepted the imposition of this dehistoricization upon Origen’s Christology, whose achievement is still little appreciated. Origen was the first to systematize Irenaeus’ recognition that the Personal unity of Christ must be that of “one and the same Son,” a unity of the Person of the eternal Son with the nous, the fully Personal humanity of the Christ, which can be full only as Personal. This insight was vindicated at the Council of Nicaea and again at the Council of Chalcedon, whose Symbol eight times affirmed the axiom of Irenaeus: Jesus is one and the same Son, of the Father and of Theotokos. His Sonship is single: it is at once human and divine. “Son” is a Personal Name: Jesus is therefor3 at once a human Person and a Divine Person.
The mistaken identification of the Person of Jesus simply with the eternal Son, long since a commonplace, in turn forces a nonhistorical interpretation of the Mission of the Son who, nonetheless, is the object of the Church’s faith, i.e., the Lord Jesus, who cannot but be the human and therefore historical Logos of the Marcan, Lucan, and Johannine Gospels, the One and the same Son of the Father and of the second Eve, the Theotokos.
Even today, the Father’s Mission of his divine Son is often understood sensu negante, i.e., not as the Mission of the “one and the same Son” of the Chalcedonian Symbol, but as the Mission of the non-historical, non-human Son: summarily, the Mission of the “immanent Son” who is thereby understood to be the “subject of the Incarnation,” the immaterial Logos who “became Flesh,” but for whom this “becoming” is an a priori impossibility, with which the Latin and Greek Christologies have struggled in vain for nearly two millennia.
We have seen that Arius’ monist understanding of the divine Ousia, or substance, required his denial of the divinity of the consequently subordinate non-divine and therefore created Logos. By understanding this non-divine, created Logos to be Jesus’ hegemonikon, the “ruling principle” replacing his human soul, Arius had thought to make Jesus incapable of a human exercise of responsibility and consequently to be sinless simply by reason of his failue to be human. Thus Arius denied Jesus’ humanity as well as his divinity, a consequence first noticed and opposed by Eustathius, the bishop of Antioch.
The Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with his Father assured Jesus’ divinity; the First Council of Constantinople condemned the anti-Arian Apollinarius of Laodicaea who, while affirming Jesus’ homoousion with the Father, agreed with Arius in denying his full humanity, and for much the same reason: in order to account for Jesus’ sinlessness. This interpretation of the Alexandrine tradition of the “divinization” of Jesus’ humanity will trouble the Logos-sarx Christology henceforth: its last expression, the Monophysite heresy of Eutyches, was condemned at Chalcedon. However, its influence continues in some recent Christologies “from above” which still suppose the task of Christology to be that of explaining how the Logos could become flesh. The alternative Antiochene attempt by Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius to rationalize the full divinity of the Logos and the full humanity of Jesus failed to join them in the Person of the Christ, the Lord, the Son who is Jesus.
The development of the Trinitarian theology rests upon the doctrine, defined at Nicaea and I Constantinople, of the substantial unity of the Trinity, and the irreducible distinctions between the Father, of the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each uniquely, i.e., Personally, possessing the fullness of divinity within the absolute, indivisible, substantial unity of the One God.
This is the orthodoxy common to Athanasius and to Gregory of Nazianzen, the finest theologian among the Cappadocians, who succeeded to the presidency of the Council of Constantinople upon the death of Meletius of Antioch and during his brief tenure developed a Trinitarian doctrine integral with its revelation in Christ, and inspired by the clear affirmation of the homoousion of the Holy Spirit before which Basil had hesitated and which Gregory of Nyssa had later resisted.[637]
The Cappadocians led a group of bishops denominated “Semi-arian” by Epiphanius; it became a common misnomer for the conservative defenders of the homoiousios, most of whom were not at all Arian nor, as shall be seen, were they capable of the naive polytheism which in the last century the “Neo-Nicene” label attributed to them. Their distrust of the Nicene homoousios was due to in part to the modalist connotation given the word by Paul of Samosata’s quasi-Unitarian use of it a century earlier. The condemnation of his doctrine by the two councils of Antioch in 265 and 268 had rejected the homoousion as it had been used by Paul of Samosata. It had not become clear to the “Semi-Arians” of 358 that its dogmatic application to the Son at Nicaea as the index of his divinity had avoided the Sabellian monism which Paul of Samosata had revived, still less that the homoousion of the Son with the Father had been the necessary implication of his divinity and was in fact the touchstone of Trinitarian orthodoxy. This had been taught by Tertullian at the end of the second century and by Origen early in the third century. Later in that century, ca. 260, the homoousion of the Son had been intimated by by Pope Dionysius (of Rome) in his correspondence with Dionysius of Alexandria, and had been accepted by Dionysius of Alexandria in “the affair of the two Dionysii.” The latent subordinationism influencing the Trinitarian doctrine of Basil of Caesarea has its mature expression in his De Spiritu Sancto, where he fails to affirm the “homoousios” of the Holy Spirit, whose divinity he nonetheless affirmed, but not in terms which accept the Holy Spirit’s distinct hypostasis as member of the Trinity.
From this follows the stubborn “Semi-Arian” preference for “homoi-ousios,” understood by its proponents to be the sole possible means of upholding at once the divinity of the Son and his distinction from the Father. The difficulty of rendering in Greek the clarity of Tertullian’s distinction between the absolute unity of the divine “Substantia” and the Trinity of the divine “Personae” also had a role in this obstinacy for, as has been seen. “hypostasis” is literally translated as “substance” as easily as “person.”[638] Basil of Caesarea, or, as J. N. D. Kelly has put it, “whoever wrote his 38th Letter,” attempted to recover the conceptual clarity of Origen’s distinction of the mia ousia from the treis hypostaseis. Origen’s early opponents had ignored it, doubtless as incomprehensible. By the time of his accession to the See of Caesarea (ca. 313) Eusebius of Caesarea had transformed Origen’s Trinitarian theology, summarily expressed by “mia ousia, treis hypostaseis,” into a subordinationist slogan, and so it remained until Athanasius acknowleged its Nicene legitimacy in his Tome to the Antiochenes. Perhaps thus prompted, the author of Basil’s 38th Letter, probably Gregory of Nyssa, attempted to recover Origen’s indispensable distinction after a century and a half of oblivion. Unfortunately, his effort proceeded under subordinationist presuppositions amounting to an a priori rejection of the sole principle upon which Origen’s insight of genius is intelligible, viz., the Nicene definition of the Personal homoousion of the Son. Basil’s attempt (or Gregory of Nyssa’s) could not succeed, for Origen’s “mia ousia ” could be reconciled with his “treis hypostaseis” on no other basis than the homoousion of the Son with the Father as defined by the Nicene Creed, which Crouzel considers Origen’s Christology and Trinitarian theology to have anticipated.
The Greek Trinitarian emphasis is generally regarded as dynamic: i.e., as primarily concerned to assert and maintain the irreducible distinctions between Father, Son, and Spirit, as revealed in the distinct Missions of the Son and the Spirit from the Father, according to the rule of faith: i.e., that the Father sends the Son to give the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian emphasis of the Eastern bishops is thereby immediately anti-Sabellian. Further, the supposedly Origenist “subordinationism” attributed to some of them is often merely their recognition of the order (τάχις) of the origin of the Son and the Spirit from the Father as revealed in the economy of salvation. This order is liturgically underwritten and is therefore inseparable from the apostolic tradition. While it can be misunderstood, in itself it has nothing to do with the Eusebian “Origenism” which supposes a dualistic, cosmological ranging of divine perfections in a “great chain of being” emanating from the absolute, i.e., substantial, divinity of the Father to constitute the inferior divinity of the Son and the yet lesser divinity of the Holy Spirit, as first and second emanations from the Father, This view of the divine mia hypostasis is certainly anti-Sabellian, but only as anti-Trinitarian.
Hence, at bottom, the homoiousion affirmed of Christ and later of the Holy Spirit by the “Semi-Arians” connoted for many of them an economic or soteriological subordination of the Son and Holy Spirit to the Father, not to a cosmological one, for the Cappadocian leaders of the “Semi-Arian” party, i.e., Basil of Caesarea and his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa, affirmed the full divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit, despite Basil of Caesarea’s unwillingness to refer to the Holy Spirit as “God” or as consubstantial.with the Father His tutor, Basil of Ancyra, under Eusebian influence, had reserved the homoiousion of the Son to the Father as the only possible basis for affirming a divine Son distinct from the divinity of the Father. The corollary of this “single concept of likeness” is a binitarianism unable to accept the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. The last expression of this subordinationism is the homoiousian Trinitarian doctrine, as developed by the Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa from ca. 360 until the death of Basil in 379, and after him by Gregory of Nyssa and Diodore of Tarsus. Basil and his younger brother Gregory broke with Gregory of Nazianzen and his cousin, Amphilocius of Iconium, Basil’s quondam disciple, to whom he had dedicated his De Spiritu Sancto. Gregory of Nazianzen and Amphilocius were both pro-Nicene theologians. Amphilocius was the first to understand the members of the Trinity as interrelations, effectively the community, of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who constitute, by their co-inherence─later termed “perichōresis” by John Damascene, a term translated as “circumincessio” by the Latin tradition─constitute the divine ousia, the substantial unity of God that is the Trinity.
However, this fully Trinitarian insight, viz., the recognition that the Head of the Trinity, the Father, is properly the ‘Godhead,’ in the sense of his Trinitarian Headship, his immanence in the Trinity as its Source (Πηγή, Ἀρχή) and therefore not to be identified with the divine substance, was confused for most of the Orient by the Eusebian subordinationism controlling Basil of Ancyra’s doctsrine of the homoiousion (homoios kat’ousian) of the Son to the Father. This doctrinal confusion influenced Basil of Caesarea and, through him, Gregory of Nyssa. The “likeness” of the Son to the Father which the homoiousian subordinationism asserted was so focused upon upholding the divinity of the Son as to be inapplicable to the Holy Spirit who, having no “homoios kat’ousian to the Father, lacked substantial divinity, with evident binitarian implications. J. N. D. Kelly thinks the influence of this subordinationism finally to have been excluded.[639] However, the insistence, common to Basil of Caesarea and his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa, upon the identification of the Father with God as the substantial One God who, as Archē of the Son and the Spirit, exists in three modalities, is at a considerable remove from the Nicene Trinitarian doctrine, which affirms the Father to be a Personal member of the Trinity, of whose free unity he is the Source, but which, as immanent within the Trinity, he does not transcend. The pro-Nicene Trinitarian doctrine of Gregory of Nazianzen and Amphilocius anticipates that of Augustine, as Prestige also has seen..[640]
Nonetheless, the homoiousian opposition of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa to the Nicene homoousios of the Son with the Father, versus Gregory of Nazianzen’s ascription of the:Nicene homoousios to the Holy Spirit, forced a quest for a coherent account of the hypostatic distinctions within the divine unity, as a task of the first importance. This posed no problem for the pro-Nicene Gregory of Nazianzen and Amphilocius of Iconium: the free unity of the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit had been settled at the Council of Nicaea by its defining the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, which implied the Personal consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit as well. Having rejected this Nicene doctrine as Sabellian, the homoiousian Cappadocians, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, faced an insoluble problem, not the least element of which was their inability of uphold the hypostatic or Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit.
However, George of Laodicea, formerly an Arian, had become a Trinitarian but without abandoning the homoiousian doctrine. He does not appear to have attended the mini-Council which Basil of Ancyra had called early in 358, in reaction to what he recognized as “the Blasphemy of Sirmium,” i.e. the homoean Council which met at that city late in 357 and attempted to teach a merely nominal likeness (homoios) of the Son to the Father, leaving Arianism intact. But, even given his hazy grasp of theological issues, George of Laodicea was a homoiousian witness to the Trinity, and provided a base for resolving the problem facing Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa. Whether in fact they used the Trinitarian doctrine proposed by George of Laodicaea cannot be known, but they proceeded as if they had, for Basil and Gregory undertook to present a doctrine of the Trinity. As has been earlier remarked, Basil’s notion of the Trinity much resembled the Aristotelian analysis of material being, positing an abstract species with three members. Basil’s view of the members of the Trinity as substantially rather than personally distinct forced this resolution.
Hanson has maintained that the Cappadocian Trinitarian development is a continual effort to compensate for the inadequacy of the Trinitarian terminology at hand by resorting to similarly inexact expressions which might serve to clarify what is meant. Such “development” makes no attempt to arrive at a definitive coherence. Hanson intimates that this failure is inherent in the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, which he believes could not carry the burden imposed upon it. Hanson’s criticism assumes the equivalence of dogmatic and theological assertions. While it is evident that no theological enterprise can determine the meaning of language, it is equally evident that no doctrinal statement, whether it be scriptural, liturgical, or the doctrine taught by an ecumenical council, can survive ambiguity, This a Catholic sine qua non, with which one need not expect a Protestant scholar to be sympathetic, but which in the end is at one with the Church’s worship in truth. If the Church does not worship in truth the Incarnate Truth, her Lord, she does not worship at all.
In the end Basil’s Trinitarian vocabulary, although burdened with categorical and hence material connotations, made it possible, somewhat as Tertullian’s far more precise terminology had in the West, for Oriental theologians to speak coherently, i.e., without confusion, of the unity of the divine ousia, the One God, and the Trinity of the divine hypostases. The recognition that hitherto equivalent terms had distinct Trinitarian applications permitted a coherent doctrinal affirmation comparable to Tertullian’s una substantia, tria personae. However, unlike Tertullian’s formula, which by reason of its affirmation of the apostolic tradition whose intelligibility was not in issue, was assertive rather than analytic. Basil’s mia ousia, treis hypostaseis had no theological intelligibility until cleared of its categorial associations, i.e., of its connotation of a divisible and hence material divine substance. Its immediate fault, the consequence of Basil’s rejection of the consubstantiality of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, was the incoherence of its alternative: an interpretation of the consubstantiality of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as though they were members of a species. Basil certainly did not think the One God to be divisible, but the subordination inherent in his homoiusian doctrine could not avoid this implication.
At first, the Cappadocians understood these “Members” of the Trinity in terms of Stoic conceptuality, thus as distinct “modes of existence;” but they then passed on to seek the Trinitarian differences in terms of distinct origins. Thus, the Son is distinct from the Father by his origin from the Father, and the Holy Spirit distinct from both as having his origin from the Father through the Son. However, insofar as the Father is thought to be adequately characterized merely as unoriginate, the Father is not understood in terms of a distinct Personal origin. This dilemma was resolved in principle by Basil’s disciple Amphilocius of Iconium, who, in what appears to have been a passing observation, suggested that the “modes of existence” do not stand for essence or being, but for relations. J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 266, has translated Amphilocius’ Trinitarian insight as: “one God, made known in three forms of presentation.”[641] Understanding the distinctions between members of the Trinity as distinct relations would resolve the quandary inherent in looking upon the Father as unique by reason of his unoriginateness─an unoriginateness that, concretely, is that of his Headship, whereby he is the consubstantial source of the perichōresis, the dynamic unity of the divine ousia in which he subsists and to which he cannot but relate, simply as its immanent Source (Ἀρχή, Πηγή). It is only in the next century, with Augustine, that the 'distinctions of origin' are clearly understood to be distinctions of relation rather than of origin. Although much the same relational distinction had been proposed by Amphilocius, it does not appear to have influenced the Cappadocian Trinitarian speculation, nor to have entered into Augustine's Trinitarian theology: it may be that his De trinitate displays no Greek influence, but the matter remains discussible.
Augustine's Trinitarian development does not entail or depend upon a “neo-Nicene” notion of the divine Substance; he does not, as Harnack alleged, divide the divine ousia as a material species is divided among several materially distinct members, thus understanding the One God to be implicitly material and tritheist rather than Trinitarian. Numeration is excluded from the Trinity simply as the one God: the distinctions between the members of the Trinity, are each unique, incapable of being categorized, for they are not in any sense quantitative or material. Such Personal distinctions can only be Named, not numbered, whether divine or human: “Trinity” refers to the divine substance. In the next century, with Augustine, their distinction will be seen to be a distinction of relation, as Amphilocius had surmised. The Cappadocian acquaintance with Aristotelianism. apparent in Basil’s “38th Letter”−or rather, Gregory of Nyssa’s, as is generally accepted, prompted no “tritheist” mistake, given the immateriality of the divine substance. Rather, in the next century, the Aristotelian monist act-potency analysis led Theodore of Mopsuestia to conclude to a modalism.[642] In any case, there was available in the fourth century no systematic, i.e., theologycal-metaphysical, resolution of the one-and-three paradox presented by the Trinitarian doctrine. That waited upon Augustine’s perhaps independent development of Amphilocius’ insight.
This contribution is unique to Gregory of Nazianzen and his young cousin, Amphilocius of Iconium, who alone among the Cappadocians affirmed and defended the homoousion of the Holy Spirit. Basil and his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa, remained loyal to the homoiousian doctrine. Basil died short of the age of fifty before the First Council of Constantinople met, but Gregory of Nyssa and Diodore of Tarsus, a Meletian loyalist, joined forces at the Council to prevent its endorsing Gregory of Nazianzen’s conviction of the homoousion of the Holy Spirit. This inherently Nicene doctrine was first expressly stated by Lucifer of Cagliari, who in this preceeded Athanasius’ affirmation of the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit in his Letters to Serapion and in his Catholic Letter. [643]
The “Tropici,” as Athanasius named them, or “Pneumatomachians” (i.e., “Spirit-fighters” as they were called from about 380), accepted the logic of Basil of Ancyra’s limitation of the homoiousion to the Son, and therefore, denying that there is in God any relation conceivable other than that of Father-Son, must deny that the Holy Spirit is distinct from the Father and the Son; this with a binitarian corollary. Basil of Caesarea was the leader of the Cappadocians (i.e., as Bishop of Caesarea from 370 until his death in 379; he was succeeded in this role by his brother Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory of Nazianzen and his younger cousin, Amphilocius of Iconium, who had been Basil’s disciple, preached and acted against this heresy, insisting that the Holy Spirit has the same glory as the Father and Son. Amphilocius, like his cousin of Gregory of Nazianzen pro-Nicene and an admirer of his theology, in 379 accompanied him to Constantinople two years before the pro-Nicene emperor, Theodosius, called the First Council of Constantinople, and there supported Gregory’s effort to persuade the Council to affirm the homoousion of the Holy Spirit. As has been seen, this effort failied.
Thus the Creed of the First Council of Constantinople (381) does not attribute to the Holy Spirit the “homoousios” with the Father which the Nicene Creed attributes to the Son. Nonetheless, that Council’s definition of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, as consistent with the Council’s Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, clearly supposes the Holy Spirit to be consubstantial with Jesus and with the Father. However, the Council’s failue to affirm the homousion of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son gave the homoiousian contingent at the Council, and thereafter the anti-Nicene theologians, room to disagree. The doctrine of I Constantinople was repeated fifty years later by the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus, which taught that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is thereby “Theotokos.” the Mother of God. This was the first step in the Christological development of the Nicene definition of the Personal homoousion of Jesus the Lord with the Father. As has been noted, Bernard Lonergan, John Meyendorff, and Louis Bouyer have rejected this development and consider the Symbol of Chalcedon to be incoherent─but, as John Paul II has observed, dissent is only dissent.
Basil of Caesarea’s unwillingness to affirm the Personal standing of the Holy Spirit has been explained by attributing to Basil a recognition of a need for tact: i.e., he did not wish to cause dissent where it was not necessary, for the divinity of the holy Spirit was no longer in dispute. This is a very weak justification: “divinity” need not be hypostatic and Basil never affirms a hypostatic Holy Spirit in his De Spiritu Sancto. Gregory of Nazianzen, however, went further than Basil had, naming the Spirit “God,” which connotes a hypostatic or Personal divinity. Gregory of Nyssa had attributed to the Holy Spirit the same energeia or ousia as the Father and the Son, but these terms do not connote a divine hypostasis. Gregory of Nazianzen inferred from the hypostatic Name, “God,” which he had given the Holy Spirit, its corollary, the homoousios of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. In saying this, he broke with Gregory of Nyssa, as Beeley has shown. Of the two Gregories, only Gregory of Nazianzen was in a position to explore the crucial distinction between Ousia and Hypostasis in God which Origen had long before proposed. Only upon that that firmly apostolic Trinitarian foundation was it possible to distinguish an “identifying characteristic” or “distinguishing characteristic” (idios poion), viz., the unique “mode of origin” proper to each of the Persons, as contrasted to the “specifying quality” (koine poites) which identifies the divine Substance simply as divine. This permitted assigning to the Father, the “distinguishing characteristic” of “ungenerateness, and to the Son, of ”generateness.” The “distinguishing characteristic” of the Holy Spirit is more difficult to grasp, as Origen well knew, given that generation is unique to the Son, the Holy Spirit’s relation to the Father through the Son may be termed “procession.” “Generateness” and “procession” fulfill the latently relational notion of “mode of origin, which “ungenerateness” clearly does not. Amphilocius of Iconium had spoken of the affinity of “mode of origin” and “relation,” but the development of that crucial insight was left to Augustine. Gregory of Nazianzen’s clear recognition of the Trinity as the divine substance had been presaged by Origen’s recognition of the relational meaning of Father, and distinction between the “substantial” reality of the eternal Father, Son, and Spirit, and the “accidental” reality .of all that is created.
The truth of the revelation in Christ of the free, nuptially-ordered unity of historical being and of historical truth has long been veiled for Catholic spirituality and Catholic theology. Only within the past two decades has it entered explictly into the doctrinal tradition, with John Paul II’s teaching of the nuptiality of human existence, and finally, in consequence, of the nuptial unity of our imaging of the Triune God. The free nuptial unity of man and the free Trinitarian unity of God are liturgically, doctrinally and theologically indissociable. The determinist reading of substance as per se monadic is the imposition of necessary fragmentation upon humanity, and therefore upon God.[644]. This imposition is spontaneous to fallen sarkic rationality: it is consequent upon our solidarity with the fallen Adam. Only the illumination of our minds by the universal grace of the trahi a Deo, our immediate attraction to the free unity of truth that is beauty, frees us from that disintegration of the intelligence.
In fact, as we have seen, the monadic interpretation of the unity of the one God, the divine Trinitarian Substance, was practically universal prior to the ante-Nicene Fathers, Latin and Greek; it was particularly powerful in the Latin Church: see e.g., J. N. D. Kelly’s discussion of the third century exchange of letters between Pope Dionysius of Rome and Dionysius of Alexandria; (see endnote 430, supra) a quarter century earlier. The Trinitarian theology of Tertullian and Hippolytus had been read by Pope Callistus as a threat to the divine monarchy. This monarchian understanding of the unity of the divine Substance, then regarded by the conservataive Roman theologians as indispensable to the Catholic faith in the One God, is in fact no more than the unreflective application of the Judaeo-Christian postulate of the One God, entirely consistent with the free historicity of the Father’s historical Missions of the Son and the Spirit, which terminate in the historical New Covenant, the revelation in Christ of the free perichōresis of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Well before the end of the second century, unquestionably under liturgycal inspiration, Theophilus, the bishop of Antioch, and Athenagoras, a Greek layman, had refused the monadic notion of the One God. Theophilus described the divine substance as a trias (τρίας), and Athenagoras used taxis (τάξις) to designate by the invariant liturgical order of the Naming of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Before the second century was out, Tertullian had organized this historical-liturgical insight in the Apologeticus, developing the free association of the tres Personae of the Trinity with Jesus the Lord, by whom that free association is revealed, using to this end two terms to deal with both realities: Persona and Substantia to account for the unity of the Trinity: una Substantia, tres Personae, and to account for the unity of Jesus the Lord: una Persona, duae substantiae. A generation later, Origen’s Peri Archon stressed the Event-character of this free association of Substantial and Personal divinity, Naming it the Henōsis, the hypostasis who is the primordial Jesus, the Beginning, sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit. The Apologeticus and Origen’s Peri Archon rank as the greatest theological works ever written; following the rejection by the Greek Apologists of the authority of the pagan wisdom. The Apologists rest their quest for wisdom on the apostolic tradition, launching that doctrinal development whose culmination is the Symbol of Chalcedon, After more than fifteen centuries, the cultural shock of the Symbol’s flat rejection of cosmology in favor of Catholicism has not yet been overcome. Resistance to it is still normative for recent Thomist theologians, as has been seen. The consequences are the modalism which we have seen to haunt current Catholic Trinitarian speculation, and the insoluble monophysite vs. diophysite dilemma which continues to enmire Catholic Christology.
Unfortunately, the Cappodocians failed to exploit the insight of Amphilocius, the fourth of the great Cappadocians, who proposed the identification of the “identifying characteristic” the “mode of origin” proper to each of the members of the Trinity as a subsistent relation, The Cappadoνcians had understood the identifying characteristic which distinguishes the members of the Trinity from each other to be a distinction of “origin” in the case of Son and in the case of the Holy Spirit, but that in the case of the Father the distinguishing characteristic cannot be a distinction of origin, but is rather the lack of any origin, i.e., the “unoriginateness” (proper to Him as the Source (Archē) and the unbegottenness” (ἀγέννητος-agennētos) that is proper to him as God and Father as Source (Πηγή) and First Cause (Ἀρχή).
On the other hand, the “identifying characteristic” proper to and even constitutive of each of the divine Persons was not understood by the Cappadocians to be a relation, although as has been noted this had been suggested as equivalent to “mode of origin” by Amphilocius of Iconium, the fourth of the “great Cappadocians.” The Cappadocians had understood the identifying characteristic which distinguishes the divine Persons from each other to be a “distinction of origin” in the case of Son and the Holy Spirit, but that in the case of the Father the distinguishing characteristic is not a distinction of origin, but is rather the abstract lack of any origin, i.e., the “unoriginateness” (agenetos) proper to Him as the Source and First Cause (Αρχή Archē) and the “unbegottenness” (ἀγέννητος; ἀγένητος) proper to Him as God. The way to developing and understanding the “Personal distinctions” concretely, i.e., as relations, and the consequent understanding of the Trinitarian Persons as subsistent Relations, was left open for development by Augustine, independent of and immune to the Cappadocian quandary.
The Cappadocians did not understand the Holy Spirit to be related to the Father as Father, a view which reflects the persistent hesitation of Basil and his brother Gregory of Nyssa over the hypostatic divinity of the Holy Spirit. The way to developing and understanding the hypostatic distinctions concretely, i.e., as subsistent relations, and the consequent understanding of the members of the Trinity as subsistent relations, was left open for development by Augustine, independent of and immune to the Cappadocian quandary.
This continuity between the Greek and the Latin orthodoxy manifest at Chalcedon could not have been existed had not the orthodoxy of Athanasius and the Nicene Cappadocians, Gregory of Nazianzen and Amphilocius of Iconium, consisted in an utterly radical affirmation of the Mia ousia of the one God as prerequisite to the homoousion or consubstantiality of the Son and of the Spirit with the Father from whom they proceed in the ordo revealed by the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Spirit.
It is from this liturgical affirmation of the consubstantiality and irreducibility of the divine Persons in the Trinity that the development of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine proceeded through the first four Councils, to culminate in the Chalcedonian affirmation of the divine and human consubstantiality of Jesus the Christ, the One and the Same Son of the Father and Theotokos. Theological resistance to the homoousion of the Son with humanity has amounted to a re-invention of a quasi-Neo-Chalcedonian refusal of the Nicene homoousios, an uncritical supposition that this dogmatically-defined term, resting on the indivisibility of the divine Ousia, has suddenly lost its meaning when applied to the human ousia, whose divisibility is taken for granted. Such naiveté makes the headship of Christ unintelligible, for the head is the source of the free unity of that substance of which he is the head. There can be no multiplication of human substances without a multiplication of the head, which is nonsensical. The head of humanity is the One and the Same Son whose Personal unity is affirmed eight times in the Chalcedonian Symbol.
Basil’s avoidance of the free unity of the Trinity as the corollary of the headship of the Father has been accounted for by attributing to Basil a recognition of athe need for tact: i.e., he did not wish to cause dissent where it was not necessary, for the divinity of the Holy Spirit was no longer in dispute. This is a very weak justification: “divinity” need not be hypostatic and Basil never affirms a hypostatic Holy Spirit in his De Spiritu Sancto. Gregory of Nazianzen, however, went further than Basil had; he named the Holu Spirit “God,” which connotes a hypostatic divinity. Gregory of Nyssa had attributed to the Holy Spirit the same energeia or ousia as the Father and the Son, but these terms do not connote a divine hypostasis. Gregory of Nazianzen inferred from the hypostatic Name, “God,” which he had given the Holy Spirit, its obvious implication, the homoousion of the Spirit with the Father and the Son. In saying this, he broke with Gregory, as Beeley has shown. Of the two Gregories, only Gregory of Nazianzen was in a position to explore the crucial distinction between Ousia and Hypostasis in God which Origen had long since posited. Only upon that that firmly apostolic foundation was it possible to distinguish an “identifying characteristic” or a “distinguishing characteristic” (idios poion), viz., the unique “mode of origin” proper to each of the Persons, as contrasted to the koine poites or “specifying quality” which identifies the divine Substance simply as divine. This permitted assigning “ungenerateness," to the Father as his “distinguishing characteristic" of the Father is and ”generateness” to the Son. The “distinguishing characteristic” of the Spirit is more difficult to grasp, as Origen well knew, given that generation is unique to the Son, the Spirit’s relation to the Father through the Son may be named named “procession,” although we have seen Bishop Zizioulas refuse any distinction between "procession" and "generation; see endnote 704, infra. “Generateness” and “procession” fulfill the implicitly relational notion of “mode of origin:’ “ungenerateness” clearly does not. Amphilocius of Iconium had spoken of the affinity of “mode of origin” and “relation,” but the development of that crucial insight was left to Augustine. Gregory of Nazianzen’s clear recognition of the Trinity as the divine substance had been presaged by Origen’s recognition of the relational meaning of Father, and distinction between the “substantial” reality of the eternal Father, Son, and Spirit, and the “accidental” reality .of all created reality.
On the other hand, the “identifying characteristic” proper to and even constitutive of each of the divine Persons was not understood by the Cappadocians to be a relation, although this had been suggested as equivalent to “mode of origin” by Amphilocius of Iconium, the fourth of the “great Cappadocians.” The Cappadocians had understood the identifying characteristic which distinguishes the divine Persons from each other is a distinction of “origin” in the case of Son and in the case of the Spirit, but that in the case of the Father the distinguishing characteristic is not a distinction of origin, but is rather the lack of any origin, i.e., the “unoriginateness” (agenetos) proper to Him as the Source (Archē) and the “unbegottenness” (agennetos) that is proper to Him as Father, a view which reflects their persistent hesitation over the divinity of the Holy Spirit. The way to developing and understanding the Personal “distinctions” concretely, i.e., as relations, and the consequent understanding of the Trinitarian Persons as subsistent Relations, was left open for development by Augustine, dent of and immune to the Cappadocian quandary.
A theological ‘reception’ of doctrine is an evident misnomer insofar as the term is applied to the Catholic fides quaerens intellectum, inasmuch as the faith from which the Catholic theological inquiry arises has in any given case already interiorized the doctrine which it proceeds to explore systematically in an ongoing quest for a yet more adequate expression of the quaerens, the intellectual dimension of integral personal participation in the ecclesial worship of the mystery.
Unfortunately, the turmoil occasioned by Vatican II has left few Catholic theologians any longer willing to regard their work in those Anselmian terms. The early medieval presupposition of theologian’s Catholic fidelity as the precondition and font of his theological quaerens is now encountered as an ecumenical embarrassment, as a puerile subservience to a ”patriarchal” Magisterium, as an arbitrary affront to current political correctness, or as incompatible with an indiscussible view of academic freedom, borrowed long since from a definition published by the American Association of University Professors in 1940. Innocuous on its face, over the years its application to Catholic theology faculties has exploited J. S. Mill’s identification of freedom with irresponsibility, thereby liberating professed Catholic theologians from any need to recognize the professional’s fiduciary obligation to the ecclesial community which must affront his personal irresponsibility.
With that propriety in view, the academic’s professional responsibility for the teaching of truth is uniformly trumped by a fashionable relativism, with the easily predictable consequence that there is no point whatever in considering oneself a professor, much less a theologian: both are lately in the service of power, not of truth, their dignity traded for a safe servility. Further, the institutional ban upon any intra-institutional discussion of academic freedom thus misconceived relieves its adherents of any concern for its inner logic: it has long been noted that the ‘concerned’ academic is immune to unfashionable temptations. At this level, nothing remains to be discussed, so we turn to another.
The “Tropici” or “Pneumatomachians” (“Spirit-fighters”) as they were called from about 380, accepted the logic of Basil of Ancyra’s limitation of the homoiousion to the Son, and therefore, denying that there is in God any relation conceivable other than that of Father-Son, must deny that the Spirit is distinct from the Father and the Son. Basil of Caesarea, the leader of the Cappadocians (i.e., Basil as bishop of Caesarea from 370 until his death in 379, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, Basil’s friend, Gregory of Nazianzen and, later, Basil’s disciple, Amphilocius of Iconium) preached and acted against this heresy, insisting that the Spirit has the same glory as the Father and Son.
However, echoing Basil of Ancyra’s restriction of the “homoiousion” to the Son, Basil of Caesarea and his brother Gregory of Nyssa, broke with the pro-Nicene Gregory of Nazianzen and his cousin Amphilocius, and did not attribute the Nicene homoousios to the Holy Spirit[645] nor did Basil explicitly refer to the Holy Spirit as God.[646] Either proposition would have attributed a hypostatic, i.e., Personal divinity to the Holy Spirit as distinct from the Father and the Son; as has been seen, Basil never went so far.
Only the universal awareness, the graced intellectual intuition, of the trahi a Deo so illumines the fallen mind as to free us from self-enclosure, enabling each of us to recognize the freedom of truth in a moment of conversion to it. This radical grace has been discussed elsewhere in this work and need not further be developed here: it is enough to assert that freedom is always a gift, a reality to be appropriated. It can be refused, and that refusal, whose spontaneity is an index of our solidarity with the fallen first Adam, had long been institutionalized in the Greek philosophical tradition in which the fourth-century Fathers had been trained.
In fact, the creation of free substantial unity is one of the first of the revelations of Genesis: the revelation that the final object of creation, that by which its unity is good and very good, and therefore cannot but be substantial, is the free unity of man and women which Adam celebrates in Gen. 2:23 and whose unity is affirmed in the next verse: the unity of “one flesh’.
It has already been remarked that the truth of this revelation of the free, nuptially-ordered unity of historical being and of truth has long been veiled for Catholic spirituality and Catholic theology. Only within the past two decades has it entered explictly into the doctrinal tradition, with John Paul II’s teaching of the nuptiality of human existence, and consequently, finally, of the nuptial unity of our imaging of the Triune God. The nuptial unity of man and the Trinitarian unity of God are liturgically, doctrinally and theologically indissociable: the monadic reading of the human unity is per se the imposition either of a necessary fragmentation or of a necessary unity upon humanity, and therefore upon God. In fact, the monarchian understanding of the unity of the one God, the divine Trinitarian Substance, was practically universal with the ante-Nicene Fathers, Latin and Greek, but was particularly powerful in the Latin Church; see e.g., J. N. D. Kelly’s discussion of the third century exchange of letters between Pope Dionysius of Rome and Dionysius of Alexandria.[647] This monarchian understanding of the unity of the divine Substance, then regarded by the conservative Roman theologians as indispensable to the Catholic faith in the One God, is in fact no more than theological application of the unexamined postulate of a metaphysical monism entirely inconsistent with the free historicity of the Father’s historical Missions of the Son and the Spirit, which terminate in the historical New Covenant, and in the revelation in Christ of the free perichōresis of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Centuries will be needed to correct this theological mistake, which is still operative in recent Thomist theologians such as Louis Bouyer. Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, and Edward Schillebeeckx. Its consequences are the modalism which we have seen to haunt current Catholic Trinitarian speculation, and the insoluble monophysite vs. diophysite dilemma which continues to enmire Catholic Christology.
In sum, the “identifying characteristic” proper to and even constitutive of each of the divine Persons was not understood by the Cappadocians to be a relation, although this had been suggested as equivalent to “mode of origin” by Amphilocius of Iconium, the fourth of the “great Cappadocians.” The Cappadocians had understood the identifying characteristic which distinguishes the divine Persons from each other is a distinction of “origin” in the case of Son and in the case of the Spirit, but that in the case of the Father, whose distinguishing characteristic is not a distinction of origin, but is rather the lack of any origin, i.e., the “unoriginateness” (agenetos) proper to Him as the Source (Archē) and the “unbegottenness” (agennetos) that is proper to Him as Father, a view which reflects the persistent Cappadocian hesitation over the div inity of the Holy Spirit. The way to developing and understanding the “distinctions” of the members of the Trinity concretely, i.e. as subsistent and therefore Personal relations, rather than abstractly in terms of such categories such as agenetos and agennetos, was left open for development by Augustine, independent of and immune to the Cappadocian quandary.
This agreement between Greek and Latin orthodoxy manifest at Chalcedon could not have been existed had not the Christology of Athanasiuis and the two pro-Nicene Cappadocians, Gregory of Nazianzen and Amphilocius of Iconiuum, coincided in an unqualified affirmation of the mia ousia of the one God as prerequisite to the homoousion or consubstantiality of the Son and of the Spirit with the Father from whom they proceed in the ordo revealed by the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Holy Spirit. It is from this liturgical-doctrinal commitment to Nicene affirmation of the consubstantiality and irreducibility of the divine Persons in the Trinity that the development of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine proceeded through the first four Councils, to culminate in the Chalcedonian affirmation of the divine and human consubstantiality of Jesus the Christ, the One and the Same Son of the Father and the Theotokos.
Theological resistance to the homoousion of the Son with humanity has amounted to a re-invention of a quasi-Neo-Chalcedonian refusal of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, an uncritical supposition that this dogmatically-defined term, resting on the indivisibility of the divine ousia, has suddenly lost its meaning when applied to the human ousia, whose divisibility is taken for granted for, cosmologically considered, every human person is a distinct substance. This naïve obstinacy renders the headship of Christ unintelligible, for the Head is the source of the free unity of that substance of which he is the Head: there can be no multiplication of human substances without a multiplication of the head, which is nonsensical. The Head of humanity is the One and the Same Son whose Personal unity is defined seven times in the Symbol of Chalcedon: he is the source of the free personal unity of every human being, and the source of the free substantial unity of the humanity created in him.
The Arian heresy had been introduced into Gaul in 352 by the Arian Emperor Constantius who, having won control of the Empire from Magnentius, his last rival, promptly undertook to impose upon the empire, and particularly upon the hitherto recalcitrant West, an Arian religious unanimity, as his father Constantine had attempted before him. To this end, Constantius required of the Western bishops that they approve of the version of Arianism advocated by the same theological advisers, Bishops Valens and Ursacius who, in 357, would publish the homoean creed at the second Council of Sirmium. The Arian creed which, in 352, Constantius began to impose upon the major dioceses of the West had the same authors. Constantius began his program with the coercion of the bishops of southern Gaul in a series of provincial councils, the first, in 353, appointed Saturnins bishop of Arles, a second, at Milan in 355, encountered the angry resistance of Eusebius of Vercellus, whom Constantius immediately exiled, and a third in 356, at Béziers, where Hilary of Poitiers, whom he may have ordered to attend that council, condemned the Arianism of Saturinus, the recently installed bishop of Arles and was then exiled to Phrygia in what is now central Turkey, where he fell under the influence of the homoiousian bishop, Basil of Ancyra.
The Western bishops summoned to attend these councils, while remote from the Arianism then infecting the East, and less amenable to its influence, were also largely ignorant of the Council of Nicaea’s definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father. Ill-prepared by their own unreflective subordinationism to contest the Arian denial of the divinity of the Son, and unacquainted with the condemnation of Arianism at Nicaea, their vulnerability drew upon them Constantius’ first attention.
Hilary had become the Bishop of Poitiers sometime before 355, perhaps as early as 353. He and Saturninus were immediately at odds: given Hilary’s identification of the Johannine Logos with Jesus Christ the Lord, it could not have been otherwise. Constantius’ selection of Saturninus as Bishop of Arles had made him the point man of his drive to establish Arianism in Gaul. Hilary replied to this Arian insurgency by excommuinicating Saturninus, and also the two Eastern bishops, Valens and Ursacius, who were Constantius’ theological advisors and who, armed with his authority, had installed Saturninus during the Council of Arles in 353. Saturninus had there shown his colors by forcing the attending bishops, along with the legates sent by Pope Liberius, to subscribe to the Arian credal formula prepared by Valens and Ursacius, and to condemn Athanasius. Two years later, at the Council of Milan, Valens and Ursacius, continuing the same coercive imperial policy, deposed and banished Dionysius, the orthodox Bishop of Milan, and replaced him with an Arian bishop, Auxentius; after which, as at Arles, they forced the bishops assembled at the Council to condemn Athanasius, of whom, like those at the council of Arles, the Latin bishops knew little, and to subscribe to the Arian creed. Hilary’s excommunication of these bishops was a direct affront to Constantius, a lèse majesté which he could not ignore.
In 356, following his excommunication by Hilary, Saturninus called a provincial council at Béziers, an ancient city on the southern coast of Gaul, evidently subordinate to his authority as Bishop of Arles. Like the councils earlier held at Arles and Milan, the council of Béziers was called to implement Constantius’s Arianizing program, thus to coerce the assembled bishops into subscribing to the imperial Arianism, including the condemnation of Athanasius. Saturninus had done this at Arles, as had Auxentius at Milan. Although ostensibly Saturninus had summoned the Council of Béziers to defend himself in an appropriate forum against Hilary’s sentence of excommunication, nonetheless he acted as Constantius’ agent, charged with the promotion of Constantius’ agenda, and therefore he required that each of the assembled bishops sign the Arian creed prepared by Valens and Ursacius, and that each also condemn Athanasius, long since recognized as the major opponent of Arianism and, notoriously, as the most effective opponent of Constantius’ Arian policy.
Constantius may have required Hilary’s attendance at Béziers; in any event, Hilary attended the council but refused to subscribe to the Arian creed denying the divinity of the Son, and refused as well to join in the majority’s condemnation of Athanasius, with whom few of the bishops at Béziers, like those at Arles and at Milan, had any personal acquaintance, and to whose condemnation they had no personal objection: they were easily persuaded to approve it.
Hilary’s obduracy on both counts brought about his exile by Constantius and, perhaps, his deposition from the See of Poitiers. If in fact the Council of Béziers did depose him, he ignored the sentence. During his exile in Phrygia he continued to conduct himself as the Bishop of Poitiers, without overt objection by Constantius, and with the acquiescence of the Western bishops to whom, at their request, he sent the summary account and sympathetic explanation of the homoiousian Trinitarian doctrine of the local synods of Eastern bishops that constitutes his De synodis. On his return from exile to Poitiers in 361 he resumed his apparently uninterrupted governance of that diocese. Hilary’s exile was considerably tempered by the liberal interpretation given it in practice by Constantius, who made no objection to Hilary’s travelling well beyond Phrygia, throughout the Province of Asia: e.g. to attend the Synod of Seleucia in 359 and the Synod of Constantinople in 360. By the end of Hilary’s exile in 360, Constantius appears to have come to regard Hilary as more of a nuisance than a threat; he had long recognized in Athanasius the uniquely unyielding enemy of his Arianizing program: Hilary’s diplomatic approach to Constantius was grounded in his theological confusion, in marked contrast to Athanasius’ unyielding insistence upon the one thing necessary, the doctrine of Nicaea. At Béziers, Hilary’s intransigent rejection of Arianism undoubtedly had been the chief cause of Constantius’ displeasure. Athanasius’ opposition to Constantius’ imperial imposition of Arianism had already made him the symbol of an anti-Arian insurgency with evident political implications. Hilary’s dissent to Athanasius’ condemnation confirmed Constantius’ estimate of him as a comparable opponent of the Arian unanimity which Constantius held indispensable to the peace and unity of the Empire: hence he exiled Hilary as well, but to Phrygia in the Orient rather than to the western city of Treves where Athanasius spent his first exile, and perforce had to learn the Latin which would serve him well at the Council of Serdica and at Rome.
Constantius’ exile of Hilary had little if any doctrinal motivation. While the Emperor was obviously sympathetic to Arianism rather than to the Pro-Nicene alternative represented by Athanasius and to an extent by Hilary, he regarded them as obstacles to a necessary doctrinal unanimity and so to be removed from their sees. As emperor, Constantius’ first concern, like that of his father Constantine, was the political unity of the Empire, which required religious unanimity, not of the pagans, nor, at this time, of the Jews, but most certainly of the Christians, whose faith often extended to their martyrdom. Hilary’s first concern, as the bishop of a major See, was and remained the unity of the Catholic faith in Jesus the Lord. Given Constantius’ Arianizing agenda, Hilary’s fidelity to his office as a Catholic bishop had immediate political consequences. The Church is a historical reality by reason of its historical worship, which has an inevitable historical impact. However politically expedient Constantius found Hilary’s exile, Hilary’s exercise of his episcopal responsibilities was not political: it was religious simply. It is of course evident that as a historical community, the Church’s historical worship inevitably has an influence which, from a simply political viewpoint cannot but be seen as divisive, for its goals are not guided by political considerations: Catholic bishops, then as now, are obliged by their office to preach in and out of season, and that preaching is often obnoxious to those who are not members of the Christian community. It is nonetheless idle to seek an explanation of Hilary’s conduct at Béziers in terms which ignore or transmit his episcopal responsibility, the defense of the Christian faith.[649]
In a document written after Constantius sentenced him to exile but before his departure to Phrygia, Hilary rebuked the episcopal majority at Béziers for their accommodation to imperial policy. Constantius was not much interested in questions of orthodoxy or its lack: like his father Constantine─and Justinian in the sixth century and Charlemagne in the ninth─he was unable to conceive of a political unity that would not be a religious unity; the cosmological imagination has always joined political, religious and military authority in a single potestas regalis. Centuries would be required for this coercive concept of political unity as the product of potestas regalis, to give way to that of a free civil unity, in which the moral authority of the Church, her auctoritas sacerdotalis, poses an historically concrete moral limit to the otherwise absolute dominion of the princeps.
In the next century Augustine would distinguish the coercive exercise of the postestas regalis from the free personal exercise of the auctoritas sacerdotalis proper to every Christian by the fact of his baptism. Thereby Augustine was the first to provide the rationale for the double fidelity inherent in Christian existence in ecclesia: the duty to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. Each of these distinct fidelities is a personal and therefore moral obligation, the one to the Church, the other to the emperor, and thus each can be met only by the free personal exercise of free personal responsibility. This freedom of Christian adherence to the faith that Jesus is the Lord had its first clear statement in Pope Gelasius’s Letter, “Famuli vestrae pietatis,” to Emperor Anastasius. distinguishing two principles by which the world is ruled, the auctoritas sacrata pontifica and the regalis potestatis, of which the former is the greater.(see DS *347) Vatican II’s Dignitatis humanae is the most recent official confirmation of this Augustinian analysis, which is still little attended and less understood.
By the middle of the fourth-century, the development of Western Trinitarian theology had not advanced greatly beyond loyalty to the anti-adoptionist Trinitarianism of the third century, represented by Tertullian and Novatian. The Latin bishops then knew little or nothing of the Council of Nicaea and were not in a position to understand its definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father. Hilary himself was not entirely clear on the eternal generation of the Son as may be learned from his Commentary on Matthew, written shortly before his exile (356) to Phrygia,[650] By his own later admission he was ignorant of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father until just prior to his exile.[651] Once aware of it, i.e., during his exile in Phrygia, under influence of Bishop Basil of Ancyra, he read it through subordinationist optics. Mark Weedman has explored the possibility that Hilary’s Trinitarian theology was early infected by what he considers to be the subordinationist potential of Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine.[652] Such an early influence would have facilitated Hilary’s evident sympathy with the subordinationism of theologians he encountered in Asia Minor, who in the main were uncritical followers of Eusebius of Caesarea, particularly intent upon supporting his condemnation of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father as Sabellian.
It was not well understood at the time of the Council of Nicaea, and is still not generally recognized, that ecumenical Councils are liturgical mediations of the Truth of Christ in and through his Church. They are not called to deliver novel theological insights or to resolve theological controversy. From the first Ecumenical Council at Nicaea to the Second Vatican Council, they have met to defend and uphold the Church’s worship in truth. That their doctrinal assertions do not arise out of a theological consensus is particularly evident in the case of the Nicene assertion of the homoousion of the Son, concerning which Athanasius himself had little to say until given the opportunity by the breakdown of the hegemony of Eusebian subordinationism in the mid-fifties of the fourth century.. Only with the so-called Cappadocian Settlement did the necessity to choose between subordinationism and its flat condemnation at Nicea begin to be understood as foundational for Trinitarian theology. The full development of the Nicene affirmation of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father waited upon the recognition by the Symbol of Chalcedon that our consubstantiality with Christ the Lord is human as well as divine.
When Hilary arrived in Phrygia in the middle of the fourth century, the majority of the bishops, Latin as well as Greek, were either unaware of the Nicene affirmation of the consubstantiality of the Son or, knowing of it, had rejected it outright as Sabellian. Cosmologically impossible, however indispensable to the faith that Jesus is the Lord, the acceptance of the Nicene homoousion requred a conversion from the immanent deterministm of cosmological rationality to the freedom of historical rationality. In the Orient historical rationality had few representatives: the Apologists, Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras of Athens, Irenaeus, and Origen. The converts to historical rationality who were allied to Athanasius upon his return from exile in 362 were limited to his few surviving suffragans, together with Marcellus of Ancyra, Eustathius of Antioch, Ossius of Cordoba, his young friend and ally, Apollonaris of Laodicaea, Lucifer of Cagliari who had been exiled with Eusebius of Vercelli in 355, and Serapion, whom he had appointed bishop of Thmuis. Prior to the Council of Alexandria in 362, only these few had grasped the indispensability of the Nicene homoousios.
By the end of his first two years in exile the acquaintance with Greek which he had acquired in his youth had improved sufficiently to permit Hilary to be in sympathetic communication with Basil of Ancyra, or at least with his doctrine. He had already begun to write his De trinitate;[653] in 359, at the request of the few remaining orthodox bishops of the West, he sent them his De synodis which, like all his works, was written in Latin. The De synodis is a lengthy exposition and and a meliorative explanation of the condition of Trinitarian doctrine in the East, as illustrated by the creeds of a series of provincial Councils, ranging from the Council of Antioch in 341 to the Council of Sirmium in 357. By reason of the influence of his De trinitate, Hilary has been been dubbed “the Western Athanasius.” Certainly none of the Latin bishops of his time matched his influence or his publication. However, his influence in the East was diplomatic rather than scholarly; as addressed to the Emperor Constantius, it failed. Insofar as doctrinal, it never overcame his mistaken assimilation of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father to the homoiousian subordinationism of Basil of Ancyra. Hansen thinks the theology of the Cappadocians to be tributary to that of Basil of Ancyra; Hilary’s works, being in Latin, would have had little influence among them. There is no record of his having any communication with Athanasius, who would have had no sympathy with Hilary’s homoiusian predelictions; these included recognition of the religious authority of the emperor and a correlative obligation to negotiate matters of doctrine with him.
Thus Hilary remained within the uncritical subordinationism of many of the Western bishops and of the Eastern majority under the influence of Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia. Like the Eusebians, he did not understand the Nicene homoousion, of which he admitted having been ignorant until just before his exile, and which even thereafter he was unable adequately to distinguish from the implicitly subordinationist homoiousian doctrine of Basil of Ancyra. He never came to believe the distinction to be important. It is difficult to censure Hilary for this mistake. At mid-century, only Athanasius and the few bishops within his sphere of influence upheld the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father over against the Eusebian subordinationism. Elsewhere, from Jerusalem to Ancyra, the Orientaal bishops rejected as inherently Sabellian the Nicene definition of the homoousios of the Son with the Father, together with its corollary, the substantial unity of the Trinity.
Basil of Ancyra was intent upon preserving the divinity of the Son and of the Father, but only within the cosmological, nonhistorical context of the Eusebian subordinationism, a systematically impossible task by reason of its presupposition of the necessary unity of divine substance, to which the free revelation of the Trinity by Jesus the Christ is incapable of assimilation. The corollary of the Eusebian conviction of the necessary unity of truth and being is the identification of the Father with the divine substance. This renders the Father simply absolute, incapable of immanence in history. Porphyry’s version of Neoplatonism had departed from that of Plotinus in providing for this identitification of the Absolute One with Intelligence, i.e., with Truth. At bottom, the bulk of the Oriental bishops throughout the fourth century were Monarchians; the labeling of their Absolute One with such impersonal abstractions as Intelligence and Truth has no other explanation.
To this end of preserving and defending the divinity of the Son, Basil of Ancyra asserted a ‘likeness’ of the Son to the Father in the order of substance. This likeness of the Son to the Father, conceived as substantial rather than as Personal, forced the problem posed by the uniqueness of substance as such, for each intellectual substance (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) must then be understood either to exhaust the substance with which he is identified, with a consequent tritheism, or to be identified with each of the other two Persons, which is Sabellianism. It may be added that, given this cosmological understanding of divine substance as a divine Monas, the acceptance of the Nicene doctrine of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son to the Father would have added nothing to the homoiousian subordinationism; the equation of the divine Person (Monas) with the divine ousia or substance renders the Nicene doctrine meaningless, for it identifies the divine substance with the Trinity, which the homoiousian subordinationism cannot accept. This accounts for the spontaneous rejection of the Nicene homoousios by the followers of Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia, who understand the Nicene doctrine of the Son’s Personal consubstantiality with the Father (their Monas) to be inexorably Sabellian.
This inference relies upon the cosmological postulate of the necessary unity of substance. The Eusebian monism was taken for granted by the bishops throughout the Orient, with the sole exception of Athanasius of Alexandria, whose continued emphasis upon the absolute unity of the divine substance has as its corollary the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father. This was never understood by the Eusebians.
Tertullian’s Substantia-Persona distinction rested upon an apperception of the divine substance, the one God, as a Trinitas, not a Monas. Were Tertullian’s distinction known to Basil of Ancyra, he would have dismissed it as Sabelllian, as he dismissed the Nicene homoousios as Sabellian. The Sabellian identification of the Son with the Father is the direct implication of the cosmological identification of the divine substance with the Monas who, exhausting the divine substance, is the one God, with no conceivable rivals. All the divine Names are his, for any Personal distinction between them would be the assertion of the disunity of the divine substance, a tritheism as unacceptable to Basil’s party as it was to the Sabellians and the Arians. However, Basil’s assertion of a “likeness” of the Son to the Father in the order of substance demands just such a Personal distinction in the order of substance. This posed a dilemma, incapable of resolution, which haunted the Eusebian subordinationism, including Basil’s homoiousian version. It forces an impossible choice between a Sabellian monotheism and a henotheistic tritheism comparable to the pagan pantheons.
Basil’s assertion of the substantial likeness (ὄμοιος κατ’οὐσίαν) or homoiousion of the Son with the Father was therefore a relation of ‘likeness” to the Father conceived not as a Person but as the divine substance. It is this substantial likeness which in 357 the Second Creed of Sirmium─aptly labeled by its opponents “the blasphemy of Sirmium”─refused to accept. This conviction of a substantial similarity between the Father and the Son prompted Basil’s first clear statement of the homoiousian doctrine, a forthright affirmation of the eternity and divinity of the Son, contra the Arian doctrine of the Council of Sirmium which reduced the Son to a creature. However, the Eusebian prohibition of Personal distinctions within the absolute unity of the divine substance barred the distinguishing the Personal divinity of the Son from the Personal divinity of the Father and the Holy Spirit within the divine substance, for Basil’s subordinationism required that the divine substance be identified with the Father alone. Basil’s solution, i.e. his assertion of the substantial similarity of the Son to the Father, amounted to a ‘leap of faith. He relied upon the revelation by Christ that he is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. Basil understood this revelation to require the Son’s similarity to the Father, as that which must exist between the Begetter and the Begotten. He did not understand his assertion of the Son’s substantial similarity to the Father to contradict the substantial unity of the Father; rather, the substantial “likeness” of the Son to the Father requires their substantial and, as he thought, equivalently Personal distinction. The reality of this distinction was for Basil a truth of the faith, as later it was for Hilary. The Son is necessarily distinct from the Father, as the eternal Begetter of the eternally Begotten Son, and the Son, as eternal Begotten by the eternal Father. This distinction, as a matter of faith, could only be a mystery, theologically unplumbable and consequently transcending the cosmological veto of its possibility.
Nonetheless the profession of faith in the eternal begetting of the Son by the eternal Father required Basil, and Hilary, to carry water on both shoulders, affirming the substantial unity of the Father-Monas, together with his Personal distinction from the Son. Further: this distinction of divine Personal Names must be substantial for, under the influence of the Eusebian subordinationism, Basil had refused and condemned as Sabellian the Nicene doctrine of the consubstntiality of the Son with the Father. Given the subordinationists’ identification of intellectual substance with ‘person,” the Son’s distinction from the Father must be either nominal, thus Sabellian, or concrete, with the immediate implication of “two Gods” if the Son’s full divinity is to be maintained. A failure to maintain the Son’s divinity is of course a regression to Arianism, while its affirmation raises the ancient problem of “the one and the many,” i.e., of “two Gods.” The Council of Nicaea had resolved this problem by identifying the divine unity with the Trinity as at once substantial and free.
However, there is no cosmological exit from this dilemma: Basil accepted the Son’s divinity as implicit in the Son’s eternal Begetting by the Father. Thereby he could not but accept also the further implication of the impersonality of the Holy Spirit, for he knew the divinity of the Son to be dependent upon his Begetting. Because the Holy Spirit is not “Begotten,” Basil understands the Holy Spirit to possess no identity distinct from the divine substance constituted by the Father’s begetting of the Son.
The relation between the full divinity of the Father, the Begetter, and the “similar” divinity of the Only-Begotten Son could not be reciprocal. The Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father asserted that reciprocity, simply because the consubstantiality is Personal rather than substantial, as Basil’s doctrine of the Son’s homoiousion to the Father requires that it be. The Nicene doctrine of the Trinity has as its corollary the Father’s consubstantiality with the Son and with the Holy Spirit. This is simply the corollary of the consubstantiality of the divine Persons. Basil, a disciple of the Eusebians, condemned this consubstantiality as Sabellian. Bound by his subordinationism, he could not but understand the Nicene “homoousios“ to be the distinctive attribute of the substantial Son, whose “similarity” to the Father, understood as the divine substance, is inferred from his Sonship as the corollary of his having been Begotten by the Father; Basil reasoned that a Son cannot but be like his Father on the level of substance. Once again, the “likeness” asserted must be substantial in order to be Personal, for Basil cannot admit the Trinity, which for him is a most Sabellian doctrine. Strictly linked to the Sonship of the Only-Begotten, it is cosmologically impossible to ascribe ”homoiousios” to the Holy Spirit; for that homoios kata’ ousian (similarity according to substance) is reserved to the Son’s unique relation to the Father precisely as Son: the relation of the Only-Begotten to the Monas who is the Father-Begetter. That relation, insofar as inescapably a derivative substantial similarity, left the homoiousian doctrine in the posture of Arianism, unable to assert the full divinity of the Son, which is to say, unable to defend the faith that Jesus is Lord, apart from faith in his eternal Begetting, which here resembles a begging of the question; were the quality of its logic in issue. But it is not in issue: for Basil, the affirmation of the Son’s Begetting is the affirmation of a mystery: a finally ineffable truth, not open to the cosmological analysis which requires that the Nicene homoousios be read as Sabellian.
Within this subordinationist context, viz., the faith-affirmation of the homoiouson of the Only-Begotten Son to his Father, Basil is unable to affirm the Christian faith in the full divinity, defined at the Council of Nicaea by the inclusion of the Holy Spirit within Nicene Creed. of the Person who is the Holy Spirit, as later defined at I Constantinople against the Macedonian denial of that Personal divinity, and taught definitively at Chalcedon. Basil did not concern himself with this issue. While the document that issued from his Council of Ancyra in 358 affirms incidentally the three divine Names, Basil’s homoiousian doctrine was unable to provide for the distinct Personal divinity of the Spirit. This ambiguity haunted the Cappodocians thereafter and finally broke their unity.
At this time, still dominated by the Arian controversy, little attention was paid to theology of the Holy Spirit. Over twenty years earlier, the Nicene Creed had offered no elaboration of its Creedal assertion of the Catholic belief “in the Holy Spirit,” while the Eusebian theologians, increasingly of the homoiousian persuasion after the death of Constantius in 361, ignored this troubling question until forced to it by the Macedonian rejection, on homoiousian grounds, of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. This prompted Basil of Caesarea’s De Spiritu Sancto of 375, which he began to write a dozen years after Athanasius’ had affirmed the divinity of the Holy Spirit in the irenic Tome to the Antiochenes in 362. Hilary alone faced the homoiousian quandary, and, if only to his own satisfaction, resolved it. Accepting the impossibility of a Personal homoiousion other than that of the Son, Hilary concluded that faith in the divinity of the Holy Spirit required that “Holy Spirit” simply Name the divine substance. Within the subordinationist format of the homoiousian theology, no faith-affirmation analogous to the affirmation of the Son’s eternal Begetting by the Father permits the ascription to the Holy Spirit of a Personal, “hypostatic’distinction, a homoiousion with the Father, to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit's divinity is therefore substantial, but not Personal, for that distinction is proper only to the divinity of the Father, and the Son by the mystery of his eternal begetting by the Father. In short, the homoiousian doctrine cannot avoid binitarianism. The “Holy Spirit” must coincide, impersonally, with the divine substance.
The Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son is basically Trinitarian. It is only on this foundation that the Council defines the full divinity of the Son, for the Son possesses the fullness of divinity only by reason of his consubstantiality with the Father by which the Son is the second Person of the Trinity, as the Holy Spirit is the third. This Trinitarian faith flatly contradicts the “homoiousian” defense of the Son’s divinity proposed by Basil of Ancyra and his followers, for the Nicene Creed presupposes the unqualified unity, the ‘sameness,’ of the divine Trinitarian substance in which subsist the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Basil of Ancyra’s theology knows no Trinity. It knows no consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit with the Father, and thus can assert no Personal distinctions on that basis. It must contrive an alternative foundation for the divinity of the Son, for Basil’s doctrine distinguishes the Father’s substance or nature from that of the Son; they are not then “consubstantial,” but rather are “similar in substance: homoios kat’ousian. The Nicene definition of this “sameness,” the “homoousion” of the Son is reaffirmed in the Council’s anathematization of Arianism, a condemnation whose stress upon the divine “mia ousia , mia hypostasis,” simply excludes all subordinationism, whether that of Arius, of Eusebius, or of Basil of Ancyra’s doctrine of the Son’s “similarity according to substance,” which Hilary vigorously supported. In fact, Basil’s minor council of Ancyra (358), which first formulated the homoiousian doctrine, anathematized the Nicene homoousion precisely because it taught that “sameness” of the substance of the Father and the Son, which Basil had termed “tautousios,” and, with all the Eusebians, had identified with Sabellianism.[654]
Hilary’s development of his Trinitarian theology proceeded from the anti-modalist, anti-adoptionist Trinitarianism which the Latin West had been taught by Tertullian and Novatian.[655] The Western bishops displayed little of the speculative interest which was dividing their Eastern counterparts, and Hilary shared that disinterest. It is evident in that inadequate appreciation of the eternal begetting of the Son which marks his early Commentary on Matthew, and in his facile dismissal of the significance of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father. While in the final statement of his Trinitarian theology, the De trinitate, Hilary accepts and affirms the Nicene orthodoxy, viz., the definition of the eternal generation and the homoousion of the Son, and the unqualified unity of the divine substance (the “mia ousia , mia hypostasis” with which he had little or no acquaintance prior to 356), it is clear that he continued to think in the subordinationist terms, welcoming the homoiousion doctrine which had been developed by Basil of Ancyra early in 358 in reaction to the imposition of homoeanism upon the empire by the Second Creed of Sirmium in 357. Hilary was unable to find in the homoiousion of the Son any significant difference from the homoousion defined at Nicaea. It is only on that basis that he has no objection to the Nicene doctrine: he had not disputed Basil’s condemnation of the Nicene homoousion as “taut-ousian,” which for Basil meant Sabellian.
Thus, when in his De synodis, Hilary affirms the homoousion of the Son and, suo modo, of the Holy Spirit, he fails to distinguish the Holy Spirit from the divine substance, and thus also from the Father and the Son. He does not understand the homoousion of the Nicene definition to be Personal, i.e., he does not recognize that its doctrine of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father is not his consubstantiality with the divine substance, but with a Trinitarian Person, the Father who cannot be identified with the Trinitarian substance. Admitting no Trinitarian divine substance, he cannot avoid that subordination of the Son inherent in Basil’s formula of the Son’s “similarity in substance” homoios kat’ousian (ὅμοιος κατ’οὐσίαν) to the Father, for similarity cannot but connote difference. However Hilary’s commitment to the homoiousian doctrine left him with no alternative.
For him, the divine Persons, i.e., the Son and the Father, are known, by faith in the Father’s begetting of the Son, to be substantially distinct, by which the Father gives the Son all that he is, save his Paternity, i.e., his being the Begetter, the Father, the divine substance. Like Basil of Ancyra, Hilary’s mentor while in exile, Hilary recognized no possibility of any other substantial similarity, any other homoiousion in God. This of course excludes any recognition of the Holy Spirit as distinct from the Father, i.e., distinct from the divine substance.
It must follow that Hilary’s assimilation of the Nicene doctrine of the Son’s “homoousios” of the Son with the Father, to Basil of Ancyra’s notion of the “homoiousios” of the Son to the Father, amounted to his assimilation of the Nicene Creed to the Eusebian subordinationism common to practically all of the Greek theologians at that time, thirty years after the Council of Nicaea, Marcellus and Athanasius being the uniquely clear exceptions.
Hilary’s acceptance of the Nicene homoousios was only nominal, for he never understood it. As with all homoiousians, he remained in principle a disciple of Eusebius of Caesarea. His own insistent but incoherent affirmation of the eternal generation of the Son is not that of the Nicene doctrine, whose emphasis on the radical unity of the divine substance is basic to the doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father and consequently of the Son’s divinity and eternity.
Hilary’s approval of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father did not entail his recognition of the definition by the Council of Nicaea that the Son and the Father are of the same substance, and not merely of the one substance. Hilary prefers to translate the Nicene “homoousios” as “one substance,” which translation accords with his subordinationism, because permitting, and relying upon, the identification of the Father─and the Son because Begotten by the Father─with the one divine nature or substance. The Nicene doctrine precisely forbids this identification. The consubstantiality of the Son with the Father radically excludes the identification of either with the divine substance. Rather, each Person possesses the fullness of divinity as a member of the substantial Trinity, as consubstantial with each of the other Persons, each of whom Personally, (i.e., uniquely, suo modo) possesses the fullness of divinity, whether as its Source, as Begotten, or as Poured Out.
The Nicene Fathers did not provide a theological account of their doctrine of the Personal consubstantiality of the divine Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for they taught as bishops, not as theologians. At Nicaea they established the Trinitarian foundation of the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord, asserting the full divinity, the consubstantiality of the Son and the Holy Spirit with the Father, and the absolute unity of the divine substance, the Trinity, upon which all subsequent doctrinal development would build, and apart from which no theological inquiry into the Mysterium fidei could nor would proceed. Inasmuch as the Nicene definition of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father, the doctrinal assertion that the Son is “of the same substance,” excludes subordinationism, it excludes the homoiousian theology, for the Nicene doctrine places the Father within the Trinitarian substance; thus the Father does not constitute the divine substance, as the homoiusians assume and as Hilary explicitly affirms.[656]
When, as with the Eusebians, the unity of the divine substance is understood cosmologically, it is understood monadically, as the Father-Monas whose subsistence in the divine substance exhausts it in such wise tht the Monas and the divine substance are concretely indistinguishable. Thereupon the attribution of paternity to the Monas-Father by Basil and by Hilary, with the correlative attribution of divinity to the Son of the Monas, posits a relation between Father and Son which can only be of a superior to a subordinate, a greater to a lesser, in which the Son is cosmologically comprehensible only as an emanation from the substance of the Father. Hilary, who is intent upon the full divinity of the Son, of course denies this consequence: for him, the Father, who is eternally the Father, in eternally begetting the Son, is eternally distinct from the Son not by nature, but by begetting him. The begetter and the begotten cannot but be distinct, but the distinction is finally ineffable, a mystery of faith, revealed in the Son and proper to him, best expressed, however inadequately, as a similarity in the order of substance. It is by faith that their distinction is known, and it is upon this faith in the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father that Hilary constructs his Trinitarian doctrine, which at bottom is the homoiousian doctrine urged by Basil of Ancyra against the homoean Arianism of the second Council of Sirmium.
Hilary’s De trinitate, like his De synodis, is narrowly focused upon the refutation of Arius’ summary exposition of his heresy in the brief Epistle to Alexander, the archbishop of Alexandria before and during the Nicene Council, which Arius had written in 320, nearly forty years earlier.[657] Consequently, the anti-Arian polemic in the De trinitate is to an extent dated but, given the neo-Arian development by Aetius, from about 350, of a rationalized Arianism more extreme than that of Arius, the polemic of the De trinitate retained its relevance well into the latter half of the fourth century. At the same time, Hilary thought the Nicene homoousios dispensable, in that where contested, it need not be insisted upon. He still understood it as assimilable to the homoiousious doctrine of Basil of Ancyra.[658] He expresses his bitter disappointment at Constantius’ abandonment, at the Council of Constantinople in 360, of the homoiousian doctrine which two years earlier he had accepted:[659] it is evident from his polemical Contra Constantium that. after returning from his exile, Hilary remained loyal to the subordinationism of Basil of Ancyra.
Hilary devoted most of the De trinitate, as well as the last sections of the De synodis, to an effort to escape the subordinationist import of the homoiousion by focusing upon the substantial unity implicit in the eternal Father-Son distinction, but to no avail for, like Basil, he supposed those Names each to designate the divine substance in such wise that the distinction between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit which they intimate must also be substantial. This bars the substantial unity of God, which is precisely the Homoean doctrine of the “Blasphemy of Sirmium,” which had led Basil of Ancyra to propose an alternative at once to Arianism and to the Nicene doctrine of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, which, following the Eusebians, he held to be Sabellian. Basil’s resolution of this difficulty was to teach that, the Son is similar in substance to the Father, but not, as Nicaea had taught, identical in substance, i.e., not of the same substance: Basil had seen fit to anathematize the Nicene doctrine as a Sabellian “tautousios” (same substance) of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Like all the Eusebians, he failed to understand that the Nicene anathematizetion of the Arian failure to uphold the mia ousia , mia hypostasis of the one God is presupposed by the homoousios of the Son with the Father. The Son possesses the same substance as the Father and, as has been seen, this “sameness” makes the Nicene affirmation of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father to be mutual: by reason of the Father’s possession of the same substance as the Son, he cannot but be homoousios with the Son, as the Son is with him.
In the last dozen chapters of the De synodis, Hilary makes it clear that he finds no unique significance in the “homo” (i.e., same) of homoousios which would distinguish it from the “mia” (i.e., one) of “mia ousios and “mia hypostasis,” For Hilary, “same substance” and “one substance” are interchangeable terms, inasmuch as he interprets the former in terms of the latter. This is the standard homoiousian reading of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father: viz.,: a literal acceptance of the Nicene “homoousios,” equivalently “identity of substance,” cannot but be Sabellian. This standard Eusebian critique of the Nicene Creed is unquestioned by Basil of Ancyra, and by Hilary. It is then evident that Hilary never grasped the significance of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son, for that simply excludes the cosmological subordinationism of the Arians and the Eusebians. In the end, Hilary was willing to be silent concerning the Nicene homoousios if that would avoid a controversy which he thought meaningless lis de verbis: the homoiousion of the Son would serve his theological project quite as well.
Despite Hilary’s repeated affirmation of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father in the De trinitate, his Trinitarian doctrine is rather the expression of a firm and deeply considered baptismal faith in the inseparability of the full divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the full divinity of the Father, than a coherent theological statement. There can be no doubt of Hilary’s loyal witness to the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord, but his uncritical commitment to the cosmologically-imposed subordinationism of Basil of Ancyra prevented his giving his faith a coherent systematic expression. This failure is most apparent in his theology of the Holy Spirit, anticipated in Book II of the De trinitate, and given its full development in Book VIII. Faced with the inherent homoiousian dilemma of reconciling the hypostatic divinity of the Holy Spirit with his distinction from the Son as well as the Father, Hilary simply followed the homoiousion logic: to be divine is to be Spirit; thus, very simply, he identifies the Holy Spirit with the divine Substance, possessed fully by the Father, given to the Son in his begetting, and by the Son returned to the Father.
But Hilary is quite willing to use “Person” of the Son and the Father: in fact, he stresses the Names of the Son and the Father,[660] while insisting, as Basil had, that the Names cannot stand alone, but that prerequisite to their intelligibility is the Father’s begetting of the substantially similar Son (homoios kat’ousian). On the other hand, for Hilary, as opposed to Tertullian, names denote substance, not persons: they can name the divine Persons only insofar as the Persons are identified with substances. Their Personal distinction is therefore at the level of substance, as the “homoiousios” of the Son to the Father confirms. In short, the Nicene homoousios is intelligible to Hilary only as controlled by and assimilated to the meaning of homoiousios.
The price of Hilary’s faith-assertion of the Personal distinction of the Son from the Father, made within the context of the Eusebian subordinationism, is its radical incoherence. He affirms a substantial divine Unity which can avoid Sabellianism only by a finally Arian subordination of the Son who is only similar in substance,“homoios kat’ousian,” to the Father. Hilary’s identification of the divine ousia with the Father-Begetter is countered by his affirmation of the divinity of the Son, which presents him with the impossible problem pointed out by Athanasius in his De synodis, later exploited by the neo-Arian Aetius and his disciple, Eunomius. “Homoiousios” is inevitably reducible to “heteroousios.” Hilary’s reasoning precisely rejects the Nicene resolution of the problem of the one and the many in God. The Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son rests upon the indivisibility of the divine substance, which requires the divine Son’s consubstantiality with the Father as the corollary of his divinity, thereby transforming the meaning of the unity of the divine into the substantial Trinity of consubstantially divine Persons. The corollary of the rejection of the Nicene Creed is the restoration of the problem of the one and the many in God. Sabellianism and Arianism exhaust the options.
Although Tertullian had in the last decade of the second century ascribed the same Personal standing to the Holy Spirit as to the Father and the Son, thereby providing a substantia-persona terminology capable of theological development from which, as we have seen Evans insist, he never retreated. He failed to exploit it himself, as did his Latin successors, leaving the West with a recognized theological vocabulary adequate to the expression of Church’s Apostolic faith in the divinity of each of the divine Persons as written into the baptismal liturgy via Mt. 28:19, but awaiting its systematic explication. The virtue of Tertullian’s substantia-persona terminology is that it simply bars subordinationism, for the Father, as a member of the substantial Trinitas, could not be identified with it, for he is a member of the Trinity, not its Substance. This is the radical Mysterium fidei which, as Ex nihilo sui et subjecti, cannot be rationalized.
In the West as in the East, the fourth century theological focus was defensive, intent upon meeting the Arian challenge to the divinity of the Son, but hampered by the already customary cosmological dehistoricization of “the Son,” already evident in Tertullian’s acceptance of the correlatively false and consequently insoluble Christological problem of arranging, in Adversus Praxean 27, for the historicization of the non-historical absolute, the “immanent Son,” who can not change and therefore must be clothed with flesh─immo indutus─a notion he rejected twenty-seven lines later, in Evans’ edition of Tertullian's Treatise against Praxeas, in favor of the personal unity of the Christ―in una persona deum et hominem Jesum.
Tertullian’s Apologeticus had made the term persona indispensable to Western theology, both in Christology, to designate the historical unity of Jesus the Christ, and in Trinitarian theology, to identify what is three within the unity of the Trinitas, the Trinitarian substance. Tertullian’s use of “persona” to designate the historical unity of Jesus the Lord had made the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord immediately intelligible, for it permitted a rational distinction between what is one in Christ, i.e., his Name and thus his Person, and what is two in him as the Lord Jesus, his full divinity and full humanity which are distinct “natures” within the unqualified unity of his Person─unqualified because that unity is Named by the Apostles in their encounter with Jesus the Lord. Similarly easily understood was Tertullian’s ascription of “Person” to each the three Names in the baptismal formula, and his ascription of substantial unity to the one God, whose unity as Trinitas was at once beyond question, and entirely familiar by reason of its affirmation in the baptismal liturgy and in the epicleses and doxologies inseparable from participation in the Church’s Eucharistic worship. Once again however, while Tertullian’s substantia-persona paradigm clearly underwrote the faith that Jesus is Lord, it provided no basis for a theological entry into that radical mystery.
In sum, Tertullian’s adaptation to the Catholic faith in the Trinity and in Christ of the ancient use of “name” to designate the full unity and value of each of the members of the human community was at once immediately familiar to believers, and its liturgical meaning was intuitively clear to them if only by reason of their participation in the daily worship of the Church, offered to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, in whose Names each Christian has been baptized. This Spirit Christology was the apostolic tradition, which had received creedal expression in Mt. 28:19. The systematic theological expression it awaited was provided by Origen, whose own affirmation of the Spirit Christology in the Preface to the Peri Archon rejected the ambient Middle Platonic rationalism to construct an historical synthesis (Henōsis) of the apostolic Trinitarian and Christological tradition that underwrote at once Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine of tres personae, una substantia and his Christological doctrine of una persona, duae substantiae. Origen’s systematic focus upon the communication of Names in the historical Jesus the Lord formed the Alexandrine tradition and was there first deployed by Alexander of Alexandria, whose condemnation of Arius. affirmed at Nicaea, was the foundation of the doctrine proclaimed at Chalcedon almost two centuries after Origen’s death.
Hanson points out that Hilary may have avoided the term, “person,” because, due to the influence of the Eusebians, he thought it tainted by its Sabellian use.[661] Hilary’s avoidance of “person” is much more easily explained by his familiarity with Tertullian’s Trinitarian use of “Person” to include the Holy Spirit, which Hilary’s commitment to the homoiousian doctrine did not allow. Hilary uses “Person” of the Son and the Father precisely to insist upon their distinction and their divinity: he even stresses the Names of the Son and the Father and the Son,[662] but with the provision ad cautelam that Names cannot of themselves denote Personal distinctions, as they do for Tertullian. Hilary considers the the faith-affirmation of the Father’s begetting of the substantially similar Son to be prerequisite to the intelligibility of the Names of “Father” and “Son;” only by his begetting is the Son homoios kat’ ousian to the Father. The absence of a comparable polarity between the Father and the Holy Spirit bars the ascription of Person to the Holy Spirit. In accepting this consequence, Hilary reveals his commitment to the homoiousian formula, and to its inescapable subordinationism: i.e., lacking that prerequisite affirmation, the faith-assertion of a necessary distinction between the Begetter and the Begotten, the Son’s homoiousion could have only a Sabellian meaning: it would a unity of substance simply, for the Trinitarian Names refer to the divine substance, and so could not provide the necessary distinction between the Persons, with the consequence of their Sabellian identity; this is evident in Hilary’s refusal, or inability, to distinguish the Holy Spirit from the one God.
Hilary’s unwillingness to use “person” left him with no adequate substitute; his attempts to find an alternative term or terms by which he might distinguish the unity of the divine Substance from the entirely distinct unities of Father, and of the Son, (who, in Hilary’s homoiousion formula, comprise the divine substance), could not succeed. The homoiousion formula was at best ambiguous: it could not be otherwise, for its assertion of the Personal divinity of Son, received from the Father, and his Personal distinction from the Father, were self-contradictory. The Greek and Latin cosmologies upon which he relied could not accept two divinities who were not two gods. He never resolved this difficulty, as Hanson has shown.[663] Hilary’s quandary is best illustrated by his dissociation, of Person from Name. For him, it is the divine Substance, not the divine Person, that is Named. Thus the Holy Spirit who is Named the Advocate by the risen Lord, is not a Person. Concentrated as his De trinitate is upon refuting the Arian denial of the divinity of the Son and, equally, the divinity of the Holy Spirit, Hilary often refers to the Holy Spirit as “Gift; but he never speaks of the Spirit as a Person, for this term is reserved for the Father and the Son, whose unity is substantial, that of the one God. This conforms to the homoiousian supposition that Personal distinctions in God are limited to the Son’s substantial similarity to the Father, the sole alternative being polytheism, the presupposition of a material divinity, capable of division; Basil of Ancyra held materialism to be implicit in the Nicene homoousion as the only alternative to Sabellianism.
Thus for Hilary, the prior faith-assertion of the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son is apodictic, controlling the binitarian meaning of the one God. It is only by that assertion that the Father can be understood to be distinct from the Son, but the ground of the distinction is ineffable, a faith-utterance consistent at once with the unity of the one God and the distinction of the Father and the Son, whose substantial unity is maintained in the fact of the begetting of the Son. Hilary must recognize a level of subordination in the Son, as having his source in the Father, but he denies that this is an inferiority. Here he may be remembering Tertullian’s distinctions between the Trinitarian Persons as of gradus rather than status, as set out in the Adversus Praxean 2, 2 and 9, 3, although in the latter place Tertullian uses gradus to uphold the divinity of the Person of the Holy Spirit, which Hilary could not admit.
Hilary cannot but have recognized the inability of the homoiousian theology to provide for the divinity of the Holy Spirit, whose divinity nonetheless he never doubted. However, granted the divinity of the Holy Spirit, he found it impossible to accept the Personal distinction of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son within that subordinationist format, in which Person and Substance are the identical except where faith in the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son is understood to have overridden the subordination of the Son to the Father.. Hilary’s inability to admit the Personality of the Holy Spirit, despite his recognition of the Name (Advocate) given the Holy Spirit by Jesus, reduces his affirmation of the homoiusion of the Spirit to a quasi-Sabellian identification of the Holy Spirit with the divine substance. This is the necessary consequence of supposing “name” to denote substance, not person, a supposition basic to the Arian subordinationism, and to its homoiousian alternative.
Thus is explained Hilary’s avoidance of all reference to the Holy Spirit as a “Person,” and his sympathy with the Basil of Ancyra’s rejection of the Nicene homoousion in favor of a homoiouson; Basil insisted on regarding the Son’s substantial similarity to the Father as the direct implication of his having been begotten by the Father, whom Basil, as a Eusebian subordinationist, identified with the divine Substance. With the substantial similarity of the Son to the Father thus grounded in the Son’s filial relation to the Father, i.e., in his having been begotten by the Father, it could not but follow that the homoiousion has no possible application to the Holy Spirit. Consequently, Basil’s homoiousian doctrine could not support the divinity of the Spirit. This failure of the homoiousian forumula to support the divinity of the Holy Spirit prompted the later Pneumatomachian (Macedonian) explicit denial of the divinity of the Spirit. The “Spirit-fighters,” i.e., bishops such as Macedonius and Eustathius of Sebaste, were from Basil’s homoiousian party and tried to explain the personal reality of the Holy Spirit as Arius had, i.e., not precisely as a creature, but as a less than divine subsistence.
The heretical Macedonian denial of the divinity of the Spirit cannot be attributed to Hilary, as is evident from the opening lines of Book Ten of the De trinitate, in which Hilary treats of the “tresagion” prayer, i.e., the epiclesis of the “Thrice Holy“ Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Msgr. Jurgens has provided translations of several excerpts from the De trinitate which witness to Hilary’s clear affirmation of the divinity of the Holy Spirit.[664] It would be easy to read such passages as affirmations of the Personal divinity of the Spirit, but this Hilary never affirmed nor could he, within the format of the homoiousian subordinationism.
The Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit, as distinct from that of the Father and the Son, is entirely incompatible with the homoiousian doctrine proposed by Basil of Ancyra. Early in in 358 Basil had gathered an assembly of bishops at Ancyra to oppose the Second Creed of Sirmium, the “Blasphemy of Sirmium,” the homoean document published the year before which, while affirming a positive similarity of the Son to the Father, excluded any comparison between the Father and the Son on the level of substance, whether that of the Nicene homoousion, or of the homoiousion taught by Basil. Hilary supported the homoiousion riposte of Basil’s Council of Ancyra to the “Second Creed of Sirmium” through 360 and the Council of Constantinople, at which Constantius imposed the homoean doctrine on the empire. He had outmaneuvered both the Greek and the Latin bishops at synods held at respectivedly at Seleucia and Rimini. He had wrung from all of them a concession to the homoean doctrine. Hilary then returned to Poitiers from his Phrygian exile. having himself been outmaneuvered and bitterly disappointed by Constantius’s final rejection of Basil’s doctrine of the homoiousion of the Son which the Emperor and his advisors had accepted two years earlier at another Council of Sirmium. Hilary’s diplomacy had failed, as therefore had his theology.
The eighth chapter of Hilary’s dogmatic treatise, De trinitate, the first serious exposition of Catholic dogmatic theology in the West, probably composed during his first two years of exile, develops his theology of the Holy Spirit, to whom, in sum, he refuses a subsistence distinct from that of the divine ousia . To do otherwise would be to accept the homoiousion of the Spirit, which he cannot do, for the same reasons which prevented Basil of Ancyra from doing so. We turn now to the text of Hilary’s examination in the De trinitate of the standing of the Holy Spirit.[665]
Bk 8, Ch. 19
(19) The Father and the Son are one by nature, power, and glory, nor can the same nature desire different things. Furthermore, let them listen to the Son as He testifies about the unity of the Father with Him: ‘When that Advocate has come, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness concerning me.21 The Advocate will come and the Son will send Him from the Father, and He is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father. Let the entire school of the heretics hurl all the sophistries of their clever wit, and let them invent something which may at least deceive the uninformed, and let them teach what it is that the Son sends from the Father! He who sends manifests His power in that which He sends. But, what are we to understand by that which He sends from the Father? Is it something received, or sent forth, or begotten? That which He sent from the Father must mean one or the other of these things. And He who proceeds from the Father will send that Spirit of truth from the Father. Hence, there is no longer an adoption where a procession is revealed. Nothing remains but for us to corroborate our teaching on this point, whether we are to understand here the going forth of one who exists or the procession of one who has been born.
21. Cf. Jn 15.26
St. Hilary of Poitiers: The Trinity. Tr. Stephen McKenna, C.SS.R. (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1954) [hereafter, McKenna], Book viii, 19, at 289. (sublineation added). [666]
Hilary first rejects any adoption of the Holy Spirit, with its implicit reduction of the Holy Spirit to a creaturely standing. The single alternative is procession: that Spirit which the Son sends from the Father, i.e. the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, must either be received, sent forth, or begotten. Hilary then proceeds to eliminate “begotten,” as that procession which, unique to the Son, alone accounts for his distinction from the Father:
Bk 8, Ch. 20
(20). . . . Hence, He now clearly asserts that He will receive from Him because everything that belongs to the Father is His. If you are able to do so, separate the unity of this nature, and bring forth some compelling reason for a dissimilarity as a consequence of which the Son will not be in the unity of nature! The Spirit of truth proceeds from the Father, but He is sent by the Son from the Father. Everything that belongs to the Father belongs to the Son; hence, whatever He who is to be sent will receive He will receive from the Son, because everything that the Son has the Father has. Accordingly, nature adheres to its own law in everything, and because the two are one the reference to the same Godhead in both is indicated by the birth and generation, since the Son declares that what the Spirit of truth will receive from the Father will be given by Him. Hence, the impiety of heresy is to be granted no liberty for its godless knowledge so that it may claim that this saying of the Lord—that everything that the Father has is His, and therefore the Spirit of truth will receive from Him—does not have any reference to the unity of nature.
McKenna, at 291 [667]
The “unity of nature,” i.e., the substantial Godhead, is binitarian: within it only the Father and the Son are distinct;[668] any begetting of the Holy Spirit as distinct is ruled out by definition or, rather, by the Catholic faith in the only-begotten Son; Hilary would establish this from the words of St. Paul:
'You however are not carnal but spiritual, if indeed
the Spirit of God is in you. But if anyone who does not have the Spirit of
Christ, he does not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, the body, it is
true, is dead by reason of sin, but the spirit is life by reason of justice.
But if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then he
who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will also bring to life your mortal
bodies because of his Spirit who dwells in you.’25 We are all
spiritual if the Spirit of God is in us. But, this Spirit of God is also the
Spirit of Christ. And, since the Spirit of Christ is in us, the Spirit of Him who
raised Christ from the dead dwells ls in us, and He who raised Christ from the
dead will also give life to our mortal bodies because of the Spirit of Him who
dwells in us. We are vivified, however, because of the Spirit of Christ that
dwells in us through Him who raised Christ from the dead. And since the Spirit
of Him who raised Christ from the dead is in us, the Spirit of Christ is in us;
nevertheless, it is the Spirit of God that is in us. Hence, 0 heretic,
separate the Spirit of Christ from the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of Christ
that was raised from the dead from the Spirit of God that raises Christ from
the dead, since the Spirit of Christ that dwells in us is the Spirit of God,
and since the Spirit of Christ that was raised from the dead is, nevertheless,
the Spirit of God that raises Christ from the dead!
25 Rom 8:9-11
McKenna, at 292
(25) We must conclude, I believe, that the Spirit of God means God the Father because the Lord Jesus Christ asserted that the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him, and therefore He anoints Him and sends Him to preach the Gospel. The power of the Father’s nature is manifested in Him, while through the spiritual anointing He also reveals that the Son, who was bom in the flesh, has a share in His own nature, since after the birth that took place in the baptism, this designation of the true nature was also heard at that time when the voice testifies from Heaven: ‘Thou art my son: this day have I begotten thee.31 We must not understand this in the sense that He Himself was over Himself, or that He was present with Himself from heaven, or that He gave Himself the name of Son, but this entire manifestation was for the benefit of our faith so that through the mystery of the perfect and true birth we might recognize the unity of the nature remaining in the Son who also began to be man. Thus we discover that the Spirit of God refers without doubt to the Father. But we perceive that the Son has been revealed in this manner when He declares: ‘But if I cast out devils by the spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you,’ that is, when He reveals that through the power of His own nature He cast out the devils, who cannot be cast out except by the Spirit of God. There is also a reference to the Spirit Paraclete in the Spirit of God, not only by the testimony of the Prophets, but also by that of the Apostles, when it is said: ‘But this is what was spoken through the prophet: And it shall come to pass in the last days, says the Lord, that I will pour forth of my Spirit upon all flesh. And their sons and daughters shall prophesy.32 And we are taught that these words were completely fulfilled in the Apostles, when all of them spoke in the languages of the Gentiles after the Holy Spirit had been sent.
31 Ps. 2.7.
32
Ct. Acts 2.16,17
McKenna, at 294 [669]
(26) . It was necessary to reveal these facts, therefore, in order that, no
matter where the heretical error might turn, it would still be confined within
the limits and the command of the evangelical truth. For, Christ dwells in us,
and while Christ dwells God dwells. And since the Spirit of Christ dwells in
us, still, while the Spirit of Christ dwells in us, no other Spirit dwells
except the Spirit of God. If we realize that Christ is in us through the Holy
Spirit, we still recognize that the latter is just as much the Spirit of God as
the Spirit of Christ. And, since the nature itself dwells through the nature of
the thind ddwells in us through the nature of the thing, we must believe that
the nature of the Son does not differ from that of the Father, since the Holy
Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ and the Spirit of God, is made known as the
thing of one nature. Accordingly, I now raise the question: in what manner are
they not one by nature? The Spirit of truth proceeds from the Father; He is
sent by the Son and receives from the Son. But, everything that the Father has
belongs to the Son. He who receives from Him, therefore, is the Spirit of God, but
the same one is also the Spirit of Christ. The thing belongs to the nature of
the Son, but the same thing also belongs to the nature of the Father. It
is the Spirit of Him who raises Christ from the dead, but the same one is the
Spirit of Christ who has been raised from the dead. Let the nature of Christ
and the nature of God differ in something, that it may not be the same, if it
can be shown that the Spirit which is the Spirit of God is not at the same time
the Spirit of Christ!
McKenna, at 295.[670]
Hilary’s binitarian identification of the Father and the only-begotten Son with the one God, and of both the Father and the Son with the Spirit of God, is here evident. His identification of the Holy Spirit with the divine substance has become inescapable. It is the inevitable product of the pervasive influence of the homoiousian theology upon the De trinitate.[671] The subsequent chapters of his exposition of his theology of the Spirit (Bk 8, 27-32) only repeat the binitarian rationale proposed in Chapters 19 and 20. and exploited in Chapters 25 and 26. Within the homoiousian perspective, the depersonalization of the Holy Spirit is inevitable; the homoiousian reservetion to the Son of similarity kat’ ousian to the Father permits no alternative. Hilary’s theology is strictly binitarian: i.e., sensu negante. His Latin contemporaries[672] who upheld the doctrine of Nicaea could and did speak of the Father and the Son as though constituting the divine substance, this being the immediate import of the definition of their consubstantiality, which the Latin Nicenes understood sensu aiente, i.e., as not foreclosing the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian doctrine of the Latin adherents to the Nicene homoousios had been summed up in Tertullian’s ascription of substantiality to the Trinitas; with him, they understood the unity of the one God to be the Trinity constituted by the three divine Personae. Their failure to refer to the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit is to be understood within the context of the Arian controversies of the mid-fourth century and, in that historical context needs no justification it entailed neither a denial of the Person nor the affirmation of his consubstantial divinity, but only their loyalty to the proclamation by Council of Nicaea of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father.
Hilary’s canonization, and his standing as a Doctor of the Church, are the Church’s recognition of his dedicated fulfillment of his teaching responsibilities as the Bishop of Poitiers, particularly notable during his four years of exile, when he produced his major works in circumstances of which there is little record, apart from the punitive character of the works themselves. In the fourth century, exile to a foreign land was no small inconvenience. His defense of the Catholic faith against the Arian denial of the divinity of Jesus the Christ was the occasion of that exile. He spent its years in the tireless exercise of the same episcopal responsibility for which he had been exiled, the preaching and the defense of the faith. He was not there as an academic, to construct theologoumena by which the Arian heresy might be shown to be so, but to preach the truth of the Catholic faith in and out of season, as is evident in all he wrote.
He thought to have found that truth best defended by the homoiousian doctrine of Basil of Ancyra, and devoted himself to its theological development in the De trinitate. Along with the vast majority of the fourth century Oriental bishops, he accepted a subordinationist theology which, having denied the authority of the Nicene Council, could recognize no foundation for doctrinal unity, and thus for theological rationality, other than a finally political consensus under the aegis of the universal authority of the emperor. In retrospect, his failure to understand the doctrine of Nicaea was the consequence of his exile to the Orient, and thus of his immersion in the doctrinal confusion of the Orient, which he thought to resolve by subscription to the homoiousian doctrine of Basil of Caesarea. This entailed as its corollary the rejection of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion, in which he could see only as a source of continual confusion. This confusion was the consequence of his initial unfamiliarity with the docttrine of Nicaea, and his exile to and immersion in a theological mentality rendered subordinationist forty years earlier by Eusebius of Caesarea, whose refusal of the authority of Nicaea was eo ipso subscription to the imperial politicization of the Catholic tradition. Eusebius of Caesarea had espoused this equation of faith and political loyalty without reservation and found in Athanasius’ resolute adherence to the Nicene doctrine of the Trinitarian mia hypostasis an infidelity at once to the Christian faith and to the imperial dignity. Thirty years later, this Oriental synthesis of fidelity to the faith and loyalty to the empire began to fail. The first clear evidence of this failure was the emergence of Basil of Ancyra’s refusal of the imperial homoeanism cobbled into law by Constantius’ advisers, the notorious bishops Valens and Ursacius, who managed to deceive both Basil and Hilary at the Council of Seleucia in 359 and whose triumph at the Council of Constantinople lasted barely a year, dying with Constantius in 361.
The circumstances of Hilary’s exile in 356 lead him, understandably enough, into grave error, but they did not lead him into a departure from the faith of the Church. The Church’s definitive affirmation of the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit would wait another twenty years upon the First Council of Constantinople.[673] Hilary’s reputation, as a saint and an unbending defender of the faith against the Arian menace, is not dependent upon his flawed theology. Theology is a personal undertaking, and all such are flawed by definition. Were that fatality disqualifying, no one could afford to undertake the task of theology. Hilary met the responsibilities of his episcopacy in a period of humanly inextricable confusion, and did not waver from this office in the face of the imperial displeasure, which he did not seek to placate, but only to correct. In the end, he refused, as Athanasius had long refused, the politicization of the faith inherent in the homoiousian theology. After returning to the diocese of Poitiers, in the year of Constantius’ death, he continued to confront Arianism as he had before his exile, defending the faith of the Church until he died, in 367.
Marius Victorinus was born in Africa of pagan parents, and became a famous teacher of Neoplatonism in Rome. At about the age of sixty, he was converted to Christianity. He resigned his official teaching office, that of Rhetor, in 362: This formal repudiation of philosophy in favor of the Catholic faith attracted a good deal of attention. Augustine’s favorable account of it in Book 8 of the Confessions suggests that Victorinus’ conversion to Christianity had a role in Augustine’s conversion from the Manichaean heresy some thirty years later.[674]
While resident in Rome, Victorinus applied his Neoplatonic learning, unmatched by any of theologians of his time, to the refutation of the Arian heresy. He became a Christian shortly before the II Council of Sirmium that produced the homoean document to which Basil of Ancyra replied a few months later, in 358. Otherwise, Victorinus knew some of of the early Arian documents, and enough of the homoean Council of Sirmium to oppose its doctrine, although he rejected Basil of Ancyra’s homoiousian riposte to it as well, in favor of his own substantialist reading of the Nicene homoousios. Victorinus’ theological works were written between 357 and 362, thus antecedent to his conversion. They begin with an a literary debate with a fictional foil, the Arian, Candidus, the supposed author of Candidi Epistola I, which presents the Arian case. Victorinus replies to it in the In Candidum, to which “Candidus” replies in Candidi Epistola II, largely composed of Arius’ correspondence with Alexander of Alexandria and with Eusebius of Nicomedia, upon which “Candidus” had based his defense of Arianism. There follows the Victorinus’ Adversus Arium in four volumes, its summary in De Homoousio Recipiendo, and a number of hymns.[675]. Victorinus died ca. 363.
In service of his defense of the Nicene doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, Victorinus had begun to develop an active notion of the one God as dynamic: i.e., an understanding of the divine substance or Esse as Moveri, with three variously designated “subsistences:” e.g., “Silence, voice, voice of the voice;” or “esse, vivere, intelligere,” (which Hadot renders as “être, vie, pensée,”) terms which designate substantially divine realities dialectically distinct from each other, in which the divine substance, the Father, subsists. It is thus that Victorinus understands the unity of the God as Trinitarian. This language of “subsistences” is explained by a passage which J. N. D. Kelly has noted: viz., the absolute substance, the Father, subsists “tripliciter.”[676] This is the Sabellianism which Hanson believes Victorinus never to have escaped.[677] Rahner uses the same language in the exposition of his own modalist doctrine: Trinity, 38, 45-6, 58, 114, n.39, et passim.
Victorinus developed his Trinitarian doctrine independently of personal involvement in, or even acquaintance with, the Arian controversy and of the “Cappadocian settlement;” He wrote several years before the Cappadocians undertook the task of distinguishing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit from each other within the numerical unity of the divine Substance and, because he wrote with a then unmatched learning in a difficult Latin style, he had little interchange with theologians of his time whether Greek or Latin. Hansen notes his antipathy to Tertullian. For instance, Victorinus never uses the term “persona,” although, like Hilary, he is unable able to provide an adequate replacement: he tends to use “subsistentia’ instead.
As an extraordinarily learned convert with a profoundly Neoplatonist world-view, which at the end of his life of the Emperor Julian was attempting to restore as the official religion of the empire, Victorinus developed his theology of the Trinity on the basis of a latently subordinationist identification of the Father with the divine substance, which the Eusebian fautores of the homoiousion had also attemptted.[678]. This posture entailed for Victorinus, as it did for them, a substantialist interpretation of the Nicene “homoousios,” one which supposed it to assert the identity of each of the divine “subsistences:”―Father, Son, and Holy Spirit―with the one God. This failure to recognize that the Nicene homoousios taught a Personal rather than a substantial consubstantiality was at one with the commonplace subordinationism of the fourth century, at the heart of which is the Platonist emanationism. This is famously summarized in the apothegm, “Bonum diffusivum sui” which invokes a pantheist dualism, the “great chain of being” which the Porphyrian interpretation of Plotinus favored by Victorinus has reduced to an immanent rational necessity. viz., the divine substance cannot but emanate its reality into an indefinite series of continually diminishing entities. There is no question of a divine creation ex nihilo sui et subjecti; insofar as Victorinus understands creation, the Creator’s power to create is limited to what is antecedently possible; and is therefore locked into the cosmogical pattern of necessity which Neoplatonism develops.
Victorinus’s attempt to adapt a version of Neoplatonism to the task of Christian theology uses its dualism methodologically, and thus understands the “Trinity” not as the community of the distinct “subsistences” by which term he designates the Father, Son, and Spirit, but as their substantial identity, their homoousios as the Sabellians understood it. He developed an elaborate doctrine of the eternal imaging of the Father as God, the divine Substance, by the eternal Logos, who is the divine substance as eternally passing from potency to act, from passive priority to being to immanence within being as identified, as revealed, as self-aware. The Logos in turn is eternally imaged by the Holy Spirit and, on the level of creation, by the human spirit or mind. The result is a “double dyad” of imaging in God: the mutual imaging of Father- Son, and of Son-Spirit. Pierre Hadot has provided a summary of the interrelation of Victorinus’ understanding of the human imaging of God, and of the structure of the Trinity:
… For him, it is only insofar as imaging the image that is the Logos, that the soul will be the image of the Trinity. Otherwise said, it is in the measure that the Logos manifests the Trinitarian structure of the divine being that the soul, the image of the Logos, is itself the image of this Trinitarian structure. We recall here the strict link already pointed out between the substance and the image. Augustine has a tendency to confound the notions of image and of resemblance. The image, for him, is a copy of a model. For Victorinus, the image is made to be in some fashion part of the substance; otherwise put, for him, being is essentially double, it is itself and its definition; itself and its proper manifestation: the image is a sort of dedoubling (dédoublement) that is essential to being. From this it follows that, in the intelligible world, substance and image are mutually implicatory: the substance is already image; the image is still (encore) substance. Thus, Victorinus tells us, God has said: “According to our image” because Father and Son are one single image. Here, for the first time, we touch upon Victorinus’ Trinitarian doctrine. For him, the Father, to whom he reserves the name of God, is the substance, the Son is the image of this substance, his Word, his definition, his revelation. In virtue of the mutual implication of the substance and of the image on may say that the Father is already image, which is to say that the substance is already determined and defined in potency. Father and Son are one sole image which is in potency in the Father, in act in the Son. When God says, “Let us make man in our image” that means, for Victorinus, that the Father addresses the Son to say to him, Let us make man according to the unique image which we two are, the unique substance that I am, and that reduces finally to his saying: “Let us make man to the image of the Word whom you are and that I am”. The soul is therefore the proper image of the Word, that is, of the Son, and is the image of the Trinity only because the Word, thanks to the unity of the substance, has in himself the Trinity: as with each of the Three, he is the Three.[679]
Tr. by the present writer.
A few lines later, using the soul’s imaging of the Logos as a point d’appui, Hadot returns to the “dédoublement” (i.e., splitting, dividing) theme, now in its application to the Son’s imaging of the Father as “dedoubled” by the Son’s relation to the Spirit:
According to the first consideration, the soul is therefore being, life, and intelligence, as is the Trinity. For, like the Trinity, the soul is constituted by two dyads (dyads; i.e. dialectical correlations), on the one hand, the substance and his Word; on the other hand, at the heart of the unique Word of the substance, life and thought (la vie et la pensée). In fact we here discover again the dedoubling (dédoublement), essential to being, which we have already encountered.
The soul is an incorporeal substance, Victorinus tells us. Thus, insofar as substance, the soul necessarily has an image and a definition of its own, in short, a Word who reveals and manifests it. This corresponds in the Trinity to the distinction between the Father and the Son; that is to say, its (the soul’s) movement, its actuation and its revelation. In the soul, this definition of the substance, this Word of the soul, is its potentiality for living and thinking. Otherwise put, in the soul, as in the Trinity, the Word is double, in a unique movement, it is life and intelligence. Victorinus insists strongly on this double dyad, which is found in the Trinity and in the soul.
In the end, a theology founded on a cosmological dualism is incapable of supporting the Church’s Trinitarian faith, which relies entirely upon the definition of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father as the immediate implication of his divinity. The divinity of the Holy Spirit, inherent in the liturgy and defined finally at I Constantinople, establishes the Trinitarian substance as a community of consubstantial Persons, constituted by the Father, the Son and the Spirit. As with Hilary, Victorinus wants to affirm the divinity of the Spirit but, having reduced him to the insubstantial “definition” of the Son, can do so only by the quasi-Sabellian device of identifying the Spirit with the divine substance, the pure potentiality who is the Father―which for Victorinus is what “homoousios” means in any case. At bottom, Victorinus’ theology is at best binitarian: his notion of the substantial consubstanthiality of “the Three” tends to Sabellianism. It is entirely understandable that, without citing him or perhaps even having read him, Karl Rahner should have used Victorinus’ notion of the Father-Monas’ subsistence in three impersonal “Persons.”[680] The alternative is the Eusebian subordinationism.
It is not clear whether Augustine’s Trinitarian doctrine was influenced by Victorinus; Hadot finds their affinity rather in the influence of Neoplatonism upon both, although this is much less evident in Augustine than in Victorinus. There is some similarity in their finding in the soul or mind the image of the Trinity, but the Trinity Augustine had in view was that which is defined in principle at Nicaea, constituted by Personally consubstantial members, whose Personal distinction from each other was at once relational and constitutive.
St. Ambrose was born about 340, probably in Trier, of a Christian family long prominent in Rome: his father was the prefect of the province of Gaul, an area including the British Isles and most of northern Europe west of the Rhine. Ambrose received the classical rhetorical education of his time, preparing him for a career in law and administration, but in his case including an unusual familiarity with the Greek language and literature as well. He became a fine orator and advocate and was in his early thirties appointed governor of the province of Aemilia-Luguria, whose capital was Milan, and whose bishop was an Arian, Euxentius. However, Ambrose’s competence and even-handedness made him highly popular with the people of Milan, Arian as well as Catholic.
In 374, Euxentius, died. An Alexandrine, ignorant of Latin, he had held the See of Milan since the deposition in 355 of its orthodox bishop, Dionysius, who died in exile a few years later. Euxentius had enjoyed the support of Valentinian I, Augustus of the West who had made his brother Valens, the Augustus of the East, and so had been able to withstand the attempts of the Catholics, notably of Hilary of Poitiers, to unseat him. By the time of his death, his conduct of his episcopacy had so divided the people of Milan as to make a peaceful election of a successor nearly impossible—specifically, because the Catholics demanded a voice in the election of his successor. Hoping to calm the tumult by the authority of his presence, Ambrose entered the church in which the election was being held, and there addressed the assembled Arian and Catholic multitude, including major figures of the city. In the course of his address, he so pleased both Arians and Catholics that both parties saw in him the obvious choice to succeed Auxentius, even though he was only an unbaptized catechumen, and his sympathies were with the Catholics. Effectively, he was elected then and there by acclamation. Ambrose had not expected this, but his attempts to avoid it were futile: his election had the approval of Valentinian, and a few weeks later he was baptized, ordained and consecrated the bishop of Milan; he held the office for twenty-three years, to his death in 397.
After the early death of his father, Ambrose’s mother moved the family to Rome: there he received his formal education, and was well trained in the Catholic faith by his mother and older sister, but obviously insufficiently for the exercise of episcopal authority over one of the great cities of Italy and of the western Empire. Well aware of his inadequacy, immediately upon his consecreation he occupied himself with a study of theology. His familiarity with Greek opened to him the Alexandrine exegetical tradition stemming from Philo Judaeus’ allegorical exegesis of the Old Testament, adapted by the Alexandrine Catechetical school under Clement and Origen, further developed by Alexander, Athanasius, and Didymus: Ambrose was in corresponce with Basil of Caesarea until the latter’s death in 379.
His intelligence and energy are manifest: within five years he had so familiarized himself with the doctrinal tradition as to write his De Fide ad Gratianum, a learned defense of the divinity of Christ against the Arian heresy, followed by De Spiritu Sancto, a defense of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, similarly directed against the Arians. His most famous work is the De Officiis, a manual written to guide the conduct of the clergy. Twelve centuries later, another comparably zealous Archbishop of Milan, St. Charles Borromeo, would undertake a similar reform of his clergy. Ambrose wrote also the De mysteriis and its sequel, the De sacramentis. His exegetical works are influenced by the allegorism of the Alexandrine school, which informs much of his response to the literalist Arian exegesis.
We have examined his Eucharistic hermeneutic, whose criterion of literal truth is the Church’s liturgy, her worship in truth. However, Ambrose never attempted to systemize this insight. His religious interests were not primarily academic or systematic; his famous observation in De Fide: “It was not by the dialectic that it pleased God to save his people, for the kingdom of God consisteth in simplicity of faith, not in worldly contention” is pithily stated in another apothegm: “We believe fishermen, not dialecticians.” Ambrose was an ascetic, a scholar, a moralist, a liturgist, a controversialist, a great preacher. In sum and above all, he became a great bishop. It is for his unflinching exercise of that office under extraordinarily difficult circumstances that he is honored as one of the four great doctors of the Latin Church.
Contemporary Ambrosian scholarship, in conscious departure from the tradition represented by Harnack, generally regards Ambrose rather as an adroit and unscrupulous politician driven by an ambition for which his office was mere façade, than as an a bishop charged with a moral authority and consequent responsibility for the Church’s worship in truth, but which, if exercised at all, must be exercised in a world whose antagonism to the historical worship of the Church is an historical constant. Typical of that antagonism is the post-modernity which finds all public exercise of authority and responsibility suspect a priori of being merely a quest for and exercise of power that is oppressive per se until acquitted by an mentality which can admit no innocence short of aquiescence.[681]
Nearly a century after Ambrose’s death, Pope Gelasius I, in a letter to Emperor Anastasius I, wrote what would become the classical interpretation of the Scriptural admonition to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. Gelasius reminded the Emperor that
there are two, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of priests (auctoritas sacrata sacerdotium) and the royal power (potestas regalis). Of these that of the priests is the more weighty, since they have to render an account for even the kings of men in the divine judgment.”[682]
Ambrose had no need of this assertion of his authority. He first faced what has recently been named the Madisonian dilemma[683] when, a year after his consecration, Valentinian I died, leaving his infant son in the custody of Justina, his second wife, who immediately reverted to her Arian predilections and began a long campaign to restore the Arian ascendency in Milan. Ambrose met that challenge with a courage, foresight and diplomatic skill which finally triumphed. In this he had the aid of Valentinian’s oldest son, Gratian, who at the age of nine had been made the Augustus of the West, and who succeeded his father as the Emperor of the West. However, the Roman army, dissatisfied with Gratian, declared for Valentinian II, his four-year old half-brother, Justina’s son, as Emperor in his place. Gratian acceded, more or less willingly, and Valentinian II assumed that role, under the tutelage of his mother, three years after Ambrose had become the bishop of Milan. Gratian, meanwhile, made Theodosius ruler of the East and, as himself the Augustus of the West, transferred his own capital from Trier to Milan, where Ambrose met him and undertook his further Christian ecucation. On becoming Emperor, Gratian had already refused the traditional imperial title of “pontifex maximus;” later, under Ambrose’s urging, he ordered the removal of the statue of Victory from the building in which the Roman Senate met, and cut off all official support of pagan institutions.
Although killed by an assassin at the age of thirty-one, Gratian was a major figure in the Christian victory over paganism in the West. He also lent badly needed support to Ambrose in resisting continuing pressure to approve Arian worship in Milan.
Ambrose’s major contribution to Trinitarian doctrine is his efficient exercise of the pastoral office: he preached the faith when it was decidedly out of season in Milan, and did so with such vigor and efficacy as to eliminate the influence of Arianism in northern Italy, where it had been firmly established under Auxentius. However, Ambrose’s contribution to Trinitarian doctrine is not merely a pastoral following of Hilary’s teaching in the De trinitate:
A little later (i.e., than Hilary) “we find Ambrose conceiving4 of three Persons Who are one (unum sunt) through Their having one substance, one divinity, one will, one operation; the idea of a universal with its particulars does not suffice to explain Their unity.”
4 Cf. de fid.1, 2, 17-19; 4, 34;5, 42; de incarn. dom. sacr. 8, 81-8.
J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 269.
The later Western Trinitarian development was led by Augustine, whose genius fulfilled Tertullian’s and gave Latin Trinitarian thought a quasi-permanent format: the identification of the Persons of the Trinity as subsistent relations.
Augustine had first to reply to the dilemma posed by the Arians, who argued that the Son, as really distinct from the Father, must be so either as substance (with an implicit polytheism) or accident, in which case the Son is not a divine Person distinct from the Father (with an implicit Monarchianism, whether modal, dynamic or both). The Arian dilemma was predicated upon the Aristotelian division of all reality between the substantial and the accidental. Augustine denied the adequacy of the division, observing that a third category of reality, relation, had been ignored, and replied that the Son is distinct from the Father as a relation is distinct from an inverse relation: viz., as passive generation (being generated) is distinct from active generation (generating).
The signal contribution of Augustine to Trinitarian doctrine is his identification of the distinction between the divine Persons as their interrelation, and consequently of the intra-substantial-relationality of the Persons constituting theTrinity. Centuries later a debate would develop over whether the relation is constitutive of the Person, or the Person of the relation/ Given their evident indissociability, this is a classic instance of lis de verbis.
With this insight of genius, it was at last possible to eliminate the implicitly quaternarian imagining of a divine Monas-Trinity transcending the Trinitarian Persons as a species transcends its members, for the inter-relationality of the consubstantial Father, Son, and Holy Spirit now could not be other than their subsistence in the substantial Trinity. By that subsistence, each Person possesses, in the constitutive ordo (τάξις) of their unique interrelation, the fullness of the substantial Trinity which no Person constitutes. Summarily, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has stated:
255: The divine persons are relative to one another. Because it does not divide the divine unity, the real distinction of the persons from one another resides solely in the relationships which relate them to one another: “In the relational names of the persons the Father is related to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both. While they are called three persons in view of their relations, we believe in one nature or substance.”89 Indeed “everything (in them) is one where there is no opposition of relationship.”90 Because of that unity the Father is wholly in the Son and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is wholly in the Father and wholly in the Son.91
89Council of ToledoXI (675); DS 828.
90Council of Florence (1442):DS 1330.
91Council of Florence (1442): DS 1331.
Augustine’s second great Trinitarian contribution is his development of the psychological analogy between the human mind and the Trinity. This was first intimated in the second century by Athenagoras; it was taken up nearly two centuries later by Marius Victorinus, whose influence upon Augustine is accepted while remaining obscure. Augustine’s development of the analogy of the Trinitarian processions with human mind’s reality as at once remembrance, understanding, and loving (memoria, intellectus, voluntas)–elements of personal consciousness which, in their irreducibility, nonetheless constitute the unity of the human mind, of which each is a full expression within an ordered unity. It is the whole mind that remembers, knows, and loves, but only in their unity do memory, intellect and will constitute the mind. They are in no sense faculties: they are integrating elements of the free unity of the mind, in sum, of personal subjectivity, of personal consciousness.
This insight embarks Augustinian theology upon a phenomenological inquiry into our personal existence in Christo, in ecclesia, for Augustine maintains that the imaging of God is fulfilled only in worship. The foundation of this phenomenology has been more fully addressed in Covenantal Theology (1996) Volume II, Chapter Six. Here it is enough to emphasize that Augustine’s theological method is profoundly phenomenological: a phenomenology of Eucharistic worship in the Church, wherein the mind is illumined by the immanence within it of the intus magister, and by that illumination is freed from the immanent necessities of fallen reason, the culmination of whose quest is a flight from a free history whose radical irrationality is finally unbearable─hence the tempatation in Augustine as in his disciples, to fall into the Platonic disdain of physical reality.
Augustine knew this despair to be avoided only by existence in ecclesia, by personal participation in the liturgical mediation of the hope given us in Christ. His theology is focused upon the personal experience of this existence in ecclesia, in Christo: it is quintessentially Pauline, a recognition of the self as sundered and imprisoned by sin, yet restored and freed by the grace of Christ. It is thus that our existence is simul peccator et justus: a tension between two loves, which have built two cities. To exist is to choose between them, continually, a tension relieved only by returning ever and again in worship to Christ, who is our peace.
Because the Thomist notion of the psychological analogy is a rationalization of the Augustinian phenomenology, it is important to distinguish these constitutive dimensions of the mind from the faculties of the more familiar Aristotelian-Thomist psychology. The faculties essential to the latter psychology are the product of a metaphysical analysis intent upon proving the existence of God. Augustine had no inerest in such analysis: the distinctions between willing, knowing and remembering within the unity of the consciousness which they constitute is phenomenological, i.e., given in personal experience, not discovered or verified by analytical reason. In Augustine’s phenomenology, memory, intellect and will are each identical with human consciousness, and yet within it they are irreducible to each other. Their unity is one of order, of relation, thus their interrelation, inseparability and irreducibility. Their Trinitarian analogue is evident.
It is further to be emphasized that Augustine’s phenomenology, and thus his psychological analogy, rests upon experience, but upon experience precisely as illumined, the experience of an illumined mind whose conscious unity is free. This unity is of course that of the self, whom the Greek and other pagan wisdom knew to be unhappy per se. However the Augustinian phenomenology understands that unhappiness, that “restlessness,” to be not the necessary implication of conscious finitude, of finitude as self-aware, but rather to be due to sin and the fall. It is an Angst not removed but transcended by participation in the historical worship of the Church: i.e., by existence in ecclesia.
Only this sacramental existence, existence as historical, as personally responsive to and illumined by the trahi a Deo, is the subject of Augustine’s phenomenology, his version of the “theology of experience.” For Augustine and the tradition for which he speaks, there is no ungraced experience, no ungraced existence. Created in Christ, we are all “drawn by God” (trahi a Deo) to a personal fulfillment beyond our capacity to conceive, but which is a gift freely given, freely to be personally received and personally appropriated. Nature and grace are distinguished phenomenologically, experientially, not analytically: they correspond to the Pauline sarx and pneuma.
The present work has earlier developed the nuptial order of historical freedom, and thus of our imaging of God, our covenantal fidelity. While Augustine did not develop this theme, it is inherent in his illumination doctrine, which is to say, in his phenomenology. The only experience which concerns him is experience informed by the worship of the Church, thus experience in ecclesia. Only in this sacramental realm is freedom actual and concretely experienced as the awareness at once of personal fallenness and personal sin: of existence as simul justus et peccator, without integrity, yet not without the gift, as freely received, of the free personal unity inseparable from that universal existential datum of a nameless anxiety: “our hearts are restless, until they rest in Thee.”
In his old age, under the stress of bitter controversy with the Pelagian bishop Julian of Eclanum, Augustine fell into the error of rationalizing this moral freedom:[684] thereby the existential-historical justus et peccator became an abstract dichotomization of the historical reality. Thereby man became justus aut peccator, either just or sinful in the divine economy, thus initiating a false doctrine of predestination. In this Augustine would be echoed by Gottschalk, Calvin, Baius and Jansenius, but not by the Catholic moral tradition. A century after his death, Augustine’s protracted struggle with Pelagianism issued in theology of grace summarized in the Second Council of Orange, a provincial Council given ecumenical authority two years later, on the centenary of Augustine’s death, by the approbation of Pope Boniface II.[685]
Augustine’s psychological analogy has the great defect of having been presented as though non-historical, as without physical expression or application. Augustine may be read to have understood our Tridentine imaging of God as achieved only in an abstract contemplative flight from historical distraction and confusion, for he dissociated it from all bodily activity. This emphasis upon the immateriality of our imaging of God invites a quasi-angelist anthropology, in which the supposedly immaterial “soul” is the only religiously significant aspect of our humanity. St. Thomas accepted this view of our imaging of God: he considered the imaging more perfect in angels than in men by reason of their essential immateriality. This again reflects his monadic anthropology, with its correlative monadic view of our imaging of the divine Substance, which imposes a subordinationism upon his Trinitarian doctrine.[686]
On the other hand, Augustine also understood the psychological analogy by which we image the Trinity to be fulfilled in worship, which for him could only be the worship of the Church, the defense of whose sacramentality against the Donatists was one of his major and most pressing concerns, and perhaps his greatest achievement. It is certainly true that it is only by personal participation in the Church’s sacramental worship that the Image to which we are is made is fulfilled in us by the covenantal fidelity inseparable from that historical worship.
However, in the context of his development of the psychological analogy in the De trinitate, Augustine did not clearly assert the sacramental character of this worship and this imaging, and therefore did not clearly distinguish it from the Greek pagan ideal of an erotic union of the “soul” with the nonhistorical divinity by way of a contemplative distancing of one’s mind from involvement in the historical world. The consequent dilemma may be best regarded as a product of Augustine’s “following his pen” in his writing of the De trinitate. Its composition occupied his leisure for more than twenty years, evidencing the single-mindedness of a bishop extraordinarily preoccupied with a question of the highest significance.
As a bishop he well knew the sacramental reality of our imaging of God. He knew that: in our ecclesial worship, we image God only as in a glass, darkly: faith is not vision. We experience our Lord as our intus magister, intimius intimo meo: more intimately present to us than we are to ourselves, but it is an experience illumined in the darkness of our fallenness, our sinful solidarity with the fallen Adam, by the faith that is ours only by the grace of Christ, mediated to us through our personal participation ine Church’s Eucharistic worship, whose indispensable authenticity he established in another long controversy with a resurgent Donatism, contemporaneous with the writing of the De trinitate, and taken for granted by its author.
The second great defect in the psychological analogy is its supposition that, at the human level, substance and person are concretely identical. This unexamined postulate carries the latent implication that the revelation of three Persons in the substantial unity of God has no anthropological relevance, and thus no bearing upon the human imaging of God, which Augustine, with the entire Greek tradition, understands to be personal in the monadic rather than the relational sense. Consequently an ambiguity was inserted into our imaging of the Trinity: its Thomist development tends toward the modalism which Rahner’s monadic theological metaphysics cannot avoid, rather than toward a Trinitarian imaging of the substantial Trinity of Persons revealed in Christ.
A clearer insight―specifically, that provided by the Chalcedonian Symbol─will recognize that human substantiality also is tri-personal, or better, tri-relational, in that it is constituted by the free ordered unity of three subsistent relations: the man, the woman, and their irrevocable marital bond─irrevocable because uttered by each within the untrammeled freedom of the Church’s Eucharistic worship, in which alone is our fallen fragmentation capable of coherent self-utterance, capable then of the nuptial fidelity which images the union of the Bridegroom and the bridal Church in One Flesh which Jesus the Lord instituted on the Cross..
Pope John Paul II has insisted on the marital quality of our imaging of God, and upon the nuptiality of the image: it is as instituting the One Flesh of the New Covenant that Christ images the Father, whom He does not image simply as the eternal Son, for the Image is historical, the “one and the same Son,” sent by the Father to give the Spirit, which Mission is fulfilled in the offering of the One Sacrifice on the Altar and on the Cross. This insight ties very neatly into the Pope’s view of morality as set out in his greatest encyclical, Veritatis Splendor (1993): all morality is graced: covenantal, nuptially ordered, Eucharistically grounded and sacramentally objective in our fallen history.
The rationalization of our freedom in Christ, a temptation to which even the genius of an Augustine could succumb, plagued the Augustinian theological tradition thereafter; it led Carolingian and early medieval Augustinians to see in the shallowness of “dialectic” a quasi-metaphysical criterion of truth. It prompted Duns Scotus, one of the greatest of Augustine’s followers, to reject as “unecessary” the foundation of Augustine’s theology, his illumination doctrine, while at the same time insisting upon an intellectual intuition of the “haecceitas” the uniqueness, of every concrete singular as beautiful―which could only be the product of precisely that graced illumination, that gift of intellectual freedom by which we are drawn to beauty simply as the freedom of truth. Augustine knew this beauty to be Christ our Lord, “the ancient beauty that is forever new.”
It is of the first importance to theological discipline as such that this perennial tendency to rationalize be recognized for what it is, a rejection of the free historicity of truth and of being revealed in Christ. Christian theology cannot survive the reationalization, the reduction to immanent necessity, of him who is Truth Incarnate. He, not logic, is the Lord. This ancient confession, that Jesus is Lord, is not a retreat to obscurantism:. Rather it is a refusal to live as though locked in the immanence of the fallen cosmological imagination and the sarkic rationality that is is its spontaneous spawn.
We have seen that the return to Nicene orthodoxy after the post-Nicene proliferation of Arian dissent, began under the leadership of Athanasius. His De synodis, published in 361 without reference to Hilary’s work of the same title, published two years earlier, challenged the homoiousian party to distinguish their theology from the radicalized ‘either-or’ doctrine of Aetius and Eunomius, who refused all mitigation of the Arian reduction of Jesus to the status of a creature.
Hilary’s travels in Asia Minor had persuded him of a near-agreement between the homoousion party led by Athanasius, and the Roman anti-Arian orthodoxy he held to be represented by himself and, in his view, by the “Semi-Arian” homoiousian party led by Basil of Ancyra. He proposed this doctrinal affinity in his De synodis. However, not all of the homoiousian party were thus positively disposed to Nicene orthodoxy, as became evident when the Pneumatomachian movement arose out of its ranks, and was found to be inherent in the homoiousian doctrine as such; it could not provide for the Personal divinity, the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and still less for the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit.
Upholding the ”treis hypostaseis” which Origen had held to constiute the “ousia” of the Trinity, the Cappadocian brothers, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, failed to recognize that the homoiosian doctrine of a “likeness in substance” between the distinct hypostases of the Father and the Son (not the Holy Spirit) was entirely inconsistent with the identity of substance between the Father and the Son which they also affirmed under the impresssion that no significant difference obtained between their adherence to the Eusebian subordinationism and loyalty to the Nicene Creed. When the Nicene Creed is thus misunderstood, i.e., by the assimilation of the homoousos of the Son to the homoios kat’ousian, they found the Nicene homoousios to be no longer objectionable, but the fragmentation of the "Semi-Arian" party between homoiousions, homoeans, and anomians only demonstrated that the “homoios kat’ ousian” could not suffice. The doctrinal precision of the Nicene homoousios was indispensable to Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy. The homoiousian mitigation of the “homoean”compromise with Arianism was finally impossible. Neither could Hilary’s attempt at a diplomatic solution―in which a prescient Athanasius took no part― have succeeded, for it opposed a negotiated political orthodoxy to the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea.
In the end, the “Cappadocian Settlement,” insofar as it concluded to recognizing the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea, was achieved only by Gregory of Nazianzen, whose five Theological Orations taught the faith of Nicaea to the Byzantine Church and, with Athanasius and Lucifer of Cagliari, went beyond it to affirm the homoousion of the Holy Spirit. Basil of Caesarea died before pro-Nicene Emperor Theodosius had brushed aside the local Arian opposition and summoned First Council of Constantinople, but Basil’s influence remained powerful. As he could not bring himself, in his De Spiritu Sancto, to affirm the homoousion of the Holy Spirit, so neither would the Council. It taught the Holy Spirit’s divinity and reaffirmed the Nicene Creed, but the Oriental bishops, led by Gregory of Nyssa and Diodore of Tarsus, found reasons to refuse the attribution to the Holy Spirit of the still suspect “homoousios.”
Upon his triumphant return to his diocese in 362, Athanasius had immediately summoned the provincial Council of Alexandria. Constantius, the Emperor of the East and the West, had died scarcely a year after the Council of Constantinople in which he had imposed his homoean version of Arianism upon the empire. He had earlier appointed his cousin Julian, still nominally a Christian, to succeed him. However, upon his succession to the throne, Julian, soon to be dubbed “the apostate, immediately permitted the surviving pro-Nicene bishops whom Constantius had exiled to return to their dioceses, still occupied by Arian usurpers.
Intent upon the restoration of the empire to his version of paganism, Julian hoped by granting the anti-Arian bishops the freedom to return to their dioceses, and to undertake the deposition of their Arian usurpers, to initiate an internecine conflict which would destroy both the orthodox and Arian parties. Thus freed of Christian opposition, the empire would return to its pagan antecedents via the imperial inculcation of Neoplatonism, the culminating expression of cosmological wisdom. That project died when Julian failed to return from the first battle of Adrianople in the following year (363) A year earlier (April, 362) he had martyred Basil of Ancyra. The return of the orthodox bishops to their respective sees, again led by Athanasius, marks the beginning of the orthodox victory over Arianism.
The Council of Alexandria produced the Tome to the Antiochenes, an ecumenical document authored in the main by Athanasius. Directed to the homoiousian majority in Antioch, it accepted the orthodoxy of “three hypostases” language of the Antiochene homoiousan party whose return to the Nicene homoousion from the doctrinal confusion of the Councils of Seleucia and Rimini three years earlier he had surveyed in his De synodis. Athanasius insisted on the “mia hypostasis” of the Trinity as the effective summary of the Nicene doctrine, and a most effective direct challenge to the Eusebians’ subordinationist perversion of Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine of mia ousia, treis hypostaseis. Athanasius had been informed of the resolute anti-Arianism of the Miletian schismatics in the Delta by the few Alexandrine bishops who had been able to attend the Council of Seleucia in 359. He was thereby led to envision an opportunity to re-affirm the doctrine of the Council of Nicaea, including the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit which his Letters to Serapion (359) had defended as implicit in the Nicene Creed’s affirmation of the Holy Spirit’s divinity.
Given the anti-Arianism of the homoiousian party in Antioch, Athanasius hoped that the Eusebian perversion of Origen’s “three hypostases” doctrine would became apparent. The evident Trinitarian orthodoxy of the mia ousia, tres hypostaseis would easily displace its habitual misunderstanding by the homousian party in Antioch.
Athanasius, who for thirty-seven years had offended the Eusebian establishment by his insistent “Mia ousia” affront to their complacent subordinationism, knew that Origen’s “treis hypostaseis” affirmed the faith of the Church. With no dissent from his and the other bisops whom he had invited to the Council of Alexandria, together with the Eustathian priests who represemted Paulinus, Athanasius wrote the “treis hypastaseis” into the Tome to the Antiochenes as integral with the Nicene Creed. He hoped to persuade the Tome's intended audience, the anti-Arian homoiousion bishops assembled at “the old place” (a church built in 314 which the homoiousian Bishop of Antioch Meletius, had made his seat), that their anti-Arian affirmation of the divinity of the Son at Seleucia was inadequate apart from their affirmation of the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit. This reasoning assumed, contra factum, their acceptance of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father as implicit in their defense of the Son’s divinity. The Tome also accepted the “una substantia” language of the Roman orthodoxy, knowing that the Latin bishops meant by “una substantia” what the Council of Nicaea―and Athanasius―meant by “mia ousia, mia hypostasis.”
The further development of an orthodox Trinitarian vocabulary would reserve “hypostasis” to designate what is three in the one God, reserving “ousia” to designate the substantial unity of the Trinity. However, this precision, arrived at a hundred and thirty years early by Origen, required the prior acceptance, upon which the Tome insisted, of the Nicene definition of the “homoousion” of the Son with the Father. This Nicene doctrine barred the commonplace cosmological identification of the unity of “person” with the unity of intellectual “substance” and, with this, barred the subordinationism infecting the Trinitarian theology of the disciples of Eusebius of Caesarea, including the homoiousian followers of Basil of Ancyra, who at the time of the writing of the Tome, were gathered at Antioch. The Tome’s attempt to restore Nicene orthodoxy in the East failed, for reasons further to be developed in the discussion of Athanasius’ role in this effort.
Athanasius Tome to the Antiochenes is thus at a long remove from the “Neo-Nicenism” which the liberal Protestant church historians, exemplified by A. Harnack and F. Loofs, claimed to be have been taught by the Council of Alexandria, for the Tome to the Antiochenes placed the same stress as had the Council of Nicaea upon the possession of the same indivisible divinity by the Son and the Holy Spirit as by the Father.
Harnack and Loofs used the term “Neo-Nicenism” to label what they held to be the Alexandrine revision of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father. In brief, they maintained that the Council of Alexandria taught a compromise between the homoousion taught by Athanasiuus and the homoiousion taught by the Cappadocians. The compromise would have been a generic, i.e., subordinationist or categorical interpretation of Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father. i.e., interpreting the homoousian of the Son with the Father as a substantial unity whose plurality would be by way of material division, by membership in a substance whose unity would be no more than nominal: that of a category.
Such a concession to the anti-Sabellian concern of the Cappodocians would of course have abandoned the Nicene homoousion. It would be obviously incapable of a coherent statement apart from the degradation into a henotheism of the substantial unity of the Trinity, which both the homoiousian and the homoousian parties held to be immaterial and therefore indivisible. Nonetheless, Harnack and Loofs alleged this confusion to have been taught both by the Council of Alexandria in 362 and again, nearly twenty years later, by the First Council of Constantinople.
The alleged Neo-Nicene retreat from the monotheism of the Nicene homoousion would inevitably be a retreat from the foundational orthodoxy of the Church’s apostolic worship of Jesus Christ the Lord, who, quite obviously, given the denial of the numerical unity of homoousios in favor of a generically distributed unity, applicable only to a divisible substance, would become one of those less than absolute divinities consequent upon a quasi-henotic, i.e., pantheistic, division of the one God. It would follow that Athanasius, having fought for the faith of the Church for the nearly forty years since the Council of Nicaea, had at the Council of Alexandra summarilly abandoned the apostolic tradition.
At bottom, such a notion of the Trinity (which in the late sixties Karl Rahner would read into any assertion of three Personal subjectivies in the Trinity) could arise only from a refusal of the distinction between the substantial unity of the Trinity, and the irreducible Personal unity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. The “Neo-Nicene” indictment rests upon a metaphysical monism such as that upon which Rahner has insisted. Its attribution to the Cappadocians, stalwart adversaries of the modalism associated with Sabellius, Paul of Samosata and, with little justification, attributed to Marcellus, is only ridiculous, for the generic interpretation of the Trinity would in turn imply the reduction of the divine substance or ousia (the one God) into a divisible, i.e., fungible, material species, whose members might be thought to participate in but who could not, as material, possess the fullness of divinity. The attribution of this mentality to those who pray to the Father in the Son through the Holy Spirit is obvious nonsense. Such an inference from the common Christian faith in the perichōresis or circumincessio of the three divine Persons who are the Trinity amounts to a denial of the Trinity by reason of a methodological reliance upon a monist metaphysics entirely incompatible with the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord. At bottom, such a monism submits the Trinitarian freedom of God to the immanent necessities of the futile quest of fallen rationality for a necessary absolute.
After having given rise to a brief academic flurry, most historians have dismissed the charge that “Neo-Nicenism” was taught by the Provincial Council of Alexandria and by the Ecumenical Council of I Constantinople. Whatever the difficulties inherent in the speculative application of Stoic or Neoplatonic conceptuality to the Trinity by Athanasius or the Cappadocians, these did not arise out of a failure of either the homoousion or the homoiousion party to recognize the immateriality and indivisibility of the divine Substance, or the concrete distinctions between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. These are enshrined in the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of Jesus with the Father, in the Constantinopolitan doctrine of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and in the Ephesian doctrine of Mary’s motherhood of the Son who is God, doctrines that reach their final development and integration in the Chalcedonian Symbol.
The attempt to discover a harmony between the views of the homoousion party of Athanasius and the homoiousian party failed. It was led by the homoiousian Cappadocians, i.e., Basil of Caesarea until his death in 379, and thereafter by his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory of Nazianzen had rejected Basil’s homoiousian doctrine some years before the latter’s death. Accompanied by his cousin, Amphilocius of Iconium, he attended the First Council of Constantinople, intent upon upholding the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit, but failed to persuade its members of the homoousion of the Holy Spirit.
Until about 360, the Arian heresy had explicitly denied only the divinity of the Son; but then a group of “Semi-Arians” called by their opponents the Pneumatomachians (i.e., Spirit-fighters―they were also known as Tropici and, with less warrant, as Macedonians―began to deny explicitly the divinity of the Holy Spirit on the same grounds upon which the Arians based their denial of the divinity of the Son: viz., that in the final analysis the Holy Spirit is a creature insofar as he is distinct from the Father.
In the East, the scholarly or theological recognition of the divinity of the Holy Spirit had always lagged behind the liturgical-doctrinal recognition of the Holy Spirit’s divinity. This had long since been affirmed explicitly in the baptismal liturgy (Mt. 28:19). Origen’s “mia ousia, treis hypostaseis” theology of the Trinity had made the Holy Spirit a hypostasis like the Father and the Son. Arius, under the subordinationist influence of the Eusebians, had reduced the Holy Spirit’s standing to that of a creature but a creature transcended by a 'created Logos.' Eusebius of Caesarea, one of the Origenists whom J. N. D. Kelly has designated “cosmological” because of their propensity to read a dualism into Origen’s theology and to trim the liturgical and doctrinal tradition to accord with what would amount to an uncomverted pagan world-view─hardly that of Origen─had made the Holy Spirit a hypostasis of the third rank, a “thing which has come into existence through the Son.” Later Arians would treated the Holy Spirit as a creature who is the source of sanctification.
However, Cyril of Jerusalem, in his Catechetical Lectures of 348, defended the divinity of the Holy Spirit against the “Spirit-fighters,” teaching that the Spirit belongs to the Holy Triad which, as immaterial, is indivisible: the Holy Spirit is therefore fully divine. At that time, there was as yet no theological discussion of the homoousion of the Holy Spirit, who therefore was not yet acknowledged to be consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father and the Son, even though equal to the Father and the Son, always with them and, of course, implicitly consubstantial with them, for he is worshiped with the same worship as are the Father and the Son, as is clear in the baptismal formula of Mt. 28:19 and in the closing phrase of the Nicene Creed.
Eleven years after Cyril of Jerusalem had defended the divinity of the Spirit, Athanasius (in his De synodis of 359 and again at the Council of Alexandria in 362), replied to the “Tropici” who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, by simply affirming of the Holy Spirit what he had affirmed of the Son, that the same single, full, and indivisible divinity possessed by the Father and the Son is possessed by the Holy Spirit, who is therefore homoousios with the Father and the Son, and with them has the one same energeia or activity; whatever the Father does, he does through the Word; whatever the Word does, he effects through the Holy Spirit. His friend Lucius of Cagliari had recognized the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit well before Athanasius.
‘A theological ‘reception’ of doctrine is an evident misnomer insofar as the term is applied to the Catholic fides quaerens intellectum, for the faith from which the Catholic theological inquiry arises is the personal appropriation of the doctrine which it proceeds systematically to explore in an ongoing quest for a yet more adequate expression of the quaerens intellecttum, the intellectual dimension of the theologians integral personal participation in the ecclesial worship of the Mysterium fidei. Catholic theology has no other source than the apostolic tradition mediated by the Church’s Eucharistic liturgy.
Unfortunately, the turmoil occasioned by media coverage of the documents of Vatican II has left few Catholic theologians willing to regard their work in those Anselmian terms. The early medieval presupposition of theologian’s Catholic fidelity as the precondition and font of his theological quaerens intellectum then began to be perceived as an ecumenical embarrassment, as a puerile subservience to a ”patriarchal” Magisterium, as an arbitrary affront to current political correctness, as incompatible with the view of academic freedom, borrowed long since from a definition published by the American Association of University Professors in 1940, adopted whole-heartedly by the bulk of nominally Catholic theologians, thereafter went unchallenged, even undiscussed.
Innocuous on its face, over the years the application of the AAUP version of academic freedom Catholic theology faculties has endorsed and exploited J. S. Mill’s identification of freedom with irresponsibility, which liberated self-professed Catholic theologians from any need to recognize their fiduciary responsibility to the ecclesial community. From the stance of the A.A.U.P, fiduciary responsibility was entirely inconsistent with their enfranchisement from personal irresponsibility.
With that propriety in place, the academic’s professional responsibility for the teaching of truth is uniformly trumped by a fashionable relativism, with the easily predictable consequence that there is little point in considering oneself a professor,yet less a theologian, for both have become quests for power, not for truth, their dignity traded for a safe servility to a triumphantly secular Weltgeist. Further, the academic community’s institutional ban upon any intra-institutional discussion of the significance of academic freedom thus deliberately misconceived relieves its adherents of any concern for its intrinsic coherence, for it has none. It has long been noted that the ‘concerned’ academic is immune to unfashionable temptations. At this level, nothing remains to be discussed, so we turn to another topic.
There remains to be probed the basis for the fifteen centuries of theological failure to “receive” the Chalcedonian refusal of the nonhistorical reading of Jn. 1:14 underlying the Antiochene diophysism and the Alexandrine monophysism as well as the contemporary Thomist Christology. The Conciliar proclamation of the historicity of the object of the Church’s faith in Jesus the Christ continues to baffle theologians after this sesqui-millennium of unavailing controversy. The Christologies rejected at Chalcedon in mid-fifth century were then irreconcilable with each other as well as with the faith of the Church and remain so today. In fact, the criticism directed at the Chalcedonian Symbol by recent Catholic theologians such as Louis Bouyer, Alois Grillmeier, and Bernard Lonergan arises out of their failure to see the obvious, viz., that the Chalcedonian Symbol is a refusal of their monist metaphysics which has posed and continues to pose the false problem, the historicization of the “Trinity-immanent Logos”─taken for granted by the regnant pre-Chalcedonian Christologies, and which continues to feed their contemporary surrogates, locked in the same tension between the “high” Christology reminiscent of the Eutychian monophysism, and the “Christology from below,” comparably resonant of the Nestorian diophysism.
The ground of this bafflement is clearly not the contemporary indulgence in a generalized Romanticism, a fashionable distrust of structure, a puerile need to “test authority.” Those superficialities cannot explain the adamantine disregard of and the scorn for the highly traditional orthodoxy of the Chalcedonian Symbol, whose only novelty was to proclaim once more the controverted truth of the Personal unity of Christ, the mystery “ancient yet forever new.”
The Formula of Union set out the doctrine of the Council of Ephesus, focusing on the Council’s recognition of the Virgin Mary as the Theotokos, the Mother of God. This indirect assertion of the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus the Lord was completed by the Symbol of Chalcedon’s reference to Irenaeus’ nuclear identification of Jesus as “one and the same Son” of the Father and of the Virgin Mar. This late second century summation of the Mysterium fidei became the leitmotif of the Symbol, which invoked it eight times. Theretofore it had still been possible for theologians to suppose that the single great task of theology was that which Tertullian’s Apologeticus had refused at the close of the second century: viz., the reconciliation of the absolute, Trinity-immanent, pre-human divine Logos, the Eternal Son qua eternal, with the “becoming human”─a surrogate for the “And the Word was made flesh” (Logos sarx egeneto) of Jn. 1:14─a clause that in the early fifth century was still being referred to this dehistoricized Logos, rather than to the historical Word, Jesus the Christ, the one and the same Son.
Two options had presented themselves. Either (1) the “immanent” i.e., nonhistorical divine Logos did not “become” anything, because as absolute and eternal the nonhistorical Logos, is immune to change, with (1) a consequent diophysism which bars the Personal identification of the Logos with Jesus the Christ, or (2) the Logos in fact “became flesh” with a consequent monophysite merger of the divinity of the eternal Logos and the historical humanity of Jesus, to the nullification of both.
In sum, it appeared necessary to choose either a monophysite Christology “from above,” or a diophysite Christology “from below.” Neither could support the faith of the Church. Nor could it have been otherwise, for the problem posed, that of providing for the prior possibility of the historicity and humanity of the Son, was abstract rather than historical As nonhistorical, it could not concern the historical mystery, Jesus the Christ, and so was not open to a theological inquiry. Further, the monist identification of human nature and human person was taken for granted by both parties to the dispute, and required of both parties a flight from history, a dehistoricization of the faith which lives on the historicity of the One Sacrifice.
Under pressure from the Emperor Marcian, culminating in a threat to move their Council to the Latin West, the Fathers at Chalcedon achieved a doctrinal development of the Nicene decree of the homoousion of the Son with the Father through its analogous application to the full humanity of Jesus which transcended the false Christological dispute simply by historicizing its subject matter, which fact has eluded the critics of Chalcedon for the intervening millennium and a half.
The Chalcedonian Symbol puzzles its critics because it is a radical rejection of the dilemma presented the Council for resolution by the Antiochene and Alexandrine disputants, whose cosmological rationality is also that of the Symbol’s contemporary critics.. The traditional concern for the supposedly abstract divine Logos dominating Oriental theological speculation apart from Alexandria since fourth century was replaced at Chalcedon by a recitation of the faith of the Church in Jesus Christ the Lord, the One and the Same Son, consubstantial with his Father as to his divinity and with us as to his humanity. The attribution of this duplex consubstantiality to the One Son required his Personal subsistence in two irreducible and, in that sense, entirely distinct substances: the substantial Trinity, and the equally substantial human community. The latter in consequence could no longer be conceived theologically in the monist terms of the Greek tradition. In brief, the traditional cosmological identification of concrete human person with concrete human substance, with the consequent refusal of the intelligibility of multiple subsistences in that mono-psersonal human substance, could no longer be maintained. Substance as free is communal, whether the Trinity or its nuptially-ordered human image.
The single human substance, by subsistence in which Jesus is “consubstantialem nobis,” is, like the Trinity, inevitably a community of persons, in which Jesus the Christ, the One and the Same Son, subsists as its Head, consubstantial with those human persons whose head he is, as the Father is consubstantial with those divine Persons whose Head the Father is, i.e., the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian criterion of consubstantiality, the co-subsistence of the Trinitarian Persons in one and the same divine Substance, had been set at Nicaea and reaffirmed at I Constantinople: the use of the same word at Chalcedon to define the Christ’s Personal subsistence in the divine and the human communities points to the profound analogy between them, the analogy that is the human imaging of God, which can only be communal, by a single communal substance in which the One and the Same Son, Jesus the Christ, subsists as he cannot but subsist, i.e., as its Head and so as its source. It is precisely as its Head, that Jesus the Christ is the source of the free unity of the good creation, of its free substantiality and therefore, inexorably, is its Creator and its Redeemer ex nihilo from its fallen fragmentation, its sarx, by his sacrificial institution of the mia sarx of the New Covenant, whose freely irrevocable nuptial unity of the Bridegroom and his bridal Church, the second Adam and the second Eve, is the primary Image of the Trinitarian Unity of God.
Throughout his long papacy, the late Pope John Paul II emphasized the nuptial unity of this imaging, whose history-transcending foundation is the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Holy Spirit, which Gift terminates in the sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant.
The obdurate resistance of academic theologians to the Chalcedonian stress on the free unity of the Trinity, whose free image is the One Flesh of Christ and the Church, the criterion of all free human unity, is soon explained: the Symbol of Chalcedon bars the autonomous rationality, the spontaneous, reductively pagan mindset, upon which theological academy has unquestioningly and therefore uncritically relied since the latter third century, when Paul of Samosata first rationalized and consequently dichotoized the Jesus the Christ, and left academic theologians with the impossible problem of providing for the restoration of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, which paralyzed them thereafter, The Enlightenment confidence in this sarkic rationalism has elsewhere failed, but it has reigned without effective challenge in Catholic theology.
Consequently, in this second decade of the twenty-first century, Catholic theology is thus afflicted with modernity as to have ceased in fact to be Catholic. Apart from a few marginalized, avowedly conservative institutions in which, unfortunately, Catholic orthodoxy tends to be identified with a voluntarism, a sacrificium intellectus, Catholic theologians vie with one another in producing hopefully novel restatements of the ancient pagan dissent to the freedom of historical truth and historical existence. The basic difficulty is evident enough: freedom in the Church and in the world, insofar as nuptially ordered, insofar as concrete and actual in covenantal fidelity, can have only a sacramental objectivity: otherwise it would vanish into nonhistorical subjectivity, subsumed to the sarkic order of merely fallen existence, which “profits nothing,” possessing no autonomous redemptive significance or efficacy. Over the fifty years since Vatican II nothing has been of less interest to Catholic theologians and the editors of their journals than the sacramental realism that is indispensable to systematic theology. Their parti pris anti-sacramental animus is effectively untroubled by any theological publication critical of the validity of their project of dehistoricizing Catholic worship. That animus is securely in place in theological academy, undiscussed and indiscussible as though it were a matter intuitively clear. Minds thus beguiled by cosmology become its willing captives.[688]
Harnack’s “Neo-Nicenism,” resting on a notion of a divisible divinity unthinkable by theologians of the first five centuries, is now a commonplace in theology faculties of Catholic universities and colleges, which evidence a profound disinterest in the ecclesial development of doctrine, and finally in the doctrinal tradition as such. In these purlieus, theology has become a branch of one or another humanism, subordinate to the dehistoricizing dynamics implicit in a secular methodology, and quite incompatible with the free historicity of the Church, whose concrete objectivity is first and foremost liturgical, secondarily scriptural, doctrinal, and moral and, at bottom, is Eucharistic.
The Church’s historicity is her worship, whose center and source is the priestly offering in persona Christi of the Sacrifice of the Mass. However, the historicity of the One Sacrifice is now confronted by the uncritical historicism of contemporary Church historians and exegetes in an academic atmosphere so adverse to sacramental realism as to have driven its discussion from the journals: Harnack’s “Catholica non leguntur” has the endorsement of the current editors of journals of Catholic theology.
Inevitably, the effective academic dissent to the free, sacramental historicity of the Church must focus on the liturgy; in fact, it has thereby been focused upon the doctrine of the Council of Nicaea, which, against the Arian challenge, first solemnly taught the Personal consubstantiality, the homoousion, of the Son with the Father, as basic to her liturgical proclamation that Jesus Christ is Lord. Thereafter this historical and therefore liturgical term underwent a free doctrinal development, resting upon the Nicene ascription of it to Jesus Christ, the Son, in order to underwrite his full equality with the Father, i.e, his full divinity. The First Council of Constantinople taught the full divinity of Jesus the Lord, and gave implicit application of his consubstantiality with the Father by teaching the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, which can only be Personal, ruling out the homoiousian compromise, as the full humanity of Jesus the Christ can only be Personal, ruling out the monist anthropology of Lonergan, Bouyer, Grillmeyer and Meyendorff. The Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus’ affirmed the full divinity and the full humanity of Jesus the Christ, implicitly his consubstantiality “with us.” Chalcedonian Symbol refused the nonhistorical quandary posed by the nearly universal supposition that the object of the Church’s faith is the non-historical Logos of the late Antiochene and Alexandrine Christological speculation. The Symbol taught instead that Jesus Christ is the object of the Church’s faith, that he is the One and the Same Son, that he is our Lord by his Personal consubstantiality with the Father and his Personal consubstantiality with each of us: “consubstantialem nobis.” (ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν) It is by his uniquely Personal subsistence at once in divinity and in humanity that Jesus is the Lord, the Head of humanity.
The metaphysical monism underlying the contemporary theological dissent to the doctrine of the Council of Chalcedon, like that underlying the Arian, Nestorian and Monophyite heresies, cannot accept the homoousion of Jesus, the One and the same Son, with the Father. Further, the current preference for a “theology from below” can find no resource in the Symbol of Chalcedon, whose definition of Jesus’ consubstantiality with humanity is the flat rejection of the cosmological anthropology upon which “Christology from below” depends.
The Symbol’s correlative dogmatic affirmation of Jesus’ subsistence “with us” in a single human substance requires that this substantial humanity be at once as communal and free as the Trinity it images. Jesus’ consequent consubstantiality with those for whom he died and of whom he is the Head images the Father’s consubstantiality with Son and the Holy Spirit of whom he is the Head. This imaging is foundational at once for our creation in Christ―for he, Jesus, is our source, our Archē, our Head―and for our creation in the image of God. Our imaging of the Triune God, inherent in our creation in Christ, must be substantial and therefore communal, for our imaging is by personal subsistence in a substance in wbich we are all consubstantial with each other and, obviously, with our Head. This imaging is nuptially signed: the Trinitarian perichōresis is imaged by our covenantal fidelity, whose every expression is nuptially ordered and normed: it would not otherwise be free, nor historical, nor covenantal.
In the Chalcedonian summary of the Christological faith, Jesus’ Headship of the humanity in which he subsists is not mentioned, but without that Symbol’s proclamation of the Son’s consubstantiality with us, his Headship cannot be understood. The consubstantiality of Jesus with us depends entirely upon his consubstantiality with the Father, by whose Mission Jesus is the Head of the human substance whose unity, it must be remembered, is historical and therefore sacramental, represented primarily in the Eucharistic One Flesh. It is represented secondarily in sacramental marriage, whose sacramentality is comparably inseparable from its free order, its free unity. The source of that free unity is the husband, the head of the nuptial society in which he subsists, consubstantial with his wife and with their marital covenant. Once again, the corollary of headship is the free unity of those of whom he is the Head, whether it be the Trinity, the New Covenant, or the covenant of marriage.
Chalcedon refused the monism of God and of man which fed and still feeds all heresy. Harnack, relying upon the fashionable monism of the historical academy of his time, which had long exploited that monism to deprive history of all intrinsic significance and, à fortiori, of all efficaciously salvific significance, had no qualms in reading that rationalization of the Trinitarian faith into the faith of the Council of Alexandria’s Tome to the Antiochenes, and none in reading it also into the doctrine taught by the Fathers at I Constantinople. The early Cappadocian preference for ‘homoi-ousios” was incoherent after all: Harnack’s concoction of “Neo-Nicenism”─equivalent to the merger of homousios with homoiousios asserted by Meletius at the Council of Antioch in 363─was simply the rationalization of the homoiousian doctrine.. That it corresponded to nothing the Church had taught, and to nothing the Cappadocians could have believed, was unimportant. For Harnack and his adepts, the aim of historical learning is the rationalization of historical reality, which cannot but exclude the historical faith of the historical Church in Jesus Christ the Lord of history, and in fact of every affirmation of the divinity of Jesus the Lord.. Harnack’s heirs in interest are still thus occupied with the dehistoricization of the Catholic faith. In what follows, we accept Harnack’s denotation of “Neo-Nicenism,” In sum, it assumes the divisibility of the substances in which Jesus the Christ subsists: Harnack’s focus was upon the homoiousian implication of a divisible divinity―which had never been proposed. The contemporary focus is and long has been upon a divisible human substance. In its Trinitarian application, the Neo-Nicene rationalization forces a dehistoricized Trinity, lacking free unity and consequently without recognizing the Father as the Head and source of the free Substance that is the Trinity by His subsistence within it. In its Christological application, the Neo-Nicene rationalism assumes a fragmented, dehistoricized humanity, which similarly recognizes no head, no source of free unity.
Catholic theology can proceed only as the personal fides quaerens intellectum of the theologian. As such, he must untiringly keep in view that theological metaphysics indispensable to its Eucharistic realism exists only as a theoretical expression of theologian’s personal fides quaerens intellecttum, sustained by utterly dependent upon his personal participation in the concrete historicity of the Catholic Church’s liturgical worship of the Trinity. Therefore Catholic theology is per se focused upon the historical concreteness of the doctrinal tradition integral to and mediated through the Church’s Eucharistic worship by which alone the Catholic fides quaerens intellectum is sustained and nourished. That quaerens must be metaphysical simply because its object is concrete neither subjective nor pragmatic; rather, it is sacramental. The linkage of theology to the historicity, the sacramental realism, of the Church’s worship, is no novelty: St. Thomas insisted upon it and de Lubac has shown it to be the commonplace of the patristic tradition. However, it is now necessary to stress the sacramentality of history, for only thus understood is history an object of theological interest. History as mere temporality has no intrinsic significance as a matter of definition. History is of interest to the theologian only by reason of its free Eucharistic order, the free integration of its past, present and future by the risen Lord’s Eucharistic immanence within the history of which he is the Lord, its beginning and its end. Too little attention is given to Jesus’ Eucharistic transcendence of history; it implications are unlimited.
It has been noted that the Council of Chalcedon completed the doctrinal development of the homoousion of Jesus, the One and the Same Son. The Council of Nicaea had found this term to be alone consistent with the Council’s dogmatic assertion of Jesus’ full divinity. The Council of Chalcedon found the homoousion of the Son with the Father similarly indispensable to the assertion of his full humanity. The double homoousion is consequently indissociable from the unity of his Person, the Head in whose Personal unity the ancient dichotomy placed by a pagan wisdom between the divine and the human is transcended.
Thus it is the faith of the Church that Jesus the Christ is Personally homoousios with the Father as the only-begotten Son, and only thus possesses the fullness of divinity. It is the faith of the Church that Jesus is homoousios with us in our humanity as our Head, and that as our Head he is the source of the fullness of humanity which each of us possesses, quite as the Father as head of the Trinity is the source of the fullness of divinity which each of the Trinitarian Persons possesses. The Pauline-Johannine doctrine of our creation in Christ requires that Jesus’ subsistence in our humanity be that of its Head, the source of the free and substantial unity of that humanity. It is thus that he is consubstantial with all of those of whom he is the source, the Head in whom we are created. It is a matter of definition that to be a head is to be consubstantial with those of whom he is the head, precisely as to have a head is to be consubstantial with him. It is thus that the double homoousion is constitutive of Jesus’ Person: neither can be dissociated from him without the immediate rejection of his Lordship.
This consubstantiality of all of us with our Head implies that each of us possesses the fullness of humanity, by reason of our subsistence in the numerically same human substance in which our Head subsists, quite as the second and third Persons of the possess the fullness of divinity by reason of their subsistence in the Trinitarian substance in which their Head, the Father, subsists. . We are not members of a category, a “species;” we do not merely “participate in” the full perfection of humanity, quite as the Son and the Holy Spirit do not “participate in” or “share in” the fullness of the divinity in which they subsist, but possess it in its fullness. There is no qualification, no ‘more or less,’ no ‘higher or lower,’ no inferiority or superiority. in our personal possession of the fullness of our humanity: we each possess it in its fullness, but we do so personally, therefore as irreducibly distinct from each other, quite as the divine Persons each possess the fullness of divinity, but in irreducible distinction from each other. We image that distinction nuptially, as irreducibly masculine or feminine. Within that primary personal differentiation, neither accidental nor substantial, each of us is inherently capable of a unique personal nuptial relation to a spousa or to a sponsus. The fulfillment of that relation is our personal imaging of God, our personal covenantal fidelity within the Good Creation that is the Church, understood as those for whom Christ died, in that most inclusive and universal sense which is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God. The Sponsus of the bishop or priest whose office is to offer the One Sacrifice in the Name and Person of Jesus the Christ, whose sacrifice it is, can only be the Church, the Bride of Christ.
Clearly enough, our homoousion with Jesus the Christ, implicit in the Nicene Creed and defined at Chalcedon, underlies our axiomatic personal equality with all other human persons before God. Unfortunately our consubstantiality with our Head, Jesus the Lord, is often understood to have reference only to the eschaton, the final judgment, as though it were without relation to our historical existence. Our practical inequality in our fallen historicity is a function of our fallenness, our existence in “the flesh which profits nothing.” Lacking, as it does, all intrinsic unity, the unity of “the flesh” can only be extrinsic, finally quantitative and therefore nominal, without historical significance. From this sarkic viewpoint─which is simply that of secular modernity and neomodernity─it is absurd to ascribe historical significance to our personal consubstantiality with Christ our Head. A famous Punch cartoon has a large and imposing prelate in full regalia reassuring a humble, hapless and rather meager layman that “we are all equal before God, but I can’t think why.” This caricature mocks the complacent wisdom of the modernist, whose pragmatic dismissal of the historical significance of the Judaeo-Christian tradition finds succinct expression in denying it any ‘cash value.’ Jeremy Bentham famously described such irrational relicts of the Western tradition as our claim to personal equality before God as “nonsense on stilts.”[689]
Despite a pervasive academic contempt for the faith of the Church, her faith continues to be the subject of Catholic theology, which cannot escape the import of of the Chalcedonian definition of our consubstantiality with our Head. This definition controls the Church’s Christology, theological anthropology, ecclesiology, sacramental theology, and theology of history. In short, the consubstantiality of Jesus the One and the Same Son, our Head, “with us” is foundational for theology as such, which is to say, foundational for theological metaphysics. This evident truth requires an entire recasting of metaphysics if it is to serve theology. The homoousion of the Son with the Father from whom he proceeds would clearly be impossible were the substantial unity of God mono-Personal: the One and the same Son’s consubstantiality with us” would be similarly impossible, were the human substance similarly mono-personal. The homoousion of the One and the Same Son with the Father bespeaks free subsistence in a free community constituting a free substance, whose free unity is derived from the subsistence in it of its Head, whether the head of that community be the Father or the Son or the husband. The notion that the human substance is single is not novel; Tertullian and Gregory of Nazianzen took it for granted.
The priority of the liturgical mediation of faith of the Church over any Catholic theological enterprise is at the heart of St. Anselm’s definition of theology as faith seeking understanding. The faith that seeks to understand is Catholic, which is to say, it is historical, for it is liturgical and therefore it is doctrinal. Consequently, the truth of the faith, its doctrinal content, is not subject to an academic oversight nor, à fortiori, to an academic override. The language by which the Church expresses her faith is itself liturgical; the liturgical proclamation of the truth of the Church’s worship in truth is a magisterial responsibility, neither negotiable nor capable of delegation.
Thus it is that the “homoousios” of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and of the Symbol of Chalcedon means what it says: the Church’s liturgy is subordinated to no hermeneutical a priori whatsoever. Consequently, it has affronted conventional wisdom from the outset, and always will. Its historical optimism, its faith in the historical mediation of salvation, its rejection of Gnostic and neo-Gnostic efforts to defeat it by recourse to a higher sophistication, a superior rationality, a more compelling vision, a greater empathy for man in his world, are unceasing. In our time, these antagonisms focus upon the liberation of mankind from moral responsibility by way of the secularization of sexuality, seeking to abolish all conscioussness of unique and inexhaustible metaphysical significance of marital union, reducing its mystery to metaphor and insignificance. However framed, these ambitions have the same goal, that atomizing rationalization of reality that would normalize and institutionalize our return to the dust from which we were taken and to which we must return. It is rather odd to find these flights from history effective in Catholic theology fifteen centuries after their exorcism at Chalcedon.
The current academic dissatisfactions with the Christological doctrine definitively taught at Chalcedon were anticipated by the liberal church historians of the nineteenth century, whose programmatic dehistoricizing re-interpretation of the doctrinal tradition according to the canons of the Enlightenment continues today by way of a comparably programmatic rationalization of the liturgy, under the auspices of “liturgical renewal.” Those engaged in it presuppose history as such to be corrupt; emphatically, they also presuppose the corruption of the historical Catholic tradition─which is to say, of the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth─substituting for it the methodological infallibility of their own dissent, purified by its historicism and its Kantian vision of scholarship as the application of immanently necessary rationality. It is evident that this dismissal by liturgical enthusiasts of the intrinsic sacramental significance of history is not open to Catholic theology, whose sole foundation is the realism of the Eucharistic liturgy, the historical objectivity of the Church’s worship in truth.
The alleged Neo-Nicenism of the Cappadocians was understood to have proposed─and in its dissenting format it does in fact propose─that the Nicene proclamation of the homoousion of the Son with the Father had taught no more than what a literal reading of the Cappadocian homoiousios had entailed, viz, a generic or categorical similarity (homoios kat’ousion) of the Son (but not the Holy Spirit) to the Father, quite as members of a material species are formally alike without being materially identical with each other, the “likeness” in view presupposing a concrete divine substance in which each particular Person is held somehow to participate. Such participation implies a divisible divinity, which every Cappadocian would deny.
Were its logic pursued, this cosmologized interpretation of the Nicene Son as “one in substance with the Father” (tautousios rather than homoousios, as Basil of Ancyra had it, and consequently Sabellian) would revive the perennial problem of harmonizing “the one and the many” left unresolved by the pagan and medieval metaphysics. However, its incoherence is beside the point; the phrase serves dissent sufficiently well as imagery, as a metaphor whose only metaphysical significance is negative: a refusal of the Nicene homoousios as Sabellian.
We have seen that this dehistoricizing interpretation of the Cappadocian “homoiousion,” which Harnack thought to have found in what he called the “Neo-Nicene” definitions of the first Council of Constantinople, entails a monist refusal of that concrete distinction between “person” and “substance” which was posited in the late second century by Tertullian and given dogmatic standing by the definition at the Council of Nicaea of the Son’s Personal consubstantiality with the Father and again at Chalcedon by the definition of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with us. The Neo-Nicene refusal of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, whether as defined at Nicaea with respect to the Father or at Chalcedon with respect to the Son’s consubstantiality with all human persons, rests upon the conviction that each intellectual substance, whether divine or human, is a finally impersonal Monad, a self-enclosed ‘immanent Self,’ incapable of communication. The refusal of the homoousion of the Son with the Father in favor of his being “one in substance” with the Father amounts to an imaginative reduction of the Trinity to a category of intellectual monads distinguished from each other only as members of a material species are distinguished: i.e., by their postulated participation in a perfection which they cannot, as members, fully possess. So understood, the distinction between the Trinitarian Persons can only be material, in such wise that the Son is divine only by participating in the same specific form─divinity─as that in which the Father participates, and from whose participation the Son’s participation must be imagined, if not understood, to be merely materially distinct. This is of course polytheism, a flat rejection of the Christian faith in the Trinity.
When the homoousion of the Son with us, as defined at Chalcedon, is similarly refused, as it is by the Thomist Christology, the refusal rests upon the same postulate of a monopersonal human substance, in which no literal consubstantiality with another person is impossible, simply because each human person is a monad, substantially distinct from all others. This postulate refuses what Chalcedon affirms, that Jesus subsists in the human substance in such wise as to be consubstantial with us. It then becomes necessary then to blur the meaning of the Chalcedonian definition, since it cannot be understood to be literally true.
This dissenting imagination underlies the penchant of the International Commission on English (I.C.E.L.) in the Liturgy for the “sharing” idiom, which is incompatible both with the full divinity and the full humanity of Jesus the Christ. Obviously, this usage contradicts the Catholic faith, whose Creed begins with the assertion of belief in One God, whose unity is absolute, incapable of being “shared.” However, insofar as it was taken seriously by the liberal historians of doctrine, Harnack’s allegation of a Neo-Nicene infection of the ecumenical First Council of Constantinople provided an escape from the rigors of orthodoxy. It warranted a recital of the Creed while distancing oneself from participation in its liturgical mediation of the Truth of Christ, i.e., in the Church’s worship in truth. Thus Harnack’s departure from the Lutheran tradition; thus also the entry of what Karl Rahner has named “cryptogamic (sic) dissent” into the Catholic liturgy.[690]
I.C.E.L. was established in 1963 to aid Anglophone bishops in their endeavors to translate the Latin liturgical books into English. Quite predictably, under the leadership of Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, its anonymous staff hijacked this project, transforming the prosaic work of accurate translation into a more comprehensive task of revising the English liturgical books, an insolence whose full expression, entitled the Third Progress Report on the Revision of the Roman Missal, was published in 1992. The subject has been dealt with in Volume III, endnote 130.
The consequence of those five decades of resistance to sacramental realism has been an academic reinterpretation of the Church’s doctrinal tradition which returns it to the resistance to the Nicene Creed by the Eusebian opponents of Athanasius. Their fear of a Sabellian latency in the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father was taken up by two of the Cappadocians, Basil of Caesarea and his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa. Their apophatic distinction between “theology” as concerned for the eternal Trinity, and their consequent dismissal of the economy as of lesser theological interest, was rejected by Gregory of Nazianzen and his cousin, Amphilocius of Iconium, who anticipated Augustine’s identification of the Trinitarian Persons as subsistent relations in his further exploration of this insight in the De trinitate, which may well have owed something to Amphilocius.
The rigorously literal reading of the Nicene definition of divinity of the Son, of his homoousion with the Father, upon which Athanasius had insisted in his De synodis, was in fact indispensable to restoration of the Orient to the faith of the Church in the divinity of Jesus the Christ for, under the Arian influence of the “two Eusebii” (of Caesarea and of Nicomedia) upon Constantine, that faith had been out of season since shortly after Council of Nicaea, when Constantine required of Athanasius that he restore Arius to communion in Alexandria, and was rebuffed. This signal affront to the imperial dignity, “lèse-majesté,” baffled Constantine. He knew that Athanasius had been a conspicuous figure at the Council of Nicaea, a vigorous opponent of the “two Eusebii,” who were now Constantine’s advisors; in short, Constantine realized that Athanasius could not be punished for upholding the Nicene Creed against the Arians whom the Nicene Council had condemned. This the Arians themselves recognized; when finally they brought him to trial at Tyre in 335, he was charged with criminal offenses; his orthodoxy was not in issue. Nonetheless, the reconversion of the Orient to the faith of Nicaea required a continual, unflinching and indefatigable preaching of the Nicene Creed by a conspicuous prelate of a major Oriental see whose preaching could not be ignored. Athanasius found himself in this strategic position, and became the voice of the Church in the Orient. This required from the outset of his succession to the See of Alexandria an uncompromising exercise of his authority over the largest diocese in the Church. His authority was challenged by a suffragan bishop, Miletus, who some years earlier had asserted an authority over the area south of the Nile delta and extending to the cataracts at Aswan. He had sought this authority from the Council of Nicaea, which had denied it and affirmed against him the authority of the suffragan bishops appointed by the bishop of Alexadria. However, the priests whom Miletus had ordained and assigned to parishes, and the monasteries he had founded, firmly supported him. At the same time, the Jewish population of the See of Alexandria was opposed to the Christians, as was the pagan. Together these constituted a formidable resistance to Athanasius’ authority. To maintain that authority, he had to assert it, which meant meeting his opponents on their own terms, i.e., their entire opposition to his exercise of his Episcopal office.
Accordingly, for pastoral purposes, he dealt with them as a single enemy to the faith of the Church. When Miletus died, soon after the Coucil of Nicaea, the Miletian sectarians sought an audience with Constantine, but were sidetracked by Eusebius of Nicomedia, who enlisted their support of his Arian agenda as the price of his support of their opposition to Athansius.
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. We have seen that, early in 358, Basil, the Eusebian bishop of Ancyra, alarmed by the homoean (Arian) Council of Sirmium held in 357, called a minor council of his own in Ancyra, out of which emerged a mitigated Arianism. Its central proposition attributed to the Son a substantial likeness to the Father: (homoios kat’ ousian) which rejected the central homoean theme, the imperial prohibition of all theological attribution of “substance” to God. However, intending to defend the Son’s divinity by assigning him a substantial likeness (homoi-ousios) to the Father. However this “homoiousianism” could be given no theological intelligibility. As an ordinary parlance among the conservative anti-Arian and anti-Sabellian orthodoxy, it might do little damage, but its latencies, when pushed as by Macedonius, Eustathius of Sebaste and Eunomius, must deny either the substantial unity of God, or the divinity of the Son. Athanasius had seen this from the outset, but was unable persuade the homoiousians of its truth and its necessity. Given the conversion of the homoiousians in Antioch to the literal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, the Nicene Christology would have been firmly in place in that ancient See. With the condemnation at I Constantinople of the monophysism of Apollinarius, the Chalcedonian implications of the Nicene doctrine of homoousios of Jesus the Lord began to become clear..
On monophysite grounds, Apollinarius had affirmed the human as well as the divine consubstantility of Jesus by reason of the supposed unity of the divine and the human in his nature (physis), a unity arranged by supposing the dehistoricized Logos to have displaced the intellectual soul of Jesus as the hegemenon or ruling principle of a composite “theanthropic” nature (physis). It followed that Apollinarius was able to identify this “nature” neither with the Logos nor with the Person of Jesus. With the condemnation of this Christology at I Constantinople, Apollinarius’assertion of the human consubstantiality of Jesus, entailing as it was now understood to require, viz., Jesus’ full humanity, was dropped by those who would later develop the monophysite heresy, which held an assertion of the full humanity of Jesus to be inevitably adoptionist. Out of this conviction the Nestorian heresy would arise.
It would never have occured to the “great Cappadocians” (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa) to divide the immaterial and therefore indivisible divine substance, or to deny the divinity of Jesus the Christ but, like all their contemporaries save Athanasius, they had to overcome the burden of the habitual application of the monist imagination to the doctrine of the Trinity which had prevented the homoiousians from understanding and accepting the Nicene doctrine of the possession by Jesus the Son of the same divine Substance as the Father. Gregory of Nazianzen fially broke with Basil by upholding the Nicene Creed, and affirming the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit with the Father
We have noted that Pope Benedict XVI, while a member of theology faculty at Tübingen immediately after Vatican II, remarked upon Augustine’s failure to apply to human persons his discovery of the intrasubstantial relationality of the Trinitarian Persons. Augustine accepted the traditional Greek identification of each human person with the distinct substance in which each subsists, a view which obviously would bar their consubstantiality with each other in the intrasubstantial Personal sense of that term as established at Nicaea,. as repeated at the Council of Alexandria in 362, and at I Constantinople in 381.[691] Augustine died a few months before the Council of Ephesus, where the relational distinction between human persons, together with their consubstantial unity, began to be worked out in the context of the condemnation of the Nestorian heresy, dogmatically established in the ascription of the title “Mother of God” to Mary the mother of Jesus. In the post-conciliar correspondence between John of Antioch and Cyril which issued in Cyril’s unqualified subscription to the Formula of Union in his Laetentur Coeli.[692] Cyril asserted the consubstantiality of the Son with us, evidently as implicit in Theotokos title for our Lady which the Formula of Union, as composed by one of the leading Antiochenes, probably Theodoret of Cyr, had accepted, and as implicit also in the communication of idioms between Jesus’ humanity and divinity which Cyril had insisted upon in his letters to Nestorius.
Cyril had seen this communication of idioms to be essential to that personal union of unmixed divinity and humanity in Jesus which alone would support Mary’s motherhood of God. Thus he had seen the communication of idioms to be essential to the liturgical assertion of the divinity of the Christ, to his Eucharistic Presence, and to Mary’s motherhood of God. The importance of Cyril of Alexandria to the Chalcedonian Christology can hardly be missed, inasmuch as that Council had explicitly endorsed his Laetentur Coeli. Cyril was the first to grasp the nexus between the homoousion of the Son “with us” (ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν), and the communication of idioms by which Mary is the Mother of God, and the Son thereby consubstantial not only with the Father, but also “with us.” This insight anticipates the Christological doctrine of Chalcedon in all but its emphasis upon of the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, which is of course crucial to the Chalcedonian Christology, but already implicit in Cyril’s advocacy at Ephesus of the definition of Mary’s motherhood of God
The scriptural and doctrinal use of the communication of idioms, whose basic expression is that of the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord, presupposes the strict Personal unity of divinity and humanity in Christ on a level which leaves his humanity and divinity distinct. All sacramental realism, as opposed to the symbolism associated with Berengarius and Zwingli, depends upon this understanding of the unity of Christ, which is first asserted by Cyril in his correspondence with Nestorius. But this understanding of the Personal unity of Jesus is provided by revelation, not by seeking out the prior conditions of possibility of the Incarnation which, as a pure gift, has no prior possibility: it is a grace ex nihilo, the most radical grace, gratia capitis, the grace of our “creation in Christ,” our Head, the source of our free unity, our free human substance which, as free, must be communal and nuptially ordered, created in the image of God, and therefore imaging the Trinity.
Cyril of Alexandria placed a strict link between the historical Christology of his Synodical Epistles to Nestorius, and Eucharistic realism . He was perhaps the first since Justin Martyr to apply the commuication of idioms to the Eucharist as well as to the Personal unity of Jesus, an application worked out particularly in his Commentary on John.[693] In receiving the Eucharist we receive our free personal unity, our life, from our Head, from Him who who is Personally present in the Eucharist, Jesus, the Logos who is Life, given as the remedy for our corruption unto death by sin, the medicine of immortality, the remedy that we should not die (Ignatius Martyr’s Letter to the Ephesians, 20, 2).
Here Cyril echoes also Ignatius of Antioch, for whom the Eucharist is “the medicine of immortality (pharmakon athanasias: φάρμακον ἀθανασίας ), "the remedy that we should not die”). Ignatius‘ stress upon the life-giving transformation worked in us by Eucharistic communion was taken up at the end of the second century by Irenaeus, whose explanation of that Eucharistic transformation deploys a primitive Trinitarian theology which understands that the vine and the wheat grow by the Power of God; by the Wisdom of God, are put to our use as bread and wine. By the Word of God they become the Eucharist, our Food, the life-giving nourishment which ensures that after our death and burial we will be raised by the Word to enter into eternal life. This Eucharistic realism is also Cyril’s, but Cyril seems to have been the first to recognize and develop its Christological corollary, the consubstantiality of the Son “with us,” for Mary could not otherwise be the Mother of God.
The insertion of such a masked heretical intent into the liturgical recital of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was from the outset highly unlikely. The nineteenth century Neo-Nicenism was an academic dissent to the liturgical-doctrinal development, as at Constantinople, of Nicene orthodoxy. Its chief proponents were academics with remote relation to liturgical worship. But much has changed since Harnack’s time: the I.C.E.L. translations of the Textus Receptus of the Roman Missal made an at least materially dissenting participation in the Catholic liturgy practically unavoidable. It is more than interesting that the I.C.E.L. dissent should echo the “Neo-Nicene” dissent: i.e., a calculated deformation of the liturgical-dogmatic meaning of the Nicene definition of consubstantiality of the One and the Same Son, Jesus the Christ, as consubstantial with the Father.
The chief instrument of this liturgical corruption over the past forty years has been the “revision” of the Church’s liturgical books by I.C.E.L., the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, whose translations afflict practically all English-speaking Catholics. I.C.E.L.’s revisionist ambitions have lately been rebuked and its autonomy cancelled, but its works, its insolent “revisions” of the Roman Missal have not yet all been replaced. As of this writing (2012) although the several ICEL revisions of the Roman Missal have been replaced by Roman Missal of 2011, the congregations must still endure the political corrections of Scripture in ICEL’s “Lectionary” and the clergy and religious must continue, evidently indefinitely, to put up with ICEL’s 1975 edition of the English Breviary. The Neo-Nicene interpretation of Jesus’ homoousion with the Father, and with us, pervades those translations. Since 1970, the publication of these revisions of the liturgical books governing the celebration of the Mass have been effectively corrupting the faith of those Catholics dependent upon them. The apostolic tradition taught in the Symbol of Chalcedon is unknown to those thus placed, and we need not look to the contemporary catechesis to correct their ignorance: Thomas Groome’s “shared praxis,” incessantly praised by the “catechetical community,” trusted, even defended, by too many ordinaries, thrives upon that ignorance.
SYMBOLUM CHALCEDONENSE. VERSIO LATINA.
Sequentes igitur sanctos patres, unum eundemque confiteri Filium et Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum consonanter omnes docemus, eundem perfectum in deitate et eundem perfectum in humanitate; Deum verum et hominem verum eundem ex anima rationali et corpore; consubstantialem Patri secundum deitatem, consubstantialem nobis eundem secundum humanitatem; 'per omnia nobis similem, absque peccato' (Heb. iv.): ante secula quidem de Patre genitum secundum deitatem; in novissimis autem diebus eundem propter nos et propter nostram salutem ex Maria virgine, Dei genitrice secundum humanitatem; unum eundemque Christum, filium, Dominum, unigenitum, in duabus naturis inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivise, inseperabiliter agnoscendum: nusquam sublata differentia naturarum propter unitionem, magisque salva proprietate utriusque naturæ, et in unam personam atque subsistentiam concurrente: non in duos personas partitum aut divisum, sed unum eundemque Filium et unigenitum, Deum verbum, Dominum Jesum Christum; sicut ante prophetæ de eo et ipse nos Jesus Christus erudivit et patrum nobis symbolum tradidit.
NOTES.
The Greek text, together with the Latin version, is taken from the ὅρος τῆς ἐν Χαλκηδόνι τετάρτης Συνόδου , Act. V. in Mansi, Conc. Tom. VII. p. 115. We have inserted ἐν δύο φύσεσιν (see note 4). There are several other Latin versions which Mansi gives, Tom. VII. pp. 115 and 751–758, with the various readings. See also Hahn, l.c. pp. 117 sqq.
The Creed is preceded in the acts of the Council by an express confirmation of the Nicene Creed in both forms, 'the Creed of the three hundred and eighteen holy Fathers of Nicæa,' and 'the Creed of the hundred and fifty holy Fathers who were assembled at Constantinople.' The Fathers of Chalcedon declare that 'this wise and saving Creed [of Nicæa] would be sufficient for the full acknowledgment and confirmation of the true religion; for it teaches completely the perfect doctrine concerning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and fully explains the Incarnation of the Lord to those who receive it faithfully.' The addition of a new Creed is justified by the subsequent Christological heresies (Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, and Eutychianism). After stating it, the Synod solemnly prohibits, on pain of deposition 64and excommunication, the setting forth of any other Creed for those 'who are desirous of turning to the acknowledgment of the truth from Heathenism and Judaism.'
65 Against Apollinaris, who denied that Christ had a ψυχὴ λογική , anima rationalis , or νοῦς, πνεῦμα , and who reduced the Incarnation to the assumption of a human body ( σῶμα ) with an animal soul ( ψυχὴ ἄλογος ), inhabited by the Divine Logos. But the rational spirit of man requires salvation as much as the body.
66 Ὁμοούσιος , consubstantialis (al. coessentialis ), is used in both clauses, though with a shade of difference. Christ's homoousia with the Father implies numerical unity, or identity of essence (God being one in being, or monoousios); Christ's homoousia with men means only generic unity, or equality of nature.
67 Ὁμοούσιος , consubstantialis (al. coessentialis ), is used in both clauses, though with a shade of difference. Christ's homoousia with the Father implies numerical unity, or identity of essence (God being one in being, or monoousios); Christ's homoousia with men means only generic unity, or equality of nature.
68 The predicate θεοτόκος , the Bringer-forth of God, Dei genitrix (al. quæ Deum peperit , or even divini numinis creatrix ), is directed against Nestorius, and was meant originally not so much to exalt the Virgin Mary, as to assert the true divinity of Christ and the realness of the Incarnation. Basil of Seleucia: Θεὸν σαρκωθέντα τεκοῦσα θεοτόκος ὀνομάζεται. It is immediately after qualified by the phrase κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα ( secundum humanitatem ), in distinction from κατὰ τὴν θεότητα ( secundum deitatem ). This is a very important limitation, and necessary to guard against Mariolatry, and the heathenish, blasphemous, and contradictory notion that the uncreated, eternal God can be born in time. Mary was the mother not merely of the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth, but of theanthropic person of Jesus Christ; yet not of his eternal Godhead (the λόγος ἄσαρκος ), but of his incarnate person, or the Logos united to humanity (the λόγος ἔνσαρκος ). In like manner, the subject of the Passion was theanthropic person; yet not according to his divine nature, which in itself is incapable of suffering, but according to his human nature, which was the organ of suffering. There is no doubt, however, that the unscriptural terms θεοτόκος , Dei genitrix , Deipara , mater Dei , which remind one of the heathen mothers of gods, have greatly promoted Mariolatry, which aided in the defeat of Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus, 431. It is safer to adhere to the New Testament designation of Mary as μήτηρ Ἰησοῦ , or μήτηρ τοῦ Κυρίου (Luke i. 43).
69 Ἐν δύο φύσεσιν , and all the Latin translations, in duabus naturis (only the Roman editors in the margin read ex d. n.), are directed against Eutyches. The present Greek text reads, it is true, ἐκ δύο φύσεων , from two natures; but this signifies, and, according to the connection, can only signify, essentially the same thing; though, separately taken, it admits also of an Eutychian and Monophysite interpretation, namely, that Christ has arisen from the confluence of two natures, and since the act of the Incarnation, or unition of both, has only one nature. Understood in that sense, Dioscurus at the Council was very willing to accept the formula ἐκ δύο φύσεων . But for this very reason the Orientals, and also the Roman delegates, protested with one voice against ἐκ , and insisted upon another formula with ἐν, which was adopted. Baur (Gesch. der Lehre v. d. Dreieinigkeit, I. p. 820 sq.) and Dorner (Gesch. d. Lehre v. d. Person Christi, II. p. 129) assert that ἐκ is the accurate and original expression, and is a concession to Monophysitism; that it also agrees better (?) with the verb γνωρίζειν (to recognize by certain tokens); but that it was from the very beginning changed by the Occidentals into ἐν . But, with Gieseler, Neander (iv. 988), Hefele (Conciliengesch. II. 451 sq.), Beck (Dogmengeschichte, p. 251), and Hahn (l.c. p. 118, note 6), we prefer the view that ἐν δύο φύσεσιν was the original reading of the symbol, and that it was afterwards altered in the interest of Monophysitism. This is proved by the whole course of the proceedings at the fifth session of the Council of Chalcedon, where the expression ἐκ δύο φύσεσιν was protested against, and is confirmed by the testimony of the Abbot Euthymius, a contemporary, and by that of Severus, Evagrius, and Leontius of Byzantium, as well as by the Latin translations. Severus, the Monophysite Patriarch of Antioch since 513, charges the Fathers of Chalcedon with the inexcusable crime of having taught ἐν δύο φύσεσιν ἀδιαιρέτοις γνωρίζεσθαι τὸν χριστόν (see Mansi, Conc. VII. p. 839). Evagrius (H. E. II. c. 5) maintains that both formulas amount to essentially the same thing, and reciprocally condition each other. Dorner also affirms the same. His words are: 'The Latin formula has "to acknowledge Christ as Son in two natures;" the Greek has "to recognize Christ as Son from two natures," which is plainly the same thought. The Latin formula is only a free but essentially faithful translation, only that its coloring expresses somewhat more definitely still Christ's subsisting in two natures, and is therefore more literally conformable to the Roman type of doctrine' (l.c. II. 129). From my Church History, Vol. III. p. 745 sq.
70 ἀσυγχύτως , inconfuse , and ἀτρέπτως , immutabiliter (without confusion, without conversion or change), are directed against Eutychianism, which mixes and confounds the human and the divine natures in Christ ( σύγχυσις ), and teaches an absorption of the former into the latter; hence the phrases 'God is born; God suffered; God was crucified; God died.' The Monophysites (so called after the Council of Chalcedon) rejected the Eutychian theory of an absorption, but nevertheless taught only one composite nature of Christ ( μία φύσις σύνθετος ), making his humanity a mere accident of the immutable divine substance, and using the liturgical shibboleth 'God has been crucified' (without a qualifying 'according to the human nature,' or 'the flesh,' as the ( θεοτόκος is qualified in the Symbol of Chalcedon). Hence they were also called Theopaschites. They divided into several sects and parties on subtle and idle questions, especially the question whether Christ's body before the resurrection was corruptible or incorruptible (hence the Phthartolaters, from φθαρτός and λάτρης , and Aphthartodocetæ).
71 ἀδιαιρέτως , indivise , ἀχωρίστως , inseparabiliter (without division, without separation), both in opposition to Nestorianism, which so emphasized the duality of natures, and the continued distinction between the human and the divine in Christ, as to lose sight of the unity of person, and to substitute for a real Incarnation a mere conjunction ( συνάφεια ), a moral union or intimate friendship between the Divine Logos and the man Jesus. Hence, also, the opposition to the term θεοτόκος , with which the Nestorian controversy began. With the Symbol of Chalcedon should be compared the semi-symbolical Epistola dogmatica of Pope Leo, I. to the Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople, which contains a lengthy and masterly exposition of the orthodox Christology against the heresy of Eutyches, and was read and approved by the Council of Chalcedon, as the voice of Peter speaking through 'the Archbishop of old Rome.' It is dated June 13, 449, and is found in the works of Leo M. (Ep. 24 in Quesnel's ed., Ep. 28 in the ed. Ballerini), in Mansi, Conc. Tom. V. pp. 1366–90 (Latin and Greek, with the different readings), Hardouin, Conc. Tom. II. pp. 290–300 (also Latin and Greek, but without the variations), Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, Vol. II. pp. 335–346 (German and Latin), partly also in Denzinger, Enchir. p. 43.
72 Against Apollinaris, who denied that Christ had a ψυχὴ λογική , anima rationalis , or νοῦς, πνεῦμα , and who reduced the Incarnation to the assumption of a human body ( σῶμα ) with an animal soul ( ψυχὴ ἄλογος ), inhabited by the Divine Logos. But the rational spirit of man requires salvation as much as the body.
73 Ὁμοούσιος , consubstantialis (al. coessentialis ), is used in both clauses, though with a shade of difference. Christ's homoousia with the Father implies numerical unity, or identity of essence (God being one in being, or monoousios); Christ's homoousia with men means only generic unity, or equality of nature.
74 The predicate θεοτόκος , the Bringer-forth of God, Dei genitrix (al. quæ Deum peperit , or even divini numinis creatrix ), is directed against Nestorius, and was meant originally not so much to exalt the Virgin Mary, as to assert the true divinity of Christ and the realness of the Incarnation. Basil of Seleucia: Θεὸν σαρκωθέντα τεκοῦσα θεοτόκος ὀνομάζεται. It is immediately after qualified by the phrase κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα ( secundum humanitatem ), in distinction from κατὰ τὴν θεότητα ( secundum deitatem ). This is a very important limitation, and necessary to guard against Mariolatry, and the heathenish, blasphemous, and contradictory notion that the uncreated, eternal God can be born in time. Mary was the mother not merely of the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth, but of theanthropic person of Jesus Christ; yet not of his eternal Godhead (the λόγος ἄσαρκος ), but of his incarnate person, or the Logos united to humanity (the λόγος ἔνσαρκος ). In like manner, the subject of the Passion was theanthropic person; yet not according to his divine nature, which in itself is incapable of suffering, but according to his human nature, which was the organ of suffering. There is no doubt, however, that the unscriptural terms θεοτόκος , Dei genitrix , Deipara , mater Dei , which remind one of the heathen mothers of gods, have greatly promoted Mariolatry, which aided in the defeat of Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus, 431. It is safer to adhere to the New Testament designation of Mary as μήτηρ Ἰησοῦ , or μήτηρ τοῦ Κυρίου (Luke i. 43).
75 Ἐν δύο φύσεσιν , and all the Latin translations, in duabus naturis (only the Roman editors in the margin read ex d. n.), are directed against Eutyches. The present Greek text reads, it is true, ἐκ δύο φύσεων , from two natures; but this signifies, and, according to the connection, can only signify, essentially the same thing; though, separately taken, it admits also of an Eutychian and Monophysite interpretation, namely, that Christ has arisen from the confluence of two natures, and since the act of the Incarnation, or unition of both, has only one nature. Understood in that sense, Dioscurus at the Council was very willing to accept the formula ἐκ δύο φύσεων . But for this very reason the Orientals, and also the Roman delegates, protested with one voice against ἐκ , and insisted upon another formula with ἐν, which was adopted. Baur (Gesch. der Lehre v. d. Dreieinigkeit, I. p. 820 sq.) and Dorner (Gesch. d. Lehre v. d. Person Christi, II. p. 129) assert that ἐκ is the accurate and original expression, and is a concession to Monophysitism; that it also agrees better (?) with the verb γνωρίζειν (to recognize by certain tokens); but that it was from the very beginning changed by the Occidentals into ἐν . But, with Gieseler, Neander (iv. 988), Hefele (Conciliengesch. II. 451 sq.), Beck (Dogmengeschichte, p. 251), and Hahn (l.c. p. 118, note 6), we prefer the view that ἐν δύο φύσεσιν was the original reading of the symbol, and that it was afterwards altered in the interest of Monophysitism. This is proved by the whole course of the proceedings at the fifth session of the Council of Chalcedon, where the expression ἐκ δύο φύσεσιν was protested against, and is confirmed by the testimony of the Abbot Euthymius, a contemporary, and by that of Severus, Evagrius, and Leontius of Byzantium, as well as by the Latin translations. Severus, the Monophysite Patriarch of Antioch since 513, charges the Fathers of Chalcedon with the inexcusable crime of having taught ἐν δύο φύσεσιν ἀδιαιρέτοις γνωρίζεσθαι τὸν χριστόν (see Mansi, Conc. VII. p. 839). Evagrius (H. E. II. c. 5) maintains that both formulas amount to essentially the same thing, and reciprocally condition each other. Dorner also affirms the same. His words are: 'The Latin formula has "to acknowledge Christ as Son in two natures;" the Greek has "to recognize Christ as Son from two natures," which is plainly the same thought. The Latin formula is only a free but essentially faithful translation, only that its coloring expresses somewhat more definitely still Christ's subsisting in two natures, and is therefore more literally conformable to the Roman type of doctrine' (l.c. II. 129). From my Church History, Vol. III. p. 745 sq.
76 ἀσυγχύτως , inconfuse , and ἀτρέπτως , immutabiliter (without confusion, without converion or change), are directed against Eutychianism, which mixes and confounds the human and the divine natures in Christ ( σύγχυσις ), and teaches an absorption of the former into the latter; hence the phrases 'God is born; God suffered; God was crucified; God died.' The Monophysites (so called after the Council of Chalcedon) rejected the Eutychian theory of an absorption, but nevertheless taught only one composite nature of Christ ( μία φύσις σύνθετος ), making his humanity a mere accident of the immutable divine substance, and using the liturgical shibboleth 'God has been crucified' (without a qualifying 'according to the human nature,' or 'the flesh,' as the ( θεοτόκος is qualified in the Symbol of Chalcedon). Hence they were also called Theopaschites. They divided into several sects and parties on subtle and idle questions, especially the question whether Christ's body before the resurrection was corruptible or incorruptible (hence the Phthartolaters, from φθαρτός and λάτρης , and Aphthartodocetæ).
77 ἀδιαιρέτως , indivise , ἀχωρίστως , inseparabiliter (without division, without separation), both in opposition to Nestorianism, which so emphasized the duality of natures, and the continued distinction between the human and the divine in Christ, as to lose sight of the unity of person, and to substitute for a real Incarnation a mere conjunction ( συνάφεια ), a moral union or intimate friendship between the Divine Logos and the man Jesus. Hence, also, the opposition to the term θεοτόκος , with which the Nestorian controversy began. With the Symbol of Chalcedon should be compared the semi-symbolical Epistola dogmatica of Pope Leo, I. to the Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople, which contains a lengthy and masterly exposition of the orthodox Christology against the heresy of Eutyches, and was read and approved by the Council of Chalcedon, as the voice of Peter speaking through 'the Archbishop of old Rome.' It is dated June 13, 449, and is found in the works of Leo M. (Ep. 24 in Quesnel's ed., Ep. 28 in the ed. Ballerini), in Mansi, Conc. Tom. V. pp. 1366–90 (Latin and Greek, with the different readings), Hardouin, Conc. Tom. II. pp. 290–300 (also Latin and Greek, but without the variations), Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, Vol. II. pp. 335–346 (German and Latin), partly also in Denzinger, Enchir. p. 43.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds2.iv.i.iii.html
The Latin translation of the first definition of the Symbol of Chalcedon reads:
Sequentes igitur sanctos Patres, unum eundemque confiteri Filium Dominumn nostrum Jesum Christum consonanter omnes docemus, eundem perfectum in deitate, eundem perfectum in humanitate, Deum vere et hominem vere, eundem ex anima rationale et corpore, consubstantialem Patri secundum deitatem et consubstantialem nobis eundem secundum humanitatem, “per omnia nobis similem absque peccato” (cf. Heb.r 4:15) (emphasis added).
Denzinger-Schönmetzer *301.
We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and cosubstantial with us according to the manhood, in all things like unto us, without sin;
The implications of this doctrine of the consubstantiality of Jesus the Christ with our personal humanity have been hardly touched by theological tradition: particularly, his subsistence in our humanity, i.e., his being “consubstantialem nobis eundem secundum humanitatem,” can hardly be otherwise than the creation of humanity as inherent in his Mission from the Father to give the Spirit, as Paul taught in Phil. 6-7,and therefore inherent in his headship, as Paul taught in Col. 1:15-16.
However, it is enough here to observe that in our fallen history Jesus the Lord is consubstantial with us historically, as the Head of the humanity he has redeemed by the outpouring of his Spirit upon the Church, and that the historical objectivity and efficacy of his Lordship over history is actual in the Eucharistic representation of his sacrificial institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the created Image of the Trinity. It is evident that, within this covenantal One Flesh which, precisely as the created Image of the Trinity, cannot but be free as well as substantial, the second Eve is consubstantial with her Head, for she proceeds from him as from her source, as the Son, proceeding from the Father, is thereby consubstantial with Him.
Summarily, Jesus the Son subsists in the divine Substance, the Trinity, and thereby is God, the Son; he subsists in the One Flesh, and thereby is Man, the Head. Much of the post-Chalcedonian Christological confusion recited by Bernard Lonergan, Louis Bouyer and Aloys Grillmeier would have been avoided by founding Christological speculation upon the scriptural datum of creation in Christ, simply by according to Jesus the Christ that metaphysical primordiality over creation that is his, as its Head: not in the accommodated and dehistoricized sense accepted by St. Thomas, in which the Mission of the one and the same Son to Give the Spirit is not involved.[694]
Jesus the Christ is the head, the second Adam, whose Mission from the Father is precisely creative, the plenary giving of the Spiritus Creator, by which the One Flesh of the good creation is instituted and from which in the first Adam it freely fell, to be reconstituted in its primordial perfection by the One Sacrifice of the Head, the Bridegroom, the one and the same Son, whose uniquely Personal subsistence, at once in humanity and in divinity: i.e., in the free community of the One Flesh as its Head, and as the only-begotten Son in the free Community of Father, Son and Spirit that is the Trinity, required that his Mission be fulfilled not simply primordially, in the Beginning, by the offer of nuptial unity, but also in fallen history, by the offering of One Sacrifice by which "for freedom we are freed."
It is difficult to avoid the impression that the source of the confusion Bouyer has summarized is the time-honored failure of Catholic theologians to understand that it is Jesus the Christ, the “one and the same Son” who, sent by the Father to give the Spirit, is by that Mission the “subject of the Incarnation,” i.e., the Logos of the “Logos sarx egeneto” of Jn. 1:14: in short, a failure to understand that it is the “one and the same Son” with whom the Symbol of Chalcedon is concerned. The Catholic Church knows nothing of an “immanent-Trinitarian Son;” he could not be the Jesus, the consubstantial Son of the Father and of Mary, “One and the same,” the object of her faith.
However, as already noted, Louis Bouyer himself, despite his emphasis upon the identity of the Marcan-Johannine Logos with Jesus the Christ, falls into the ancient trap of assuming the “subject of the Incarnation,” to be not Jesus the Christ but, instead, the “immanent Logos.” This mistake is apparent in Bouyer’s approval of the Christology of Leontius of Byzantium, which he takes to be explicative of the doctrine of II Constantinople:
Il (Leontius) précise, tout à fait dans le ligne de Cyrille :
Le Christ ne possède une hypostase humaine qui, comme la nôtre, est particularisée et distincte par rapport à tous les êtres de même espèce ou d’espèce différente, mais l’hypostase du Logos, commune et inséparable par rapport à sa nature humaine, et à la nature divine qui la dépasse.18
18 Adversus Nest., 29 ; P.G. 86A, col. 1749 BC.
Parce qu’elle est celle du Logos, en effet, l’hypostase du Christ n’est pas particulière mais commune.19.
19. Ibid., col. 1749 D.
C’est pourquoi l’Ècriture appelle l’humanité du Christ « chair », car c’est un terme générique désignant toute la nature humaine, et c’est bien non pas seulement un individu de la race humane mais tout l’humanité qui a été unie à la divinité dans le Christ20.
20 Ibid., col 1749 D à 1752 A.
Comme la souligne Meyendorff 21, ceci rejoint les idées pauliniennes du nouvel Adam et du corps du Christ. C’est un écho à la doctrine d’Irenée sur la récapitulation, à celle de Grégoire de Nysse selon laquelle c’est l’humanité tout entiére qui forme une seule image de Dieu, et avant tout à la formule de Cyrille d’après laquelle le Logos incarné « nous possède en lui-même, dans la mesure où il a assumé notre nature et fait de notre corps le corps du Logos 22 ».
21 Meyendorff, Le Christ dans la théologie byzantine, Paris, 1969, p. 99.
22 In Jo. 9,1 ; éd. Pusey, vol. 2, p. 486.
Louis Bouyer, Le Fils eternel: Théologie de la Parole de Dieu et christologie (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1974), at 405.
In a recent article, “Individual Natures in the Christology of Leontius of Byzantium,” The Journal of Early Christian Studies 0.2 (Summer, 2002), 245-265, Richard Cross has questioned Bouyer’s reading of Leontius. Be that reading as it may, the concern here is Bouyer’s Christology, not that of Leontius.
The foregoing discussion by Bouyer assumes the nonhistorical or immanent Logos to be the subject of the Incarnation, precisely that the reading of Logos sarx egeneto which Bouyer, in the same work, has earlier rejected, because referring not to Jesus the Christ but to a Logos-doctrine dependent upon Greek speculation and improperly read into the Prologue by the Fathers reliant upon Stoic and Platonic conceptuality. The systematic chapter entitled “Réflexions” (pp. 469-513), which concludes Bouyer’s otherwise splendid study, Le Fils Éternel, reveals this nonhistorical postulate as still controlling his own Christological speculation.
This mistake, the product of a dehistorized theology of the Trinity, and hence of the Missions of the Son and the Spirit, entails the further misinterpretation of the union of Christ with the ecclesial body. Once more we see a non-covenantal and Christomonist understanding of that unity, which precisely ignores what is utterly essential, the covenantal nuptiality of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church upon which Augustine, following Paul, was insistent, but which the Christological speculation of the Neoplatonizing patristic tradition, locked into the pagan postulate of the necessary and therefore monadic unity of the human substance, could not accommodate. That ancient failure to grasp the substantial freedom of the good creation, whose goodness is its free, nuptially-ordered imaging of the Triune God, has finally been transcended by the clear affirmation, in the last doctrinal statement of John Paul II’s papacy, affirming our nuptial imaging of God, which can only be an imaging of the immanent freedom of the Trinitarian Substance by the immanent nuptial freedom of the human substance, whose Head and Archē is Jesus the Lord.
In sum, the Church’s faith in the divine homoousion of Jesus her Lord, as affirmed against Arius at Nicaea, her faith in the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, affirmed against the “Spirit-fighters” at I Constantinople, her faith in the full humanity of Jesus, affirmed against the Nestorians at Ephesus, and against the Monophysites at Chalcedon, is unintelligible unless read historically of Jesus the Word, the one and the same Son, sent by the Father to give the Spirit. Thus read, it finds its full expression in the Symbol of Chalcedon, which Catholic theologians have ignored by reason of its incompatibility with the cosmological rationality governing theological quaerens since the early fourth century, but from which it is nonetheless the permanent task of Catholic theology to purify, to convert, the Catholic consciousness.
That theological task has been postponed for the more than fifteen centuries since the Council of Chalcedon insisted on the historicity of the Church’s faith in the One Mediator, Jesus the Christ, the one and the same Son. For seven of these centuries Catholic theology has proceeded under the aegis of the metaphysical monism which St. Thomas, confident in his accommodation of the Symbol of Chalcedon to the Neoplatonic/Aristotelian metaphysical tradition, wrote into his Summa Theologiae, and which became normative for subsequent theological speculation nearly to the end of the twentieth century.[695]
From the outset, the Trinity has posed the basic theological problem.: for example, Karl Rahner has insisted that a multi-personal intellectual substance.is inconceivable. Certainly, its conception is impossible in terms of cosmological rationality, apart from its conversion to and appropriation of the free historicity of the Revelation. Nonetheless, it is out of that spontaneous sarkic rejection of the freedom of truth and being as simply irrational and, with it, the consequent rejection of the possibility of the Revelation as lacking a prior necessity-posssibility, that all the Christian heresies have arisen. All of them are attempts to normalize the fallen rationality from which conversion is essential if one is to accept the free truth of the Revelation that is given in Christ. This conversion requires of theologian a personally responsible participation in the Eucharistic worship of the Church by which alone the Truth of Christ is mediated in our fallen history. The faith that Jesus Christ is Lord is not subject to the search for antecedently necessary reasons which now passes for historical criticism: the faith is the Norma Normans of historical truth, or it is nothing at all.
Lately, the International Comission on English in the Liturgy has fed this failure of the Catholic imagination, of the Catholic consciousness, into the liturgy by by obscuring, inter alia, the translation of the homoousios of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan and Chalcedonian symbols. The attempt of Harnack and his affines to read a “Neo-Nicene” Trinitarian heresy into the consubstantiality which Councils of Nicaea and First Constantinople affirmed of the Son with the Father failed, and the Nicene definition of the consubstantiality, the homoousion, of the Son continues to be read in the Church as asserting a numerical unity or identity of the indivisible divine substance, which absolute unity alone could support the Catholic faith in the full divinity of the Son and of the Spirit as proceeding from the Father. The Persons of the Trinity are not “similar” in their divinity; still less do they “sharing” in a divisible divinity. Rather the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit each possess, uniquely, Personally, the fullness of divinity. Each is consubstantial with the other Persons because each subsists in identically the same divine Substance, the Trinity. The Catholic doctrine of their Personal divinity otherwise would be absurd.
Although the same word (homoousios) was again deployed at Chalcedon to affirm with a Nicene clarity the contested full humanity of the Son, we now find I.C.E.L. avoiding this indispensable term, whose only valid English translation is “consubstantial”), in its revisionist translations of the official Church document, the Roman Missal, whose Latin text is criteriological for its translation into English and other languages,
I.C.E.L.’s revisionist approach to liturgical translation appears first in its rendition of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, wherein “consubstantialis cum Patre” is rendered as “one in Being with the Father.” The bureaucratic dismissal of the doctrinal weight of “consubstantialis cum Patre” is manifest in a preference not merely for folksy imprecision over the precision of doctrine, but for a blurring, at best, of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, reminiscent of the fastidious avoidance of references to the divinity of Jesus by the adherents of a “Christology from below.” Already it is not uncommon to read learned references to the divine Persons’ “sharing” in the divine nature―quod est absurdum. Such implicitly polytheistic language, if innocent in intention, as Cardinal George has hopefully observed, is nonetheless consistent with I.C.E.L.’s nominalist revision of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. The “sharing” idiom intends an evident denial of the Trinitarian faith of the Church. Since Nicaea the Church has affirmed with clarity the Son’s consubstantiality with the Fathe, whose divinity is eternally received by the Son and, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit, whereby the Son and the Holy Spirit each possesses the fullness of the divine nature. Thereby they are homoousios (of the same substance) with each other because each is consubstantial with their source, their Head, the Father. It must be stressed that each divine Person possesses the same substance, not the one substance, for the “one divine substance” is the Trinity in which each divine Person subsists, and which no divine Person possesses or constitutes.
I.C.E.L.’s trendy dumbing-down of the faith to Neo-Nicene dimensions entails an implicit denial that the faith is, as such, a quaerens intellecttum:―for no Catholic intelligence can be nourished by such banalities. Underlying that implication is a dubium arising out of the enlistment of theologians such as Rahner, Bouyer, Lonergan and Schillebeeckx in the rediscovery of the impermeability of fallen history to the divinity of Jesus: God does not speak in history,” as Raymond Brown insists−see endnote 217, supra−and thus of the incompatibility of history with the realism of the Catholic sacramental tradition qua tale. The “historical consciousness” of the contemporary Catholic exegete tends to be shocked by the dogmatic assertion of the concrete historicity of the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice.
I.C.E.L.’s revision of the Creed has inserted into the liturgy a plethora of what, read at the letter, are heretical assertions. Perhaps the best known, a clear instance of the Neo-Nicene reduction of the Trinity to a divine species of which the Persons are members, is found in the First Preface for Christmas:
In the wonder of the incarnation, your eternal Word has brought to the eyes of faith a new and radiant vision of your glory:
In him we see our God made visible, and so are caught up in the love of the God we cannot see.
A more explicit affirmation of polytheism would be difficult to contrive. Its official approval for liturgical use over a period of thirty years without magisterial objection throws an unwelcome light upon the failure of the hierarchy of the English-speaking Church to meet their indelegable responsibility for the Church’s worship in truth.[696]
The same Neo-Nicene idiom has entered the liturgy by way of the Breviary, again without any apparent notice being taken by the English-speaking bishops. One of the four great Fathers of the Latin Church has fallen victim to this insouciance: we excerpt here two Latin passages from a letter of Leo the Great, along with their rendition by I.C.E.L. for liturgical use in the Liturgy of the Hours:
Lucas vero retrorsum successionum gradus relegens, ad ipsum humani generis principem redit (Luc. III, 23), ut Adam primum et Adam novissimum ejusdem ostendat esse naturae.
Leo I, Ep. 31 (P. L. 54:0791B).
The ICEL translation, from the Liturgy of the Hours, I, p. 320
On the other hand Luke traces his parentage backward step by step to the actual father of mankind, to show that both the first and the last Adam share the same nature.
A bit further on in St. Leo’s letter we read:
Nisi enim novus homo, factus in similitudinem carnis peccati, nostram susciperet vetustatem, et consubstantialis Patri, consubstantialis esse dignaretur et matri, naturamque sibi nostram solus a peccato liber uniret, sub jugo diaboli generaliter teneretur human captivitas; nec uti possemus triumphantis victoria, si extra nostram esset conserta naturam.
Once again, the ICEL translation, excerpted from the Liturgy of the Hours, I, p. 321:
For unless the new man, by being made in the likeness of sinful humanity had taken on himself the nature of our first parents, unless he had stooped to be one in substance with his mother while sharing the Father’s substance and, being alone free from sin, united our nature to his, the whole human race would still be held captive under the dominion of Satan. The Conqueror’s victory would have profited us nothing if the battle had been fought outside our human condition.
It is enough to note that this reduction of the Trinity and of its created Image, the humanity of which Jesus is the redemptive Head, to a fungible subject of “sharing” contradicts the dogmatic emphases of one of the greatest of the Latin Fathers, the Leo whose dogmatic Letter to Flavian stressed precisely those precisions which I.C.E.L. evidently cannot abide―or will not. But, since the establishment of I.C.E.L. and the U. S. bishops’ delegation of their indelegable episcopal responsibility for the liturgy to its faceless few, “sharing” has come to trump “homoousios.” Instances are heard daily at the Mass.
The Latin of the Offertory Prayer over the water and the wine is as follows:
Per huius aquae et vini mysterium, eius efficiamur divinitatis consortes, qui humanitatis nostrae fieri dignatus est particeps.
The I.C.E.L. translation renders it as:
By the mystery of this water and wine, may we share in his divinity who humbled himself to share in our humanity.
The antiquity of this Offertory Prayer over the mixed wine and water, together with its long perdurance in the Latin liturgy, do not suffice to heal the confusion patent in its I.C.E.L. translation, exacerbated as it is by what Jorge Cardinal Medina-Estévez has described as:
…the overuse of the term “sharing” (which) flattens and trivializes the content conveyed by the Latin words participes and consortes.
“Observations upon the English-language Translation of the Roman Missal,” IV, forwarded in a letter dated 16 March, 2002, by Jorge Cardinal Medina-Estévez, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, to the Presidents of the National on English in the Liturgy (I.C.E.L.).
The Cardinal’s criticism is quite clearly aimed inter alia at the translation of the prayer over the mixed water and wine of the Offertory.
The notion that the divinity of Jesus is open to a human “sharing” may be an allusion to the Alexandrine interpretation of our resurrection as a divinization. Even so, this cannot excuse a prayer that we may “share” in the Redeemer’s divinity, for were it open to “sharing” it would not be divinity. This naiveté echoes that of I.C.E.L.’s Neo-Nicene reading of the Nicene homoousios. The assertion that Jesus “humbled himself to share in our humanity” is further nonsensical: the Head, the source and the creator of our humanity does not “share” in that of which he is the head: this by definition. The equation of Jesus’ “sharing out humanity” with the humiliation of his kenōsis precisely dehistoricizes the kenōsis revealed in Jn. 1:14, I Jn. 4:2, and Phil. 2:5-11 by insinuating that the “subject of the incarnation” is not Jesus, the “one and the same Son,” but the pre-human Word, who becomes, not flesh, but “man.” The official approval given I.C.E.L.’s perpetuation of this ancient error in every sacrifice of the Mass, both in this offertory prayer, and in the translation of the Creed, is inexcusable.
The recital, in this ancient prayer, integral to the Church’s historical worship, of Jesus’ “participation in our humanity” can be heard liturgically only as the acknowledgement of his redemptive subsistence, as our Head, in our fallenness: i.e., as the recognition of his historical consubstantiality with us in our solidarity with the first Adam, which is to say, our solidarity in “sarx”. So read, the prayer has the reality of Jesus’ kenōsis in view, the self-emptying of the primordial second Adam, the head, the Alpha and the Omega who, as we read in Jn. 1:14 “became flesh.” The parallel passage in Phil. 2:5-11, describes the same primordial event, the kenōsis in which the primordial Lord, in obedience to his mission “unto death, death on the Cross,” “took the form of a slave,” entering as our head into that servitude from which he alone could free us and, through us, free the fallen creation. The prayer over the mixed wine and water then links our “divinization” to Jesus’ obedience to his Mission which, by reason of the Fall, had become redemptive, sacrificial, and crucifying.
Unfortunately there is a still-dominant Neoplatonizing theological tradition which insists on a non-historical reading of the Incarnation and the kenōsis, supposing them to refer not to the One and the Same Son, Jesus, but to a theoretical Trinity-immanent Son who, in Jn. 1:14, simply ‘became human.’ This dehistoricization of Jesus’ kenōsis-Incarnation is ireconciliable with the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which refers pre-existence to:
one Lord Jesus Christ the only begotten Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things came into existence, who because of us men and because of our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate from Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man, and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried, and rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures and ascended to heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, and will come again with glory to judge living and dead, of whose kingdom there will be no end.
The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed has a single subject, Jesus the Christ, the Lord, the Eternal Son of the Father, the historicaal Son of she whom the Councils of Ephesus, of Chalcedon and of II Constantinople will name Theotokos. There can be no question of his humanity nor, after Ephesus, of his human Person; here he is simply confessed as the eternal Son of the Father, who for our sake became incarnate; which the controls the following phrase, “became man,” for becoming “flesh” (incarnatus est, σαρκοθéντα) refers directly to “came down from heaven” (descendit a caelo, οὐρανῶν), equivalently the kenōsis of the primordial Jesus the Lord (Jn. 1:14; I Jn 4:2, Phil. 2:6-7), as “became man” (homo factus est, ενανθρωπήσαντα) does not.
Here it becomes necessary to say again that the prayer of the Church is always historical, for the object of her faith is the historical Jesus, the Christ, the One and the Same Son whose Personal and historical unity the Symbol of Chalcedon eight times affirmed. The Church worships the Father through his Son, Jesus the Christ, in the Holy Spirit whom he was sent to give, whereby we can know the Father as, precisely, “our Father.” Both Paul and John refer the kenōsis of the Redeemer to the primordial Jesus the Christ, whom Paul will name the Beginning and the second Adam, whom John will name the Logos, the Alpha and the Omega, and whom Luke will affirm to have been named ‘Jesus’ by the angel before he was conceived. Apart from this historical understanding of the kenōsis of Jesus, i.e., his becoming the Suffering Servant, that quasi-Nestorian dualism which has afflicted Latin Christology since the middle of the fourth century becomes inevitable. Via the Christology set out in Pars Tertia of St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae, it now pervades the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It should not be permitted to pervade the normative text of the Mass. The only possible interpretation of this passage is “and was made flesh” for it clearly relies upon Jn. 1:14. The clause, “And was made man” does not for most Catholics signify the kenōsis of our Lord, which is his being “made flesh,” i.e., his entering freely, as the primordial Jesus, the Son of Man, “the bread from heaven,” into the misery, the slavery, the mortality, native to our fallenness, in order that, as our Head, he may restore our freedom. The poverty of the statement that the head, the source of all humanity, by his becoming flesh is “made man” obscures the faith of the Church, whether in the Latin “homo factus est,” or in I.C.E.L.’s English, which here at least accurately translates the textus receptus.
The official approbation of such vagaries may account for the curious rendition of the Chalcedonian Symbol’s homoousios / consubstantialis a decade later in the English edition of Karl Baus’ report of that Council [697] wherein we read:of the Son:
The One and the Same is equal in substance to the Father in his divinity and equal in substance to us in his humanity.
The corresponding Latin verses (9-10) of the Chalcedonian Symbol reads:
Consubstantialem Patri secundum deitatatem
Et consubstantialem nobis eundem secundum humanitatem
Baus’ translation, “equal in substance,” like “one in substance,” does not in fact translate the dogmatically, i.e. historically, established Personal meaning of homoousios, “the same substance,” which is a liturgically-underritten and therefore at once irreformable and continually developing expression of the Church’s faith, of her worship in truth. Its truth had been struggled for throughout the fifty-six years between the Councils of Nicaea and I Constantinople, in which the cosmologically-grounded Arian heresy tested the faith of the infant Church in Jesus as the Lord, and failed to overcome the liturgical historicity of her mediation of the revealed Truth which is ours in Christ.
The appropriate expression of Jesus’ divinity as the Son was then in question. Througout nearly forty years of controversy, the Cappadocian “semi-Arians,” were content with the anti-Sabellian homoiousion, equivalently Harnack’s Neo-Nicenism, which he claimed to have been given doctrinal standing in the Provincial Council of Alexandria and in the First Council of Constantinople. They could not be persuaded, in 362, to accept the argument of Athanasius in the Tome to the Antiochenes, that the divinity of Jesus the Son was not supported by Basil of Ancyra’s verbal relativization of its fullness, homoios kat’ousian, as though Jesus were merely “like in substance” to the Father. The homoiousian community in Antioch to whom Athanasius had addressed his Tome refused its invitation to ecclesial solidarity through the single means of subscription to the Nicene Creed. Instead, loyal to Meletius, they upheld his claim to the See of Antioch by attending the Council he called in the year following, (363) which attempted to identify the Nicene Creed with the homoiousian rejection of its truth.
That Council confirmed the “Schism of Antioch;” thereafter Athanasius dropped any attempt to deal with them. In 363, having travelled to Antioch soon enough to have anticipated the Arian and homoiousian missions to the new Emperor, Jovian, Athanasius presented Jovian with a credal statement which earned Jovian’s confirmation of Athansius’ episcopal authority over the See of Alexandria. Thus armed, Athanasius confirmed Paulinus’ allegedly irregular ordination by Lucifer of Cagliari, and in so doing, recognized him as the legitimate Bishop of Antioch; Pope Damasus would soon confirm Paulinus’s authority over the See of Antioch. The First Council of Constantinople (381) repeated the Nicene Creed’s affirmation of the full divinity of Jesus, the Son, and found his full divinity to be proper also to the Holy Spirit, although resisting to the end the urging of Gregory of Nazianzen to proclaim the homoousion of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son.
This left the homoiousians with no place to stand. If, as is now doubted, their leader, Basil of Caesarea, is the author of his 38th Letter, he began to construct a Trinitarian synthesis, but was never able to transcend his Eusebian confusion. References to a “Cappadocian Settlement” are specious. They rely largely on the supposed acceptance by Meletius of the Nicene Creed in his council of 363, which never occured, and upon Basil’s attempts to construct a Trinitarian idiom on a basis which was anything but Nicene.
The homoousion of the Son and of the Holy Spirit with the Father is their Personally unique and irreducible subsistence in the multi-Personal divine substance, the Trinity in which the Father subsists as its head, i.e., as the Archē, the source, of free unity of the one God, which can only be the perichōresis of the Persons constituting Trinitarian Substance, the ordered and dynamic community of the Father with the Son and Spirit who eternally proceed from him and whose consubstantiality with the him is their eternal perichōresis with the Father.
We are indebted to Cyril of Alexandria for the Chalcedonian completion of the homoousion of the Son by its application to his humanity. In his Laetentur caeli Cyril celebrates the proclamation by the Council of Ephesus that Mary, by her motherhood of Jesus, is the Mother of God. The full implication of the Conciliar confirmation of this already ancient title of Our Lady was recognized and confirmed at Chalcedon, which taught that Jesus is consubstantial with every human person: he subsists in the unity of the human substance as he subsists in the unity of the divine substance: only thus is the truth of the communication of idioms assured: only thus is he Jesus the Lord.
Now that more than fifteen centuries have passed without a theological appropriation−“reception”−of the Council of Chalcedon’s affirmation of the human consubstantiality of Jesus, it is more than clear that the comparably monist cosmological understanding of the unity of the human substance stands in the way of theological recognition and appropriation of the Symbol of Chalcedon. The same ontological monism which in the early fourth century barred Jesus Personal divinity by its refusal to accept the Pauline doctrine of the Father’s Headship of the Trinity, together with the conesquent consubstantiality with him of the Son and the Spirit, now fails to accept the Pauline doctrine of Jesus’ headship. The commonplace denial of his Personal humanity bars the recognition of the free unity of the human substance of which he is the Head, and whose members cannot but be consubstantial with their ead, as the Persons of the Trinity cannot but be consubstantial with their Head.
This radical truth, this inexhaustible mystery of the Catholic faith, is revealed by the obedience of Jesus the Christ to his Mission from the Father to give the Holy Spirit. It is by that Gift alone that we may recognize the Father as Our Father and the one God as the Triune Community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In giving us the Holy Spirit, we are freed to return to Him who, as the source of all free unity, is the object of our worship in truth and of our covenantal fidelity, the Jesus the Lord, the Truth incarnate. The homoousios of the Son and of the Holy Spirit with the Father is not negotiable on any account whatever.
One must ask what motivates the drive, perennial since Arius, to domesticate and annul the Perspma; homoousion, whether of the One and the same Son, or of the Holy Spirit. The answer is simple: autonomous reason is simply incapable of accepting the free truth of the revelation in Jesus the Lord of the Trinity of consubstantial Persons. Free truth is simply indigestible by autonomous reason―which is to say, by Modernity and its sequelae. The liturgical affirmation of the homoousios of the Son with the Father is thus held irrational, “tritheist.” Thus thought Basil of Ancyra, who took the metaphysical monism and the anti-Trinitarian subordinationism of Eusebius of Caesarea for granted. Karl Rahner is only the latest, and surely not the last, to affirm that monism, and so to insist upon subordinating Jesus the Christ’s revelation of the Trinity to the supposed autonomy of reason.
The Enlightenment’s apotheosis of Reason−which is to say, of Humanity−and the scorn of the half-educated philosophes for their Catholic adversaries, was inspired by the Deism which so charmed Voltaire, and to which the bulk of Catholic scholarship continues to subscribe. It may be said that Raymond Brown’s Nestorian assurance that “God does not speak,”[698] and his disciples’ consequent quest, despite Bultmann, for the “presuppositionless” exegesis that is its corollary, pushed to its logical limit by the “Jesus Seminar,” are less influential today, but the dehistoricization of the truth in order that it may sustain the scrutiny of academic rationality is still with us. Lonergan in his latter years thought Catholic theologians were required to submit to that rationality, the “philology” which he considered to have “deprived them of their sources,” and so required them to undergo an admittedly intellectual conversion from the rationalism of the Scholastics. He was arguably right as to the Schoolmen, but he did not go far enough, for he intended only a conversion from an inadequate Thomistic or Suarezian analytics to the dehistorizing “cognitional analysis” spelled out in his Method in Theology, wherein faith is reduced to a generic religious conviction.[699]
Lonergan was hardly alone in his distaste for the moribund scholasticism of his time: Teilhard and von Balthasar had abandoned the scholastic rationalism well before him; Rahner and Schillebeeckx were comparably disenchanted and, with Josef Fuchs, the Catholic moralists’ rationalization of morality into a fabric of “natural law” began to undergo a critique from which it has not recovered. Nor will it, until Catholic moralists are at long last persuaded to accept what John Paul II has taught in Veritatis Splendor, viz., the free nuptial order of morality, and the sacramentality of the covenantal fidelity that is in fact the natural law in its sole legitimate, i.e., historical sense. It is for freedom, for the exercise of personal responsibility for each other, that Christ has made us free, not for conformity to the immanently necessary rationality of the cosmological flight from personal responsibility, from covenantal fidelity, from the Eucharistically-signed salvific history of which Jesus the Lord is the Beginning and the End. Morality is covenantal fidelity, it is not passive conformity to “eternal law;” were it, we could never know it.
By its historical institution, on the Altar and on the Cross, inseparably, the Catholic Church is historical, an ongoing, liturgically expressed communal conversion to the Truth of Christ, mediated not by theology, however liberated from scholasticism, but by the Church’s worship in truth of the Truth Incarnate. Similarly the faith of the Church is sustained, not by conformity to academic fashion or whimsy, but by the One Sacrifice of Christ, the Eucharistic “medicine of immortality.” This worship in truth of the Truth Incarnate, is historical and therefore doctrinal, pace Lonergan, Rahner, and their contemporary affines, The Catholic liturgy is at one with the Symbols, the Creeds, of the great Councils, for the concretely historical Truth whom the Church worships is the Head, the source, of the free order of the good creation which, as historical, requires sacramental representation in our fallen history.
Any return to a sound historical theological scholarship must choose between the futile Deist humanism which is now losing its charm, and the liberation of time from futility by the Lord of history who, as our Head, as the Eucharistic Lord, transcends the fragmentation of time into past, the present and the future, giving our otherwise inevitably entropic temporality the free and historically objective unity of the Old Covenant, the New Covenant, the Kingdom of God. This concrete historicity is personal because it is free: it is personally appropriated through participation in the Eucharistic worship of the Church, and not otherwise.[700] Its appropriation indeed requires a conversion, the lifting up of the mind and heart to God in the worship of Christ the Lord, the Truth incarnate, the Mysterium fidei whose Truth is always greater than the minds to whom he offers himself in signo, in the daily worship of the Church.
The mistaken substitution of a merely nominal unity─“One in Being”─for the homoousios of Jesus with his Father, undercuts also that imaging of the Triune God for which we were created. I.C.E.L’s Neo-Nicene distortion of the Chalcedonian doctrine that Jesus the Christ is “consubstantialem nobis” reduces the Trinitarian Persons to members of an Aristotelian species; Arius would not have contested the merely nominal divinity of its members.. The same refusal of the metaphysical weight of the Personal homoousion of Jesus the Christ with the Father must similarly dismiss as unimportant the free, covenantal consubstantiality of the Christ the Bridegroom, the Head, with his ecclesial Body, the bridal Church, and with those who are created in him by reason of his headship of humanity (1 Cor. 11:3; Col. 1:16; Jn. 1:3).
This unconcern for the liturgically and historically established meaning of the most fought-over word in the Church’s history, makes it effectively impossible to understand our Redemption as our liberation, as the restoration of our free unity by the Head of the Church, of humanity and of creation, for only the Head can liberate, for only he is the source of the free unity of the substance in which as Head he subsists.
I.C.E.L.’s corruption of the liturgy by way of the effective dismissal of the homoousios of the Son with the Father must also dismiss his consubstantiality with us which, in the economy of salvation, is his institution, on the Cross and the Altar, of the Eucharistic cause of the Church, and of the nuptial order of the created freedom which was lost in the first Adam and restored in his type, the second Adam, Jesus the Christ: see Rom. 8:18 ff.
All exercise of personal authority, including that of a “representative personality,” which does not derive from and recognize the authority of the Head, of the Redeemer, is finally coercive, for it lacks the Trinitarian foundation by which alone is intelligible the free association of persons in substantial community. Only there is transcended the dilemma proper to autonomous rationality, the “problem of the one and the many.”. Otherwise, i.e., as posed by autonomous rationality, it has no resolution. The usual perception of our freedom in Christ amounts to its dehistoricization, its reduction to a conformity to “eternal law:” thus the natural law tradition as it has been presented down to the present day. This is also the inescapable consequence of I.C.E.L.’s effective dehistoricization of the liturgical mediation of the Catholic faith in Jesus who is the Lord because he is the Head of our humanity, the authoritative source of its free substantial unity a unity which autonomous rationality cannot imagine, must less conceive.
Jesus the Christ is our Lord precisely as our consubstantial Head, not simply as divine, but as the one and the same Son, the Personally human Archē, the human Source of the free unity of the Good Creation, which unity, as proceeding from him through his Glory, the Church, can only be the nuptially-ordered free unity of the New Covenant. No other free unity has ever been conceived, much less proposed. It had to be revealed, the One Sacrifice on the Altar in the Last Supper, on the Cross and in its Eucharistic anamnesis. It is more than a pity that the world-transforming significance of the revelation should be ignored by those theologians whose central act of worship is its celebration.
It would be difficult today to find an educated Catholic who is aware of this truth of the faith: viz., that Jesus is the Lord because of his Personal consubstantiality with us as the liberating Head of humanity and thereby of creation tout court. This enormous truth has been dehistoricized by theologians since its proclamation at Chalcedon in 451, more than fifteen centuries ago. I.C.E.L.’s nominalist substitution of “One in Being” for “consubstantial” amounts to a liturgical confirmation and ratification of this long incomprehension of the Chalcedonian Symbol. This recourse to Neo-Nicene revisionism is entirely alien to the free, covenantal, nuptially-ordered unity of the Christus Totus, the One Flesh of the Bridegroom and the Bridal Church, and thereby is inconsistent with the solemnly defined homoousion of our Lord “with us.” I.C.E.L. has lately been deprived of its autonomy, thereby of its insolence, and transformed into a servant of the Church, but the relics of its past insurgency are still with us, infesting the liturgical books still in use at this writing and, after forty years of liturgical inculcation, infesting the minds of two generations of Catholics. The most blatant among them is the facile substitution of “the Holy Spirit for the «πνευμα αγιον» of Lk. 1:35, a mistake which denies the taxis (τάξις) of the Church’s Trinitarian faith.
Once written into the canonical liturgy, this routine dehistoricization of the faith encourages a personal worship which ignores, dismisses, and is dismally ignorant of what is utterly essential to the Church’s indefeasibly Eucharistic expression of faith in Jesus the Christ, viz., the covenantal nuptiality of the One Flesh of Christ and the Church in which the Mission of the Jesus the Lord terminates in the full Gift of the Spirit to the Church and, through her, to all creation.
Paul is insistent upon this nuptiality from I Cor. 6 to Eph. 5; Augustine’s genius named the nuptial unity of the Head with his bridal body “the whole Christ” (Christus totus), but the subsequent Christological meditation by the patristic tradition, lacking the historical metaphysical insight capable of exploring the free, sacramentally objective unity of the nuptial One Flesh, left it in the confusion which prompted Amalarius’ famous discussion of the “triforme corpus Christi,” language which naively reduced the free unity of the nuptial One Flesh of the New Covenant to the merely physical and unfree unity of a body, an organism.
Having uncritically accepted the pagan postulate of the necessary intelligibility of the human substance, the Fathers had no metaphysics capable of accommodating the revelation of its free substantial unity. This inability to consider the free intelligibility of substance has posed the central problem of Catholic theology from the revival of systematic theology in the early Middle Ages down to the present. It is more than unfortunate that the contemporary programs of liturgical renewal should have been so influenced by an untutored revisionism entirely careless of the doctrinal significance of the historical-liturgical tradition, on occasion to the point of openly ignoring it.
This work has been concerned first and foremost with the exposition of the Roman Catholic liturgical-doctrinal tradition and of its inadequate appropriation by the theological traditions, whether patristic, Carolingian, medieval, renaissance, or contemporary. The prospect of now entering into a discussion of the major issue dividing Greek Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism is more than daunting: it may be entirely impractical. On the other hand, the tension between the Christian East and West concerns the interpretation of the human homoousion of the Jesus Christ, the one and the same Son, taught by the Chalcedonian Symbol, and therefore cannot but be included within the subject matter of this study. Specifically, the Filioque controversy has arisen in the abstract context provided by the nearly universal supposition that the subject of Jn. 1:14 is the “immanent Son.” This supposition, as has been shown, is fatal to the clearly historical task of theology: in fact, it entails the refusal of that task by refusing its sole object, the revelation of the Father by Jesus Christ the Lord.
Insofar as it is understood to be on the level of doctrine, the Filioque controversy is a consequence of that refusal. Its subject has perennially been the Trinity in abstraction from the Father’s historical sending of the Son to give the Spirit, in abstraction then from the Father’s Headship; He is understood as the Archē (Ἀρχή), the source, the cause, from whom the Son and the Holy Spirit proceed, but by a procession all too easily viewed as immanently necessary rather than free, whereas the Processions cannot but be free, because they are from the Head, the very font of freedom. The controversialists thus ignore that the Father is the source of the free unity of the Trinity, thus of the free ordo of the Persons. It should be evident that the interrelations of the Trinitarian Persons are free, incapable of submission to a deterministic conceptual analysis resting finally upon a calculus of necessary reasons.
For nearly a millennium the Latin tradition of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father “and the Son” has been charged by most Greek Orthodox theologians with the heresy which they maintain to be implicit in the doctrinal standing finally given by Rome to the local sixth-century insertions of the “Filioque” into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.[702] With effective unanimity the Orthodox Churches of the Byzantine tradition have for nearly a millennium regarded this insertion as not only a violation of the prohibition by the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon of adding anything to the Nicene Creed, but also as a fatal departure from the Creed of the First Council of Constantinople, whose Creed must ground any ecumenical discussion between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. This most basic disagreement can hardly be ignored by a work in systematic theology.
The late Fr. John Meyendorff’s irenic approach to the long-standing schism between Byzantium and Rome has provided a point of contact between the Byzantine critique of the Filioque and the major thrust of the present extended restatement of Catholic theological method:
As time went on, it became increasingly clear that the Filioque dispute was not a discussion on words−for there was a sense in which both sides would agree to say that the Spirit proceeds “from the Son”−but on the issue of whether the hypostatic existence of the Persons of the Trinity could be reduced to their internal relations, as the post-Augustinian West would admit, or whether the primary Christian experience was that of a Trinity of Persons, whose personal existence was irreducible to their common essence. The question was whether tri-personality or consubstantiality was the first and basic content of the Christian religious experience. But to place the debate on that level and to enter into a true dialogue on the very substance of the matter, each side needed to understand the other’s position. This unfortunately never occurred. Even at the Council of Florence, where interminable confrontations on the Filioque issue took place, the discussion still dealt mainly with attempts at accommodating Greek and Latin formulations. The Council finally adopted a basically Augustinian definition of the Trinity, while affirming that the Greek formulations were not in contradiction with it. This, however, was not a solution of the fundamental problem.[703]
Meyendorff’s supposition that “the Filioque dispute was on the issue of whether the hypostatic existence of the Persons of the Trinity could be reduced to their internal relations, as the post-Augustinian West would admit, or whether the primary Christian experience was that of a Trinity of Persons, whose personal existence was irreducible to their common essence,” is perhaps hasty.
In the first place, it describes both parties to the dispute as concerned for an abstract Trinity, whose theological consideration prescinds from the historical Mission of the Son to give the Holy Spirit, and consequently renders their conclusions finally irrelevant to the profoundly soteriological interest of Trinitarian doctrine of the first four Councils. The members of the Trinity, as abstract, as considered apart from their historical revelation in Christ, can hardly be Personal, quite as the abstract hypostatic distinctions between Faher, Son and Holy Spirit cannot permit their consubstantiality. Inescapably, the Father, understood as the cause, the principle, the source of the Trinity, then could not be conceived to be immanent─subsistent─within that free Trinity of which the Father is the cause, the source, the principle. That he is thus the immanent source of the Trinity, its Head, is known by Revelation, not by abstract speculation. It is solely by the exercise of their liturgical and therefore doctrinal authority that the bishops who met at Council of Nicaea rejected the cosmological obstacle to the Father’s immanence in the Trinity, and thus recognized the Personal consubstantiality of the Son as intrinsic to the liturgical expression of the faith of the Church that Jesus Christ is Lord. Karl Rahner, in The Trinity, has developed the modalist implications of this abstraction of Trinitarian theology from the revelation of the Trinity in the Person of Jesus the Christ, the “one and the same Son.” It is more than odd to find that modalist book cited at the beginning and the end of Meyendorff’s chapter on the Trinity in his Byzantine Theology.
Secondly, and speaking quite generally, the “post-Augustinian” view of the Trinity which Meyendorff ascribes to the West is not as univocal as he would make it. Theologians reliant upon St. Thomas’ transposition of Augustine’s phenomenologically-oriented psychological analogy of the Trinity into the alien context of Aristotle’s faculty psychology, do in fact understand the subsistent Trinitarian relations to constitute the Trinitarian Persons, but Franciscan theologians such as Bonaventure, at least as reliant upon Augustine’s analogy, and loyal to its original phenomenological context, maintain that the Persons are prior to and constitutive of the Relations, the view which Meyendorff apparently would reserve to the East.
Thirdly, those who consider the Relations to constitute the Persons, would hardly accept Meyendorff’s intimation that their theology ignores the irreducibility of the Trinitarian Persons’ existence to their common essence. No doubt that inference can be drawn from St. Thomas’ doctrine of a “common spiration” of the Holy Spirit, as will be seen, but the Thomist theologians nonetheless rely upon the irreducibility of the Personal relations to the absolute divine Substance precisely to provide for the irreducible relational distinctions between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit who, as divine Persons, are in fact irreducible to a “common essence,” which is to say, irreducible to the Trinity in which each Person subsists, each possessing its divinity fully, equally, and consubstantially, but neither Personally constituting the Trinity, nor capable of identification with the Trinity, for it is the divine Substance in which each Person subsists, suo modo, whether as Father, Son, or Holy Spirit.
Further to the point, the Byzantine rejection of the Filioque appears to leave without support the constitutive order (τάξις) of the distinct Trinitarian Persons, i.e., the priority of the begetting of the Son to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, as revealed in the order of their Missions: the Son is sent to give the Holy Spirit. This becomes evident in Meyendorff’s chapter, “The Holy Spirit,” He considers the Holy Spirit to be present in history independent of─in fact as the principle of─the Incarnation, and proceeds to cite Athanasius First Letter to Serapion, quoting Athanasius to this effect:
“When the Word dwelt upon the holy Virgin Mary,” Athanasius writes, “the Spirit, together with the Word, entered her; in the Spirit, the Word fashioned a body for himself, making it in conformity with Himself, in His will to bring all creation to the Father through Himself.8
8. Ad Serap, 1, 31; PG 26:605a
Meyendorff, op. cit., at 170 (emphasis added)
This reading of a disjointed Trinitarianism, an implicit tritheism, into the Christology of Athanasius, whose insistent preaching of the substantial unity of the Trinity is beyond dispute, needs no reply here. Meyendorff suffers from the usual cosmological confusion, inherent in supposition that the pre-human Word is the subject of the Incarnation and is consubstantial with the Holy Spirit, whereby Meyendorff concludes:
The main argument, in favor of the consubstantiality of the Spirit with the Son and the Father, used by Athanasius, by Cyril of Alexandria, and the Cappodocian Fathers, is the unity of the creative and redemptive action of God, which is always Trinitarian: “The Father does all things by the Word in the Holy Spirit.”9
9 Ibid., 1, 28; PG 26L:596a.
Granted that the action of God is always Trinitarian, it is not Sabellian; the One God is not One Person, not One agent. Father acts by the sending of the Son, Jesus the Christ, to give the Holy Spirit, who has no historicity apart from that of being the Gift of the Son, realized in the Institution of the Eucharist in the High Priestly Offering of the One Sacrifice, at the Last Supper, and on the Cross. Meyendorff, like Zizioulas, is uncomfortable with this, the economy of salvation. At the outset of this discussion, he encloses that word in quotation marks, as though an idiosyncrasy not to be taken seriously, and proceeds to ignore what Athenagoras of Athens insisted upon, the τάξις by which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are Named in the unchanging order of their Trinitarian unity, revealed in the Father’s mission of the Son to give the Spirit.
In fact, Athanasius is here speaking in the context of the “Spirit Christology” of the patristic tradition, which underlies his radical commitment to the communication of idioms in Jesus Christ the Lord. Specifically, that ancient exegesis refers the “πνεῦμα ἅγιον» of Luke 1:35 to the primordially pre-existent Jesus Christ whose descent upon the Theotokos is her Incarnation, her conception, of her Lord.
It is evident that “Filioque” fails to translate “through the Son.” Whatever the intention of its Western defenders early and late, “Filioque” can be read to reduce the source of the Holy Spirit to a “PaterFilius,” despite the irreducible distinction between the Father, the sole Archē of the Trinity, and his only-begotten Son, a distinction which St. Thomas affirms but considers not to stand in the way of the “common spiration” of the Holy Spirit by the Father and the Son: in fact, to be irrelevant to it:
The Father and the Son are in everything one, wherever there is no distinction between them of opposite relation. Hence, since there is no relative opposition between them as the principle of the Holy Ghost, it follows that the Father and the Son are one principle of the Holy Ghost.
S. T. Ia, Q. 36, A. 4, c. The translation of the Summa Theologiae here relied upon is that of the Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Edited and Annotated, with an Introduction, by Anton C. Pegis, President, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto (New York: Random House Lifetime Library, 1944), Volume One [hereafter, Pegis I) The excerpt supra is taken from p. 351.
St. Thomas nuances this begging of the question a few lines further on”
But if we consider the supposita of the spiration, then we may say that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, as distinct; for he proceeds from them as the unitive love of both.
Ibid., Reply Obj. 1, pp. 351-52.
However, he observes:
…it seems better to say that, because spirating is an adjective, and spirator a substantive, we can say that the Father and the Son are two spirating, by reason of the plurality of the supposita, but not two spirators by reason of the one spiration. For adjectival terms draw their number from the supposita, but substantives from themselves, according to the form signified.
Ibid., reply, Obj. 7 , 352
On these abstract grammatical grounds, St. Thomas considers it appropriate to speak of the spiration as single, from a single source, from a single spirator, to which he is then able to refer, again on grammatical grounds, as indeterminately the Father and the Son:
For when we say that the Father and the Son are one principle, the term principle has not determinate supposition; but it rather stands indeterminately for two persons together.
Ibid., Reply Obj. 4, 352.
We shall see that this is not the Roman Catholic Church’s interpretation of the Filioque as it is presented in the “Clarification” simply because it denies the unique Trinitarian Headship of the Father, substituting a Source of the Holy Spirit perceived so abstractly as to prescind from the constitutive Personal relation of the Father to the Son by which he is the Father of the Son, and prescinding from the constitutive Personal relation of the Son to the Father by which he is the Son. Absent these “oppositions of relation,” the “common spirator” of the Spirit can only be the Divine Essence which, when taken to be the Archē of the Spirit and consequently to be distinct from the Holy Spirit, has ceased to be the Trinity. Hilary of Poitier was content with this consequence, but most Thomists would find it uncomfortable. In any event, it has since become impossible for Catholic theologians to affirm, on whatever grounds, a common spiration, a common headship
St. Thomas’ development of the “common spiration” of the Holy Spirit provided the ground for the Orthodox assertion that the Filioque, in this widely accepted sense, is reductionist in that what is thus common to the Father and the Son can only be a common subsistence in the divine Essence which, as “common,” is communicable, and therefore cannot be Personal: it must then be the divine Essence itself, not subsistence in it, which is to put the Trinity in issue. This would of course be modalism and a heresy. It is by no means clear that the rationale upon which St. Thomas relied can avoid this implication. His abstract notion of the Trinitarian Persons, as each constituted by an “opposition of relation,” cannot but render them impersonal, for they become thereby members of a logical category of subsistent relations which, given the divine immateriality, can only denote identity with the divine essence.
This cosmological quandary is apparent in St. Thomas’ treatment of the Spirit as Gift where, in a succinct sentence, he identifies the Father with the divine Substance: Obj. 1, Reply Obj. 1, together with Obj. 2, set the context for St. Thomas’ identification, in Reply Obj. 2, of the Father with the divine essence:
Objection 1: It would seem that Gift is not a personal name. For every personal name implies a distinction in God. But the name Gift does not imply a distinction in God: for Augustine says that the Holy Ghost is so given as God’s Gift, that he also gives Himself as God. Therefore Gift is not a personal name.
Obj. 2: Further, no personal name belongs to the divine essence. But the divine essence is the Gift which the Father gives to the Son, as Hilary says. Therefore Gift is not a personal name.
Reply Obj. 1: The name Gift implies a personal distinction in so far as gift implies something belonging to another through its origin. Nevertheless, the Holy Ghost gives Himself, inasmuch as He is His own, and can use or rather enjoy Himself: just as a freeman is said to belong to himself. This is what Augustine says: What is more yours than yourself? Or we might say, and more fittingly, that a gift must belong in some way to the giver. But the phrase, this is this one’s, can be understood in several senses. In one way it means identity, as Augustine says, and in that sense gift is the same as the giver, but not the same as the one to whom it is given….
Reply Obj. 2: The divine essence is the Fathers gift in the first sense, as being the Father’s by way of identity.
S. T. Ia, Q. 38, a. 1; tr. Pegis I, at 359-60 (emphasis added).
It appears that St. Thomas’ understanding of the two processions of the Word and the Holy Spirit in God forces this identification. Their procession corresponds to St. Thomas’ reading of Aristotle’s faculty psychology into St. Augustine’s psychological analogy in such wise that the procession of the Word and the Spirit correspond analogously to actions of the faculties of intellect and will, and which are understood to remain within the divine essence from which they proceed.[704]
A truly theological understanding of the Augustinian-Thomist doctrine of the Holy Spirit as the subsistent Love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father waits upon the recognition of the nuptial image of that subsistent love, to which neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas attained. Lacking this, the Thomist ‘psychological analogy’ remains abstract and, as abstract, nontheological. Trinitarian theology cannot afford to become a function of a cosmological psychology, whether phenomenological or analytic. Meanwhile, the Vatican’s effective disavowal of the doctrine of a “common spiration” of the Holy Spirit is a decisive departure toward a properly historical Trinitarian theology.
On September 20th, 1995, L’Osservatore Romano published a lengthy document entitled “The Vatican Clarification of the Filioque. Greek and Latin Traditions regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit.” [hereinafter, “Clarification”]. It was prefaced by a two-paragraph introduction:
The Holy Father, in the homily he gave in St. Peter Basilica on 29 June in the presence of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, expressed a desire that “the traditional doctrine of the Filioque, present in the liturgical version of the Latin Credo, [be clarified] in order to highlight its full harmony with what the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople of 381 confesses in its creed: the Father as the source of the whole Trinity, the one origin both of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”.
What is published here is the clarification he has asked for, which has been undertaken by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. It is intended as a contribution to the dialogue which is carried out by the Joint International Commission between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
The first three paragraphs of the “Clarification” sufficiently indicate at once the Holy Father’s concern for the doctrinal traditions and his disinterest in theological tradition.
In its first report on “The Mystery of the Church and of the Eucharist in the light of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity”, unanimously approved in Munich on 6 July 1982, the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church had mentioned the centuries-old difficulty between the two Churches concerning the eternal origin of the Holy Spirit. Not being able to treat this subject for itself in this first phase of the dialogue, the Commission stated: “Without wishing to resolve yet the difficulties which have arisen between the East and the West concerning the relationship between the Son and the Spirit, we can already say together that this Spirit, which proceeds from the Father (Jn. 15:26) as the sole source in the Trinity and which has become the Spirit of our sonship (Rom. 8:15) since he is also the Spirit of the Son (Gal. 4:6), is communicated to us particularly in the Eucharist by this Son upon whom he reposes in time and in eternity (Jn. 1:32)” (Information Service of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, n. 49, p. 108, I, 6).
The Catholic Church acknowledges the conciliar, ecumenical, normative and irrevocable value, as expression of the one common faith of the Church and of all Christians, of the Symbol professed in Greek at Constantinople in 381 by the Second Ecumenical Council. No profession of faith peculiar to a particular liturgical tradition can contradict this expression of the faith taught and professed by the undivided Church.
On the basis of Jn. 15:26, this Symbol confesses the Spirit “tό ἐκ toῦ PatrὸV ἐκπορευόμενον” (“who takes his origin from the Father”). The Father alone is the principle without principle (ἀρχἡ ἀναρχοV) of the two other persons of the Trinity, the sole source (η μοναδική πηγή) of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit therefore takes his origin from the Father alone (ἐκ μὸνος τοῦ ΠατρὸV) in a principal, proper and immediate manner.1
1 These are the terms employed by St Thomas Aquinas in the SummaTheologica, Ia, q. 36, a. 3, ad 1 and ad 2.
This reference to St. Thomas is in no sense an approval of his joinder of the Son to the Father to constitute the single principle from which the HolySpirit proceeds (S. T. 1a, q. 36, a. 4). In fact, all of the references in the “Clarification” to authorities such as Tertullian and St. Thomas invoke rather their witness to the Trinitarian faith of the Church than their Trinitarian theology.
The doctrine of the third paragraph of the “Clarification,” supra, is repeated in its last paragraph, quoted below. Together they summarize the doctrinal tradition, while ignoring and implicitly rejecting St. Thomas notion of a “common spiration” of the Spirit:
The original character of the person of the Spirit as eternal Gift of the Father’s love for his beloved Son shows that the Spirit, while coming from the Son in his mission, is the one who brings human beings into Christ’s filial relationship to his Father, for this relationship finds only in him its Trinitarian character: “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying Abba! Father!” (Gal. 4:6). In the mystery of salvation and in the life of the Church, the Spirit therefore does much more than prolong the work of the Son. In fact, whatever Christ has instituted — Revelation, the Church, the sacraments, the apostolic ministry and its Magisterium — calls for constant invocation (επίκλησις) of the Holy Spirit and his action (ενεργεια), so that the love that “never ends” (1 Cor. 13:8) may be made manifest in the communion of the saints with the life of the Trinity.
Bishop John Zizioulas, the Metropolitan of the ancient See of Pergamon, in northwesten Turkey, who has succeeded Meyendorff as the best-known Orthodox theologian writing in English, published a “Commentary” upon the Vatican “Clarification” which offered it faint praise, insisting that while the Filioque is unobjectionable in its application to the economy of salvation, it is entirely unacceptable as applied to the “existential origin:” i.e., ab aeterno, of the Father, Son, and Spirit. In brief, Zizioulas maintains that there is no eternal “existential priority,” no eternal τάξις, no eternal order of procession, within the Trinity. His dissociation of the economy from theology of the Trinity, and the correlative interchangeability of Personal attributes, is reminiscent of the objections which Gregory of Nazianzen made to the Trinitarian doctrine of Basil of Caesarea.[705].
Orthodox Christians have no problem with the Filioque in the economic sense, but they cannot and will not accept the projection of the Filioque into the existential origin of the Trinity. Unfortunately, past statements, including those from what the Vatican regards as Ecumenical Councils remain an issue for Orthodox Christians. Because they cannot be repudiated without undermining the Vatican’s claim to infallibility, it will be difficult if not impossible —to find agreement. Unless the Vatican can reinterpret these statements (through further clarifications?) — especially those from Lateran IV (1215), Lyons II (1274), Florence (1438-1445) and Vatican I (1869-1870) ─ it seems unlikely that the Filioque problem can be resolved.
Even if the Filioque were to be clearly defined as applying only in the economic sense, Orthodox Christians would still insist on its removal from the Symbol of Faith (the Creed) for a number of reasons. Rome, under Pope John VIII, agreed to this as late as the Eighth Ecumenical Synod (Constantinople, 879-880). Not only have any and all changes to the Symbol as composed by the Second Ecumenical Synod (Constantinople, 381) been repeatedly condemned by Ecumenical Synods (Ecumenical Councils) in which the popes of Old Rome participated and which they accepted, but the structure of the Symbol makes clear that it refers to the eternal origin of the Holy Spirit, just as it refers to the eternal origin of the Father and the eternal origin of the Son. The Symbol professes the Son as τὸν ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς γεννηθέντα (begotten of the Father) whilst the Holy Spirit is τὸ ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον (proceeds from the Father). Both γεννηθέντα and ἐκπορευόμενον can be used to complete the phrase τὸν ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς __________; they are interchangeable.
Excerpted from Zizioulas’ “Commentary” in “The Vatican Clarification on the Filioque, and Commentary,” the “Filioque Page” of the T. R. Valentine website:. From the same website, see also Zizioulas “One Single Source,” in which this critique is extended.
Metropolitan Zizioulas’ insistence upon the irrelevance of the “economic sense of the Filioque”, i.e., the historical mission of the Spirit through the Son, to “the existential origin of the Trinity” echoes the apophatic Trinitarian doctrine of Gregory of Nyssa. This classic instance of the impact of cosmology upon Trinitarian theology amounts to a flat denial of the historical revelation of the Trinity as incompatible with the product of abstract cosmological speculation upon the relation of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, from whom, as their Head, both proceed. It is a sufficient reply to his critique in the “Commentary” that there is no doctrinal foundation for that speculation. Neither the Catholic nor the Orthdox doctrinal tradition knows an abstract Trinity. It is idle to refer to its “existential origin,” as though connoting a reality. The only Trinity known to either Church’s liturgical and doctrinal tradition is what is revealed in Christ, its “economic sense.”.[706]
This methodological rationalism, with its inevitable rediscovery of the problem of the one and the many, now constitutes what is perhaps the major problem of contemporary ecumenical theology: Cardinal Kasper’s remarks to this effect are illuminating:
The following objection is often made: it cannot be that just because of the question of church ministry – priesthood, episcopate, Petrine ministry – we should live in separate churches and not participate together in the Lord’s Table. And yet it is so! Theologians of the Orthodox Churches and of the Reformed tradition point out that on the issue of ministry a deeper difference is becoming clear. We shall progress in the ecumenical dialogue only if we succeed in defining more precisely that deeper difference, not in order to cement the diversity but to be able to overcome it in a better way.
For authoritative Orthodox theologians, especially those of the neo-Palamitic School, the basic difference involves the argument about the “Filioque”, the Latin addition to the common Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of the old Church.53 At first sight, this seems a somewhat odd thesis, although it is at least still comprehensible. Yet, in the view not only of many Orthodox theologians, but recently also of Reformatory theologians, the “Filioque” has concrete consequences for the understanding of the Church. For them, it seems to link the efficiency of the Holy Spirit fully to the person and work of Jesus Christ, leaving no room for the freedom of the Spirit, who blows where it chooses (Jn. 3:8). According to that reading of the “Filioque”, the Holy Spirit is so to say entirely chained up to the institutions established by Christ. For these theologians, this perceived tendency represents the roots of the Catholic submission of charisma to the institution, of individual freedom to the authority of the Church, of the prophetic to the juridical, of the mysticism to the scholasticism, of the common priesthood to the hierarchical priesthood, and finally of the episcopal collegiality to the Roman primacy.
We find similar arguments based on other premises on the Protestant side. The Reformatory Churches are no doubt in the Latin tradition and they generally keep the “Filioque”; against the rebels they affirm with energy that the Spirit is Jesus Christ’s Spirit and is tied to Word and Sacrament. But for them, too, it is a question of the sovereignty of God’s Word in and above the Church, and with it of the Christian human being’s free will, as against a―real or supposed―unilateral juridical-institutional view of the Church.54 (emphasis added)
53 Cf. on what follows my contribution, The Holy Spirit and Christian Unity (not yet published).
54 R. Frieling, Amt, Laie – Pfarrer – Priester – Bischof – Papst, Göttingen 2002, 213 s.
“Reflections by Cardinal Walter Kasper: Current Problems in Ecumenical Theology” (2003), http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/ chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_pro_20051996_chrstuni_pro_en.html. (the website of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity).
The impending “concrete consequences” underlined in the passage quoted supra are in fact the product of abstract logic, of the quest for “necessary reasons” of cosmological speculation: they ignore the historical freedom of the Trinitarian Missions by imposing upon them the abstractions governing theology of the “immanent Trinity,” in the West as well as the East. The absurdity of fearing the Spirit to be subjugated to the “institutions established by Christ” is simply undiscussable given the consubstantiality of the divine Persons. As the Greek theologians of the second century were already aware, the interrelation of the Trinitarian Persons, their τάξις, is not a subordination. That is excluded by their co-divinity: they are supremely equal in their τάξις, and in the economy that images and reveals it. The obedience of the Son and of the Spirit to their Missions from the Father is not servile, not forced: on these points there is no controversy between East and West. The controversy is rather between the anti-institutional thrust of the Reform in opposition to the sacramental worship common to the Catholic and Oriental traditions in which the Holy Spirit does not work apart from the Mission of the Son, nor does the Son work apart from the Mission of the Spirit: their economic inseparability is precisely their unity with the Father, the Head whose Personal immanence in the Trinity is that by which the Trinitarian immanence of the Son and the Spirit is at once divine and free, whether as existing from all eternity or as freely manifest in the economy, in the historical Missions of the Son and the Spirit by which history is redeemed and salvific.
There is little basis in the Orthodox or Protestant traditions for supposing the Holy Spirit to be more closely linked, more dogmatically bonded, to the Son, than the Son is to the Holy Spirit, for the Son’s Mission from the Father is precisely to give the Spirit: that Gift of the Spiritus Creator, and nothing more required his sacrificial death upon the Cross. As the Son is consubstantial with the Father, so he consubstantial also with the Holy Spirit, whose homoousion with the Father and the Son was intimated at I Constantinople and defined at Chalcedon. There is no room for the inference of an economic subordination of the Holy Spirit to the Son attributed to some Orthodox and “Reformatory” theologians in the language of Kasper’s statement underlined above.
Here as elsewhere it is important to emphasize that the dispute between the Orthodox and the Catholic theologians over the orthodoxy of the Filioque is merely theological: it does not exist at the historical level of a doctrinal disagreement, for theologians on both sides of the dispute have long presupposed the subject of the Trinitarian doctrine and consequently of their disagreement to be the nonhistorical “immanent” Trinity, in abstraction from the Missions. However neither the Orthodox nor the Catholic doctrinal tradition knows any Trinity other than that revealed by the Father’s Mission of the Son to give the Spirit. Doubtless Catholic theologians understand the Missions to reveal the immanent life of the Trinity, while the Orthodox theologians, at least insofar as represented by Metropolitan Zizioulas and John McGuckin, reject this reasoning, but in fact there is common to the adversaries a theological dissociation of their Trinitarian theology from the historical Revelation of the Trinity in Jesus, which error forces both the Latin and the Byzantine theologians to prescind as well from the historicity of the Mission of the Son, whose historical subject, the Lord Jesus, the divine Man defined at Chalcedon to be “one and the same Son,” they routinely dehistoricize. Thus the “one and the same Son,” upon whose identity with the object of the Church’s faith the Symbol of Chalcedon insisted, they uncritically rationalize into an “immanent Son,” an abstraction which has no place in the liturgical and doctrinal tradition whether Latin or Byzantine, and thus can have no place in the authentic theology of either tradition. Once again, cosmology is not theology; still less has it any doctrinal weight.
This dehistoricization of the Mission of the “one and the same Son” bears immediately upon the concretely historical Trinitarian Image which Jesus instituted by his One Sacrifice: viz., the substantial One Flesh, the Covenantal union of the second Adam and the second Eve. Under this pseudo-theological dehistoricizing rationalization, the human imaging of God also becomes nonhistorical: yet both the East and the West know it to be fulfilled only in the sacramental worship of the Church as centered upon the Eucharistic sacrifice, whose nuptial ordering of that worship is witnessed in the Catholic and Orthodox requirement of celibacy in bishops, and in the Roman Catholic requirement that priests and bishops be celibate, and that married permanent deacons be continent.[707]
Inasmuch as the Trinitarian theology, thus intent upon a non-historical Trinity, can only be abstract, the Franciscan and the Thomist Trinitarian speculation alike must fail, precisely as theology, for neither expresses a fides quaerens intellectum, simply because the fides from which alone theological quaerens intellectum can proceed is historical and has an historical object, the Revelation of the Trinity given in Jesus the Christ. Abstract speculation upon the “immanent Trinity” prescinds from this historical object of the Church’s faith, and its constructs consequently cannot be theological. Their interest, at best, is antiquarian.
Meyendorff’s analysis is sound in this: the Western stress on the divine unity, which gave rise to the modalist heresies of the late second and early third centuries, found little sympathy in the East. Paul of Samosata’s modalist denial of Jesus’ divinity was repeatedly condemned in Synods of Antioch, and the Sabellian shadow which he cast upon the homoousios of the Son with the Father was not dispelled until nearly forty years after the formal definition at Nicaea of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. At the same time, Origen’s stress on the distinction of the Trinitarian Persons, taken up by Dionysius of Alexandria (perhaps one of the judges at Paul of Samosata’s first trial), raised a suspicion of tritheism in Rome. Among other things, Dionysius of Alexandria was faulted by the Pope (Dionysius of Rome) for not having affirmed the homoousios of the Persons of the Trinity. Dionysius of Alexandria replied that he had no objection to the term other than its lack of scriptural warrant, and that his own Trinitarian analogies had upheld it (the suggestion that these analogies implied a generic Trinitarianism itself ignores Dionysius of Alexandria’s loyalty to Origen, whose doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son flatly contradicts such nonsense).[708] At the same time it should be kept in mind that the youthful Basil of Caesarea was comparably offhand in his criticism of theology of Dionysius of Alexandria, and this without reference to his defense of the homoousion of the Son.[709]
In this third-century exchange between authentic representatives of the Roman and the Alexandrine traditions, “the two Dionysii,” we have the raw material of the Filioque controversy: the anti-Sabellian Trinitarian emphasis of Alexandria with a consequent stress on that which is three in God to the point of giving an impression of having neglected the divine unity, over against the Roman concern for the unity of God to the point of hearing theological ascription of Personal uniqueness to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as by Tertullian and Hippolytus, to threaten the substantial unity of the Trinity─this although the Roman bishops had twice condemned Sabellianism for denying the Personal distinctions between of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Even the entry of the “homoousion” into the discussion between “the two Dionysii” is symptomatic. Sixty years later at the Council of Nicaea, the deacon Athanasius would uphold the Trinitarian doctrine of his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, re-affirming Origen’s stress upon the substantial unity of the Trinity, mia ousia . Their defense of this doctrine, backed by the comparable authority of Marcellus of Ancyra, Macarius of Jeruisalem, Eustathius of Antioch, and Ossius of Cordoba, was sufficient to convince the Fathers gathered in the Council of Nicaea that the affirmation of Personal homoousion of our Lord with his Father is the only sufficient reply to the Arian denial of the divinity of the Son, a denial rooted in the monism of the Greek metaphysical tradition which Origen, loyal to the apostolic tradition, had rejected in stressing the eternal generation of the Son.
The Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father refused the cosmological equation of “person” with a unique intellectual substance: unique in that it could support only a single personal subsistence. This metaphysical monism was proper to the Greek philosophical tradition and barred the Trinitarian doctrine taught at Nicaea. It was relied upon by the Christian heresies who refused the authority of the Council f Nicaea, Athanasius, who governed the See of Alexandria from death of Alexander in 328 to his own death in 373 after thirty-four years of vigorous, lonely and persecuted support of the Nicene Creed, in 362 called the provincial Council of Alexandria in a final attempt to persuade the homoiousian party in Antioch that the ecclesial unity they sought from Emperor Constantius could be realized only by accepting the authority of the Nicene Creed. His Tome to the Antiochenes failed to persuade the Syrian homoiousians, gathered in Antioch, of the doctrinal indispensability of the Nicene proclamation of the homoousion of the Son with the Father within the unity of the one divine Substance. Their acceptance the Nicene Creed waited upon the First Council of Constantinople, nineteen years after Athanasius’ publication of his Tome to the Antiochenes, and even then, it was only nominal;
The four great Councils of Nicaea, I Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon definitively overruled the Eusebian conviction that the subject of the Incarnation is the “immanent Son,”.and in so doing rejected the monadic anthropology upon which Bouyer, Meyendorff and Lonergan have insisted, quite as the Council of Nicaea had overruled the monadic theology upon which the Eusebian deformation of Origen’s Trinitarian theology had relied.
Already persuaded that the “homoousion” of the Son did not threaten the irreducible distinctions between the divine Persons within the divine Trinity, Gregory of Nazianzen and Amphilocius of Iconium began that inquiry into the immanent intelligibility of the Trinitarian God which in the next century issued in Augustine’s reply to the continuing Arian dissent, viz., his equation of the Trinitarian Persons with distinct intra-substantial interrelations, later labeled as paternity (the Father’s eternal begetting the Son), filiation (the Son’s eternal procession from the Father as Son, as begotten by him), and spiration (the Spirit’s eternal procession from the Father, but in a manner distinct from the procession of the Son, an acceptable formulation of which, in the East and the West prior to the Filioque dispute, had been “from the Father through the Son.”[710] Meyendorff’s treatment of the Trinity concludes with a quotation from Vladimir Lossky’s dismissal of the Filioque dispute as due to the insertion of “the God of the philosophers” into theology of the Trinity. Meyendorff writes of Lossky’s succinct disposition of the Filioque issue as follows:
This conclusion may appear to some as an overstatement. It is both characteristic and refreshing, however, that precisely those modern theologians of the West who are most concerned with making Christian theology again as kerygmatic and appealing as it was in another age are suggesting a return to the pre-Augustinian concepts of God, “where the three hypostases were seen first of all in their personal, irreducible functions.”35 “Without our experience of Father, Son, and Spirit in salvation history, we would ultimately be unable to conceive at all of their subsisting distinctly as the one God.”36
35 Cf. J. Meyendorff, Christ, p. 166.
36 K. Rahner, The Trinity, p. 111.
J. Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, at 189.
A fair number of orthodox Western theologians, scholars such as de Lubac, Daniélou and Mondésert, the founders of the Sources chrétiennes, as well as Crouzel and Simonetti and their fellow participants in the freeing of Origen from Origenism, have indeed found refreshing the return to the earlier levels of the patristic tradition. They are thereby less likely to find refreshing that “renewal of Trinitarian theology” which Meyendorff’s approval of Rahner’s modalism portends. Rahner’s Trinity, which Meyendorff twice cites, is precisely the product of that insertion of the cosmological “God of the philosophers” into Trinitarian theology which in Meyendorff’s excerpt Lossky indicts. A reply to Meyendorff’s citation of Rahner as though eminent among “those modern theologians of the West who are most concerned with making Christian theology again as kerygmatic and appealing as it was in another age” is beyond the range of this work. Here it must suffice to observe that Rahner’s insistent denial of the Selfhood, i.e., the unique Personal subjectivity, of the Trinitarian Persons as the condition of avoiding tritheism eliminates any possibility of the “experience of them in salvation history” which Rahner, like Meyendorff, nonetheless holds to be foundational for the Trinitarian faith.
The Church’s faith in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is historical. It rests upon its revelation by the Father’s Mission of the Christ, the one and the same Son of the Father and the Theotokos, and upon the Eucharistic celebration and anamnesis of that Revelation, a foundation more secure than musings upon “the experience of them in salvation history” can supply.
Western theologians defend the Filioque by pointing to the necessity of an intelligible distinction between the filiation of the Only begotten Son, and the procession of the Holy Spirit, his “spiration” by the Father. They find this distinction to be provided by understanding the spiration of the Holy Spirit as his procession from the Father through the Son, as historically─i.e., economically─revealed in the Father’s Mission of the Son to give the Spirit.
Long before the Filioque controversy arose, a number of Greek Fathers had assigned a role to the Son in the spiration of the Holy Spirit, with no sense of trespass upon the Father’s headship of the Trinity. Meyendorff and Zizioulas distinguish this concern as economic―which is to say, as historical as opposed to immanent-Trinitarian and therefore eternal. The Eastern “economist” tradition was summarized by John of Damascus, whom St. Thomas cited as an authority for his own position, and whom Leo XIII made a Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. Insofar as Catholicism is concerned, there is no doctrinal dispute with the Eastern Church over the procession of the Holy Spirit: John of Damascus speaks for the Catholics as well as for the Orthodox: for both, he speaks historically.
As the Vatican “Clarification” has reminded us, it must always be kept in view that it is the Father who is the sole source: Pēgē, Archē (Πηγή, Αρχή) of the Trinity, and therefore of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and that he is thus the Source as the Head (I Cor. 11:3), immanent in the Trinity of which he is the Source. It is then unacceptable to speak of a “common spiration,” for it supposes an “indeterminate” source and headship of the Holy Spirit, which is false. Τhe Son and the Spirit have their Personal origins in the one Head of the Trinity, the one Source of its free unity, who is the Father. Trinitarian Headship is unique to the Father: he is the unique source of the Holy Spirit, as He is the unique source of the Son. At the same time, as Head of the Trinity, he is the source of the free unity, the free order, of the Trinity, that free order (τάχις) which is expressed in the Sign of the Cross, made in the Names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This irreplaceable baptismal order is sequential, in that the Holy Spirit is never named apart from the Father and the Son, nor the Son apart from the Father, nor the Father except as the origin of the Son and of the Spirit through the Son, an order revealed by the Father’s Mission of the Son to give the Spirit. As we have seen, Augustine, and the Latin tradition he represents, is particularly insistent upon this order, in the economy and therefore in the Trinity.
Thus far, we are at the level of doctrine, which is to say, at the level of the historically, i.e., economically, revealed consubstantiality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (the homoousion of the Spirit, implicit in the Nicene Creed, and in definition of his divinity at I Constantinople, was affirmed explicitly at Chalcedon, as it had been insisted upon in Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes). It is not at all clear that this conception of Trinitarian orthodoxy would offend that of the Orthodox Churches, for it rests upon a refusal of the ultimate reduction of the Trinity to a Monas (as by Rahner) which they attribute to the Western tradition generally, and not without reason. The clear implication of the Nicene definition of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father is the identification of the plurality of divine Persons with the single divine substance, the Trinity, in which each subsists, not indifferently, as though members of a species, but Personally, in a free order which in the concrete is their perichōresis, their circumincessio. That they do so subsist is doctrine common to both traditions; it provides a basis for further ecumenical discussion. The radical incompatibility of a monadic interpretation of the divine substance with the homoousios of the Son with the Father and with the Holy Spirit has already been stressed.[711] Karl Rahner’s attempt in The Trinity to retain a theological monism or modalism by insisting on a single Self in God is thus productive of further heresy as to be beyond ecumenical discussion. At the same time, the ecumenical discussion can be ecumenical only with the recognition by East and West that the dogmatic extension of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father to his consubstantiality with us by the Symbol of Chalcedon, is as necessary to our common faith that Jesus is the Lord as is the Nicene definition of his consubstantiality with the Father: the communication of idioms in Christ is in issue and, thereby, that he is the Lord. If he does not subsist in humanity, consubstantial with us, he cannot be our head, and cannot be our Redeemer, for it is as the head of our humanity and of all creation that he is the sole source, Πηγἡ, of our free unity and of the history of our salvation.
The Byzantine tradition whose history Meyendorff recites distanced itself rather early from the “humanist” efforts of Byzantine intellectuals to apply Greek metaphysics to the Orthodox doctrinal tradition, which had been preserved and mediated for the most part by monks whose spirituality and mysticism were intransigently opposed to “humanist” attempts to accommodate the doctrinal tradition to the secular mentality proper to the “world:” The Byzantine monastic tradition saw in Greek philosophy the expression of a mentality antagonistic to their faith, and had good reason to reject it.
This liturgical tradition, as primarily monastic, consequently became identified with. and consequently concerned, for the purity of its liturgical expression. This of course included preaching, but did not include much systematic theological speculation until the last century or century and a half of the Byzantine empire, when diplomatic efforts to engage the West in the defense of eastern Christendom against Islam prompted a better acquaintance with the enthusiasm of the medieval West for theological speculation, precisely as nourished by an acquaintance with theological use of Platonism and Aristotelianism, a use which, during the Middle Ages, had acquired a certain degree of academic sophistication but which remained nonetheless at the cosmological level of its sources.
This cosmologically-normed speculation entailed resistance to the historical development of doctrine at Nicaea, at I Constantinople, at Ephesus and at Chalcedon: it is quite evident that St. Thomas’ failure to understand the historicity of the Mission of the “one and the same Son” is continued in his failure to understand the human Person, Jesus, to be the subject of the Incarnation, the kenōsis, in which the primordial Word, Jesus the Lord, entered into the fleshly condition that is our fallenness, our mortality.
The interest of Greek intellectuals in that doctrinal development was limited to those scholars most suspect by the monastic upholders of the liturgical and doctrinal tradition whose commitment to Chalcedonian orthodoxy was antagonistic to precisely such theological speculation, particularly that influenced by Aristotelianism. The “Hesychast” monks saw a clear danger to the faith in the submission of theology, which they understood to be an essentially mystical religious inquiry, to the canons of a pagan rationality such as that underlying the regnant Thomist development of Aristotelian metaphysics.
We have seen that this distrust of “dialectic” existed also in the West, but it faded after Bonaventure and Peckham failed to blunt the enthusiasm for Aristotelian metaphysics inspired by St. Thomas. The Franciscan custodians of the Augustinian riposte to the rationalization of theology implicit in that metaphysics became themselves captive to the Aristotelian logic, whose isolation from its underlying act-potency metaphysics had become the commonplace of a Neoplatonism still echoing in the Augustinian theology of St. Bonaventure, and powerful as well in theology of St. Thomas: e.g., in his rationalist defense of Eucharistic accidents without a subject of inherence, in his more general supposition that gratia Christi is a metaphysical accident, and in his failure to accept the Chalcedonian definition of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Christ.
At the close of the thirteenth century, Duns Scotus found the Augustinian illumination doctrine, upon which Augustine’s sacramental realism entirely rests, to be logically unnecessary: i.e., inasmuch as it has no place in Aristotelian epistemology, he considered it evident that the mind can function without it. Illumination had already been naturalized by St. Thomas, to become the “agent intellect.” Under Scotus and William of Ockham, formal logic triumphed over the vulnerable Augustinian and Thomist theological metaphysics, to initiate a renaissance, still under way, of a rationalist humanism whose vision of freedom as autonomy rather than inseparable from responsibility has become normative in the Western academy.[712]
We have sufficiently examined the vulnerability of the classic theologyical metaphysics: it consists simply in a refusal to accept the doctrinal development, from Nicaea to Chalcedon, of the Personal homoousion of the Lord Jesus, “the one and the same Son,” with the Father and with us. Lacking that development, Western theology has become another doctrinally untenable rationalism, as von Balthasar saw: his theological aesthetics is founded on that insight.[713] We have also pointed to the inability of the classic Western systematizations of the Catholic tradition to place a positive value in freedom as historical, i.e., as a concrete exercise of personal responsibility for a free future in a world freed by its Redeemer from the futility of fleshly rationality, locked within its own immanent fragmentation, seeking an exit from it in an idealism that is finally a nihilism. The uncritical enlistment of systematic theologians in metaphysical monism gave theologians the impossible task of reconciling the free historicity of the res Catholica, i.e., of Catholic faith, worship, and practice, with the immanently necessary truths of the sarkic rationality which their metaphysics, whether hylemorphic or analytic, had sought, but failed, to systematize. Theological distrust of the classic metaphysics, evinced in the last decades of the thirteenth century, became explicit with Duns Scotus’ systematic rejection of Thomism, and triumphed in the Nominalist rejection of all metaphysics which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries displaced theological reliance upon Aristotelianism in the Western universities, with the exception of those Dominican and Carmelite institutions which, particularly in Spain, continued zealously to uphold and explore the Thomist tradition and were responsible for its revival in the Neo-Thomism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This revival reached its acme in Leo XIII’s encyclical, Aeterni patris, which was interpreted generally as establishing the hegemony of Thomism in Catholic theology and in its philosophical ancillary. Pius XII effectively discouraged theological criticism of that establishment in his encyclical, Humani generis. However, in 1993, the publication of John Paul II’s encyclical, Splendor veritatis, undercut the Thomist triumphalism by denying that the Church teaches either theology or philosophy―which did not prevent that the current academic exegesis of that encyclical as an expression of Thomist orthodoxy.[714]
Theology as Catholic is primarily concerned for sacramental realism, and specifically for the concrete historicity of that realism. Consequently it then cannot avoid being a metaphysical inquiry, for it presupposes a reality neither empirically objective nor ideal, but historical and free. Catholic theology must be concerned for the covenantal fidelity sustained by that sacramental realism and, over all, for the free, nuptial order of the creation redeemed by Jesus the Lord, whose Lordship is his consubstantiality at once with the Father as the Son, and with us as our Head.
Thus Catholic theology is radically Christological and therefore Chalcedonian, for it is in the Symbol of that Council that the Church’s faith in the Lord Jesus attains its definitive statement: Jesus is one Lord, one and the same Son, fully divine and fully human in the unity of his Person. He is the divine Son of the Father: he is the human Son of Mary, “one and the same Son” as the Symbol eight times affirms. In sum, Jesus’ homoousion is Personal, with the Father and the Holy Spirit: he is not consubstantial with the divine substance or the human substance, in both of which he subsists by the same single and unique Personal subsistence. It is as this level of his Personal Self that he is fully divine and fully human, Personally possessing the fullness of divinity, and the fullness of humanity. This one Person, the Lord Jesus, is the object of the Church’s faith, and therefore the subject of theology which that faith feeds and sustains, the fides quaerens intellectum. The sole object of that inquiry is the Revelation of God given in the historical Person of the Lord Jesus, sent by the Father to give the Holy Spirit.
The Church’s first clarification against Arius of her faith in the divinity of her Lord was the affirmation of Jesus’ consubstantiality with the Father, thus asserting his distinction from the Father and his equality with the Father in possessing the fullness of the divine dignity. This assertion contradicted the universal assumption of the pagan philosophers that the divine substance insofar as absolute is the Monad, the divine Self: Arius and his followers refused to accept the doctrinal distinction between the unity of the divine substance and plurality of the divine Persons: no rationale was available to justify it, and decades were required for its accomodation to the Greek language: “hypostasis” later came to mean the same as “person” or “prosōpon” but at the outset it had meant the same as the Latin “substantia,” its literal translation. Finally, in Greek, the more general term for concrete reality, “ousia ,” came to designate the divine substantial unity, while “hypostasis” came to designate the unity of each of the Persons (Prosōpa) subsisting in and constituting that substantial and Trinitarian unity.
That doctrinal development was in the future. At Nicaea the intellectual problem was set by the Fathers’ use of “homoousios;” its was rendered ambiguous by its association with Paul of Samosata, and its application correspondingly obscure. Nonetheless, the bishops at Nicaea understood the consubstantiality of Jesus with the Father to affirm what was necessary to counter the Arian heresy: viz., the absolute unity of the divine substance, whether named ousia or hypostasis, and the personal divinity of Jesus, the Son. One may debate indefinitely the levels at which the individual bishops attending the Council understood the term, but that debate is without doctrinal significance, for the bishops at Nicaea did not meet as individuals but as members of the Magisterium; exit polls of individual bishops either ignore that fact or intend to undermine it. The Nicene condemnation of Arius and of Arianism is unambiguous, as is the Nicene Creed upon which that condemnation rests. Jesus Christ the Lord is consubstantial with the Father; he thereby possesses the fullness of the divine dignity. As the Son eternally begotten by the Father, he is distinct from the Father, while of the same substance, homoousios, with him. At Ephesus and at Chalcedon, that same conceptual clarity will be seen to apply with the same precision to affirm his full humanity, his consubstantiality with the human persons created in him.
The Council of Nicaea, as also the Councils of I Contantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon which developed its doctrine, was not a parliamentary occasion subject to sociological and political scrutiny: it was the bishops’ common liturgical exercise of their liturgical office; they met in Council to fulfill their universal liturgical responsibility which, in and out of season, is for the truth of the faith, for the Church’s worship in truth.
We have already surveyed theological confusion of the forty years following the Nicene Council: it was resolved by the reaffirmation, at the provincial Council of Alexandria, of the Nicene proclamation of the homoousios of the Son, and by the teaching of the divinity of the Holy Spirit at the First Council of Constantinople. The personal attribution to Jesus of his homoousion with the Father would be open to a further doctrinal development, a development presaged by the Pauline doctrine of the Son’s headship of humanity, which specifies the personal consubstantiality with, and personal subsistence in, humanity that the Symbol of Chalcedon affirms of him. He subsists in the substance of humanity as its Head, as the source of its free unity. The human substance is single, a free created unity which proceeds from its head and owes to him its freedom and its unity. As both Paul and John teach, we are created in him, and as created, we are sustained in being by him―that is, by his consubstantiality with us as our Head, the origin, the Archē, of our free substantial unity by reason of his free subsistence in it.
His consubstantiality with us, i.e., his headship at once of humanity and of the bridal Church, is the terminus of his mission from the Father: because of the sinful refusal of free nuptial unity by the first Adam and Eve, Jesus’ mission became redemptive, “but in the Beginning it was not so,” as we learn from Mark and from Matthew. The primordial creation is freely fallen: it had to be free “in the Beginning” in order for it freely to fall. This primordial freedom, the free nuptial unity of the Bridegroom and the Bride, of the second Adam and the second Eve, could only proceed from the primordial head of humanity, through the primordial second Eve, to all those who are thereby created in him “in the Beginning” and are consubstantial with him because they proceed from him, through his outpouring of the fullness of the Spirit upon the second Eve, the primordial Church.
It is evident that because the consubstantiality of the “one and the same Son” with the Father and with us must be a Personal attribute, i.e., attributed to a single subsistence, a single Person, Jesus. Cosmological rationality cannot accept the Catholic faith that Jesus is at once a human and a divine Son, that is, that he is at once divine and human at the level of his Person, in brief, that he is “one and the same Son.” As with the other mysteries of the faith, theology is not charged with providing for the prior possibility of the Personal unity in him of divinity and humanity; rather, its liturgical affirmation in the Church’s celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is the concretely historical foundation upon which Catholic theology must build, for it has no other. Inquiries which do not presuppose the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, which in fact question it, have no theological standing. Theology as Catholic rests upon the Catholic faith of theologian. This faith, concretely, personal participation in the worship of the Church, once nourishes and directs the fides quaerens intellectum into the one Truth, the Mysterium fidei, Jesus Christ the Lord.
It is the misfortune of systematic theology in the East as in the West to have mistaken metaphysics for philosophy, as though philosophical speculation, as “natural,” together with its product, the “preambulae fidei,” were the substantial criterion for the consequently accidental abstract truths of Revelation, whose conformity to that criterion were prerequisite to their doctrinal authority. It is thus that the Chalcedonian Christology is held to have failed; it affronts the monist anthropology inherited from the Greeks.
Had the monist criterion been effective at Nicaea, we would all be Arians, for the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of Jesus with the Father was proclaimed by that Council precisely because it contradicts the monist “natural theology” inherited from the Greeks. From that moment, the divine substance ceased to be regarded an abstract absolute, to become historical, for “homoousios” was said of the historical Son who is Jesus the Lord, the subject of the historical Mission to give the Spirit. Like the pagan Greek anthropology, the pagan Greek theology continues to afflict Catholic and Orthodox systematic theology. It does so particularly in the context of the Filioque controversy, a context so abstract as to have no soteriological interest; it has from the outset been confined to competing rational analyses of the “immanent” Trinity, unrelieved by any recognition of the freedom and historicity of its subject.
The Filioque disputants conform to the tractates De trinitate which, since the Cappadocians in the East and Augustine in the West, have applied as a matter of course the monadic determinism, proper to the Neoplatonic divinity, to the Trinitarian order of the God revealed in Christ. The spectre of Sabellianism has never been exorcised from Trinitarian theology, East or West. Its influence has controlled theology of the imaging of God down to Karl Barth’s mid-twentieth century recognition of the nuptial quality of the account of that imaging in Gen. 1.
The subscription by Pope John Paul II to the clear affirmation of the nuptiality of our imaging of God by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World”[715] has received little theological attention, for it is simply irreconcilable with the regnant Thomist anthropology. Nonetheless, the Letter is a doctrinal development of the highest significance, integrating a it does the nuptiality of Jesus’ imaging of the Father with his headship of humanity, thereby establishing the doctrinal basis for a complete re-examination of the Procession of the Holy Spirit, for it finds that the concrete, historical analogue of the Holy Spirit in the covenantal bond between Christ and his Church and, secondarily, between husband wife. The common patristic interpretation of Gen. 2:24 as fulfilled in the One Sacrifice provides the foundation for this interpretation of our imaging of God as nuptial, and permits, even requires, that the implications of this imaging for our understanding of the Trinitarian be accepted.
This nuptially-ordered imaging of the Trinity is inseparable from the nuptially-ordered outpouring of the Holy Spirit through the One Sacrifice of Jesus, the Head of the bridal Church. This is simply Pauline doctrine, the common if universally neglected heritage of the Churches. In I Cor. 11:3 Paul recognized the husband’s nuptial office as that of headship; in Col. 1:15 he taught Jesus’ headship of the Church, and in Eph. 5:31, he brought his teaching of Jesus the Bridegroom’s headship to its full nuptial expression by identifying Jesus’ relation to the Church as the fulfillment of the primordial creation narrative of Gen. 2:26-7. We have seen both Origen and Augustine affirm the identity of Jesus’ office as Head with his office as Bridegroom of the Church.
In sum, the renewal of Trinitarian theology and, consequently, of theolοgy of the Holy Spirit, requires its re-historicization. This in turn requires that the free nuptial unity of the human substance be recognized and, with it, the nuptiality of the human imaging of the Triune God. The meaning of the nuptial imaging of God is integral with the meaning of Jesus’ headship, as set out by Paul in I Cor. 11:3, and as developed in the Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians. The Father is Head of the Trinity simply as the Father, the source of the Son and of the Spirit, and thus of the free unity, the Trinity, in which he subsists as Head. The Son, Jesus, is the Head, the Archē, of the free unity of humanity, of the Church, and of all creation simply as sent by the Father to give the Spirit, a Mission fulfilled in his offering of the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed, and the pristine creation restored, in sacramento, in ecclesia, in Christo.
The eternal Procession of the Son and the eternal Procession of the Spirit from the Father--- in short, the Trinitarian perichōresis―is revealed in the historical terminus of the Mission of the Son and the Father’s Mission of the Holy Spirit, the Spiritus Creator, through the Son. This outpouring of the Holy Spirit, by which all things are made new, is given us through Jesus’ sacrificial institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of the second Adam and second Eve. The eternally free order of the processions of the Son and the Spirit is revealed by the historical Headship of the Son, sent by the Father to give the Spiritus Creator, whose sacrificial Outpouring, primarily upon the bridal Church, and through her upon all creation, terminates in the restoration to the fallen Good Creation of its lost free unity, whose goodness is precisely that free unity, its nuptial order, sacramentally objecttive in the Eucharist and in matrimony, an objectivity rooted in the unfallen good creation: “And God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image and after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” And God said, “ Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit: you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the air and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
Gen. 1:26-31
The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the air,and to every beast of the field, but for man there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up the place with flesh, and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said:
This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.
Gen 1:20-25
It is within the order of their Missions by the Father, i.e., of the Son to give the Spirit, as imaged in the sacrificial institution of the substantial One Flesh of the New Covenant, that the Personal distinctions within the Trinity are revealed. In brief, that One Flesh of which Jesus is the Head, from whom the bridal Church proceeds, has its free unity in the subsistent mutual love, which is neither the Head nor his bridal body, but their free union, with which union Jesus and his bridal Church are alike consubstantial, as members of the one human substance which images the Trinity.
The Head is the single Source of this free unity, but it could not exist apart from the metaphysically prior procession of the Church, the second Eve, from her Head, the second Adam. Once again, we have seen Augustine’s succinct defense of the τάξις or ordo (order) of this Trinitarian unity: “The Holy Spirit indeed does these things, but let it not be said that he does them without the Son”[716] The Mission of the Holy Spirit is the consequence of the Mission of the Son. This does not make the Son to be the Head of the Spirit, whose Head is the Father alone, which Headship the Father exercises in the sending of the Son to give the Holy Spirit, “another Paraclete.”
The homoousion of the Son, with the Father and with us is central to the Church’s Trinitarian faith. It is too often forgotten or ignored that the homoousion is a Personal attribute of the Son: it is as one and the same Son that Jesus is a divine Person by his consubstantiality with the Father and, as the same Son, the same Person, that he is human by his consubstantiality with us: like us in all but sin. This last consequence, i.e., that he is a human Person, is commonly avoided, as has been seen, by theological enlistment in the Aristotelian equation of subsistence with substance, which identifies person and human substance, which is to say, with human nature.
This supposition, proper to the Thomist tradition, directly denies Jesus’ consubstantiality with us, which can only be Personal: consubstantiality does not apply to substances or to natures, despite the best efforts of theologians, Eastern and Western, to read it thus. Nevertheless, it is only as a human Person that Jesus can be the Head of humanity. Just as the Father, the Head of the Trinity, must subsist in the Trinity to be the source of its free unity, so the Son must subsist in humanity to be its Head, the source of its free unity. This requires that the human substance be at once single and multi-personal. This in turn requires that all human persons subsist in numerically the same substance, whose Head, the source of that free unique, substantial and therefore numerical unity, is the one and the same Son, Jesus the Lord, the Christ, the Redeemer. Our consubstantiality with Jesus the Lord is personal, and therefore requires his Headship, for it is a free consubstantiality, a free substance: His Lordship is his Headship, his consubstantiality with us. Apart from his consubstantiality “with us,” we would not exist, for his consubstantiality with us is the creative fulfillment of his Mission: the giving of the Holy Spirit, a Gift which is our creation in Christ, our Head, the source of our free human community which, as substantial, can only be our creation in him.
It is as Head, by the procession from him of the bridal Church, the second Eve who is his glory, that the Son is the Image of the Father. Through her mediation, his Gift of the Holy Spirit is lavished upon the created universe, whose free unity, whose beauty, reflects that the Source of all Freedom, of all Unity, the Father Who dwells in Light Inacessible, who sacrificed his Only-begotten Son to restore, by the Gift of the Spirit, the free and nuptially ordered unity by which alone, in its imaging the Trinity, the Good Creation is good. Trinitarian theology, East and West, has largely ignored these themes, which are nonetheless inseparable from the historical faith of the Church in the Triune God. It must be asked whether the Filioque controversy is not a product of this ignorance, and whether its resolution must not depend upon a refocusing of Trinitarian theology upon the Headship of the Lord Jesus, by whose One Sacrifice the Trinity is revealed through its Eucharistic celebration by his bridal Church.
The divinization of those who have persevered to death in fidelity to the Covenant instituted by Jesus the Christ is a persistent theme in Eastern spirituality and doctrine. It is far richer than its Western counterpart, the beatific vision, whose celebrated late medieval definition of the immediacy of that vision has led to an ignoring of the indispensable mediation of all salvation by Christ and his bridal Church.[717] Our divinization in Christ is our risen personal consubstantiality with him. By this fulfillment of our creation in him by our resurrection in him, we are at one with him in the Trinitarian perichōresis, a unity whose joy is beyond imagining or conceiving. “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.” (I Cor. 2:9; RSV).
[1] Origen may have been the first to use “homoousios” in theology: it is consistent with his identification of divinity as substantial, as opposed to the finite order of creation which he identifies as accidental. See Karl Baus, Church History, II, From the Apostolic Community to Constantine, with a General Introduction to Church History by Hubert Jedin, General Editor (New York: Herder and Herder, 1980), [hereafter, Church History, II], p. 239, n. 37 citing Origen's Ep. ad Hebr. fragmentum to this effect. In this passage, Baus also suggests that Origen is the source of Theotokos title for our Lady and, correlatively, is the first to have understood the union of the divine and the human in Christ to be so close as to have concluded to the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, whose classic expression is the Theotokos title for Mary. Origen’s use of this title is reported by the Greek historian Socrates (see endnote 391, infra). In the fourth century it is supported by Alexander and by Athanasius, his successor to the See of Alexandria. In the fifth century, Cyril of Alexandria discovered the communication of idioms in the Eucharistic Christ in the context of his attack upon Nestorius. It would become defined doctrine with the Council of Ephesus.
However, J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Revised edition (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978) [hereafter, Doctrines] at 130-31, 234-35, maintains that according to Origen only the Father is auto-theos, unoriginate, true God, Ὁ θεός, deriving his being from no source; consequently Origen must have understood the Son and the Holy Spirit to be derivatively God. Continuing to suppose Origen to be immersed in the Middle Platonic emanationism, Kelly concludes that he cannot but consider the Son to be less than Ὁ θεός, the God, the Father, and therefore, by inference, could not affirm the Son to be consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father, Kelly interprets Origen as believing that prayer "to the Father, through Christ, in the Spirit" according to the ancient liturgical formula, attributes a lesser level of divinity, or even non-divinity, to the Son and Spirit. As Kelly reads him, Origen never escapes his supposedly emanationist presuppositions, which must include the subordination of the Logos to the Father, and the Spirit to the Logos.
Over against Kelly stands Henri Crouzel’s emphasis upon the “substantial” reality that Origen assigns to the divine, thus to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as opposed to the created intelligences (noes) whose reality he distinguishes from the divine as “accidental” is distinguished from “substantial.” The section devoted to Origen’s Peri Archon deals with Origen’s Christology and Trinitarian theology in detail.
The shadow cast on the accuracy of Rufinus’s translation looms over the question of Origen’s doctrine, here as elsewhere. A summary in English translation of de Lubac's defense of Origen and of the value of Rufinus’ translations of his work is available in the HarperTorchbook edition of the Peri Archon: see On First Principles; being Koetschau's text of the Peri Archon; tr. into English together with an introduction and notes by G. W. Butterworth: His “introduction and notes” to Koetschau/’s edition of the Peri Archon parallels the Introduction to the Torchbook Edition by Henri de Lubac (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). disagrees with de Lubac’defense of Rufinus’ Latin translation of Origen, which denies what Butterworth asserts, viz., that Rufinus deforms Origen’s Peri Archon in the interests of Catholic orthodoxy.
Recent studies of Origen’s theology, preeminent among them those of Henri Crouzel, have disagreed with Kelly’s attribution of subordinationism to Origen. If, as Henri de Lubac and Henri Crouzel maintain against Kelly and Butterworth, Origen did affirm the homoousios of the Son and the Spirit, he cannot be the subordinationist Kelly supposes him to be. It would then be true of him what is true of Augustine, that he did not permit his Neoplatonism to control his Catholic faith. For a concise presentation of current research on Origen’s Christological use of “homoousios,” see M. J. Edwards, “Did Origen apply the word homoousios to the Son?” Journal of Theological Studies, NS, Vol. 49, Pt. 2, October, 1998, 658-70. Edward’s article responds to that of R. P. C. Hanson, with the same title, in Epektasis: Mélanges patristiques offerts au Cardinal Jean Daniélou (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972); reprinted in Studies in Christian Antiquity (London, 1983), 53-70, and again in a re-issue of that work by T & T Clark of Edinburgh in 1985. Hanson had answered his article’s question decidedly in the negative. Edwards’ answer is more inclined to accept the possibility of Origen’s reference of “homoousios” to the Son. In both articles, the crucial issue is the reliability of Rufinus’ translation of Origen. See the long footnote which Grillmeier devoted to the literature on this subject: Christian Tradition I, at note 44, p. 145.
Christopher Stead, is less troubled by Rufinus’ translation:
However, Origen also used the term homoousios to indicate the Son’s relationship to the Father; and so far as we know was the first Greek writer to do so.16
16 Origen’s use of the term homoousios in this context has recently been questioned by scholars of note: so M. Simonetti, Studi sull’ arianesimo, 125, n. 76; R .P. C. Hanson, Epektasis (Mélanges Daniélou), 293-303; F. H. Kettler, private communication. Admittedly, we have only the evidence of translations; and Rufinus had strong reasons for introducing the term to suggest Origen’s orthodoxy. But the combination of passages quoted below seems to me sufficient to uphold the traditional view.
Christopher Stead, Divine Substance (Oxford: Oxford University Press At The Clarendon Press, 1977), 211.
The quite evident basis for the suspicion of Rufinus’ translation of the Peri Archon as a corruption of the text in defense of Origen’s “orthodoxy” is the fear that Rufinus was concerned to uphold the Roman Catholic doctrinal tradition and distorted Origen’s text to that end. On the other hand, It should be kept in view that there no such concern was possible prior to the Reformation’s rejection of the Catholic doctrinal tradition a millennium later. Origen was committed to the apostolic tradition, as had been the Apostolic Fathers (notably Ignatius and Polycarp), the second century apologists (Justin, Theophilus of Antioch, Anaxagoras of Athens), as well as Tertullian, Hippolytus, Irenaeus, and the Christian world at large. Christian orthodoxy is adherence to the apostolic oral tradition, the offering of the One Sacrifice instituted by Jesus the Christ at the Last Supper, and there committed by him to the Eleven: “Do this in memory of me.” It is the Christ’s One Sacrifice, and can be offered only by a bishop or priest who stands in the apostolic succession to this authority. It must follow that the apostolic foundation of the Church is radically Eucharistic. The High Priestly offering of the One Sacrifice is the institution of the New Covenant, the nuptial One Flesh of Jesus Christ and his bridal Church, the New Covenant, the outpouring of the Spiritus Creator upon the New Creation through the Church’s Eucharistic worship.
3. The translation of this excerpt from the Symbol of Chalcedon is taken from Henry R. Percival and Wm. B. Eerdmans, eds. The Seven Ecumenical Councils (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), at 264. XXX check this again in re confusion of 16 and 23.
[3] The communication of idioms occurs in paradoxical liturgical expressions of the faith such as that Jesus, Mary’s human Son, is the Lord, or that Jesus, the Son of God, died on the Cross. Long before the ecumenical Councils, these commonplace attributions at once of divinity and of humanity to Jesus the Lord witnessed to the Church’s faith in the full divinity and the full humanity of her Lord, the “one and the same Son.” The Symbol of Chalcedon only made explicit what had always been implicit in the Church’s liturgy, the Personal unity of God and Man in the Lord Jesus. The faith that Jesus is Lord affirms in him the Personal unity whose dogmatic expression is the proclamation at Ephesus that Mary, as the mother of Jesus, her Son, her Head, is thereby the Mother of God.
[4] See the exegesis of Prov. 8:30 provided by Gerhard von Rad in Old Testament Theology I, tr. D. G. M. Stalker (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 137-39, 150, and in Wisdom in Israel, tr. James D. Martin (Nashville and New York, Abingdon Press, 1972) 163-175, 305-311. Von Rad rejects, as clearly incongruous, the usual translation (e.g., in the RSV) of this hapax legomenon for created Wisdom as a “master workman” who, in the verses following, is “daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and delighting in the sons of men.” It is not possible to associate a “master workman” with this imagery. Von Rad’s translation, “little daughter, little girl” not only makes sense in that context, but it also corresponds to the femininity of created Wisdom in the Old Testament.
It should be noted that Mary’s nuptial union with her Lord is thus immediate as to preclude its sacramental mediation. Mary does not worship in the Church; rather, her nuptial worship of her Lord is that of the Church with whom, as the second Eve, she is at one. As the second Eve, she is primordially integral, immaculately conceived; her “fiat:” « ἰδοὺ ἠ δούλη κυρίου. γένοιτό μοι κατὰ τὸ ῥῆμά σου.» (“Behold the handmaiden of the Lord: may it be done to me according to your word” (Lk. 1:38, Nestlé-Aland, p.172; RSV) is her conception of her Son, her Lord, the second Adam who in that moment became flesh in a nuptial union with the second Eve, to be fulfilled in his One Sacrifice, offered to the Father on the Altar and on the Cross.
[5] Much of the history of theological use of “homoousios” tends to dismiss the significance of its use in 262 by Pope Dionysius in a letter sent to the diocese of Alexandria rebuking his namesake, Dionysius, the Archbishop of Alexandria, for language which Dionysius of Rome thought could be read as tritheist rather than Trinitarian. We owe to Athanasius’ De Sententia Dionysii (H. G. Opitz, Athanasius’ Werke 2, 1 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1935), 46-47, (see Jurgens, Faith of the Fathers I, 325) the preservation of all we know of this letter. A second sent by the Pope personally to Dionysius of Alexandria has been lost but its general thrust may be inferred from the latter’s response to it in his Refutatio et Apologia insofar as preserved by Athanasius. For commentary, see The Letters and Other Remains of Dionysius of Alexandria. Edited by Charles Lett Feltoe, B.D. (Cambridge: The University Press, 1904), [hereafter, Letters of Dionysius of Alexandria], 170-77. Feltoe’s edition is still regarded as the standard edition of what remains of Dionysius’ works, but it is now difficult to find.
Before his elevation to the See of Alexandria, Dionysius, perhaps the most famous disciple of Origen, had succeeded to the direction of the Catechetical School (i.e., the Didaskaleion founded in Alexandria by Pantaenus ca. 185. Clement succeeded to its direction but, ca. 202, he fled from Alexandria to escape the persecution which martyred Origen’s father, Leonidas. This left the direction of the Didaskaleion in the hands of Origen, beginning when he was only seventeen. Upon Origen’s excommunication by Demetrius and his consequent exile to Caesarea ca. 231, his convert and former assistant, Heraclas, succeeded him as the director of the Catechetical School. Some years earlier than Origen, Heraclas had studied under Ammonius Saccas. Two years after exiling Origen from Alexandria, Bishop Demetrius died, to be succeeded by Heraclas, who directed the School until shortly after his succession to the See of Alexandria. Dionysius then became the director of the Didaskaleion, i.e., of the Catechetical School. He is thought to have retained that office for a time at least after himself succeeding to the See of Alexandria upon the death of Heraclas in 247 or 248.
At least one of the letters which Dionysius wrote as Archbishop of Alexandria to correct a resurgence of Sabellianism among his suffragan bishops in Libyan Pamphilia was opportunely read by them as implicitly subordinationist. On that contrived basis they appealed to Dionysius, a Roman priest who had succeeded to the papacy a year earlier. He responded to the charges which Dionysius of Alexandria’s Sabellian suffragans had brought against him by calling a local synod which condemned Sabellianism and the tritheism of which Dionysius of had been accused by his Lybyan suffragans. Thereupon Pope Dionysius wrote a personal letter, since lost, to his namesake Dionysius of Alexandria, questioning his failure to use “homoousios” in the letter he had sent to Libyan suffragans, rebuking their Sabellianism. It appears that Dionysius of Rome he had accepted the intimation of the Sabellian bishops that this failure had tritheistic consequences. He repeated the substance of his personal letter in a letter directed uimpersonally to the See of Alexandria.
Dionysius, known as “the Great” well before 260, was a disciple of Origen. The charges made against him can be attributed to Origen as their source only if the latter’s doctrine of the Father’s eternal generation of the divine Son who, as Son, cannot but be of the same divine Substance as his Father, is ignored. It is possible that in composing his extended reply to the Pope’s criticism, Dionysius achieved a clearer understanding of the Church’s Trinitarian faith than he had theretofore possessed, but there is also no reason to suppose that he had ever been in heresy. As Athanasius would show, and as Feltoe admits, Dionysius’ motive for sending letters to the Libyan Sabellians was Christological. As Sabellians, the Libyan bishops could no more affirm the divinity of Christ than could Paul of Samosata a few years later. It was this heresy that Dionysius reproved, and not for the first time, for he had discussed it earlier in a letter to the martyred predecessor of Dionysius of Rome, Pope Sixtus II, who had reigned but a year before his death in 258. Dionysius’ recognition of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, upon which the Pope Dionysius of Rome had insisted, is integral with his exposition of his faith in the “Refutation and Defense;” and thus a recognition of their irreducible distinction within the indivisible unity of the divine substance. The illustrations which he used may be thought clumsy However, Tertullian had used them in Apologeticus 17-2, which may be thought to warrant their use. In any case, it may be expected of Dionysius of Alexandria, tutored by Origen’s stress on the indivisible mia ousia of the Trinity, that he intended no resistance to the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father.
Whether or not in fact Dionysius of Alexandria still held the office of director of the Catechetical School while composing the “Refutation and Defense,” there can be no doubt that this extended statement of his faith entered into the tradition of the School. The young deacon Athanasius would not have become Archbishop Alexander’s theological advisor had he not been well steeped in that tradition, and not least in the emphasis placed upon the “homoousios” of the Son as understood by both Pope Dionysius of Rome and Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria—Dionysius the Great, and not only to those who studied at the Catechetical School. In fact, we owe to Athanasius our knowledge of Dionysius’ Refutation and Defense: see Athanasius, De sententia Dionysii, V, xiii. Dionysius of Alexandria received from the See of Antioch a specific invitation to attend the first trial of Paul of Samosata in 265. His death in that year makes his attendance at that Council unlikely, but the Sabellian confusion Paul inserted into “homoousios” would not have confused Dionysius, as his Refutatio and Defense makes quite clear. The imputation to him, by J. N. D. Kelly (Doctrines, 136, 235), of a generic understanding of that term requires that Dionysius be ignorant of the immateriality and consequent indivisibility of the divine substance, which Origen had certainly taught, and which Ernest Evans, (Against Praxeas, 41, 45) has shown to have been universally acknowledged by Christian writers from the late second century: Kelly’s error on this point is difficult to understand..
It may therefore be proposed with some confidence that Athanasius the deacon had become familiar with the meaning of the “homoousios” from his association with Anthony’s monastic community, his theological studies in Alexandria, and his further association with Archbishop Alexander of Alexandria as his secretary. Athanasius’ reputation as a major theological voice at Nicaea is indissociable from his clear understanding there and thereafter of the indispensability of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, at once to the Son’s own divinity and to the unity of God, as taught by Dionysius the Pope and by Dionysius the Great and, through them, by the Catechetical School of Alexandria.[5]
It is urged against Athanasius as the source of the Nicene “homoousios” that the word is rarely found in his writings, but J. N. D. Kelly has countered this inference in Creeds, at 260ff. Jaroslav Pelikan has pointed out Athanasius’ emphasis upon its foundation, the communication of idioms, primarily to underwrite the Church’s faith that “Jesus is Lord,” but echoing also the earliest known magisterial use of Theotokos as a Marian title: this by Alexander, Athanasius’ predecessor in the See of Alexandria, in a letter to his namesake, the Archbishop of Constantinople: see Pelikan’s Mary Throughout the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New York and London: Yale University Press,1996), 57-61, wherein Athanasius is shown to have anticipated Cyril’s reliance upon the communicatio idiomatum in the latter’s anathemata against Nestorius in the next century. The communication of idioms is the indispensable hermeneutical rule for speaking accurately of the Son as at once human and divine: its presupposition is his consubstantiality at once with the Father and with us, as Athanasius well knew:
The union, therefore, was of just such a kind, so that He might unite what is man by nature to Him who is in the nature of the Godhead, thereby assuring the accomplishment of salvation and of His deification. Let those, therefore, who deny that the Son is by nature from the Father and proper to His essence, deny also that He took true human nature from the Ever-Virgin Mary. In neither case would it have been profitable to us men: if the Word were not by nature true Son of God, if the flesh he assumed were not true flesh. (14)
14 The Son, then, is homoousios or consubstantial with the Father, and we are homoousios or consubstantial with Christ.
Athanasius, Discourses against the Arians, 2, 70; tr. Jurgens, Early Fathers I, , §767a, at 330.
It may be noted here that Msgr. Jurgens is that rara avis, a twentieth-century Catholic theologian who affirms the doctrine of Chalcedon, and who finds Athanasius’ understanding of the homoousion of Jesus the Christ to be thus Personal and therefore univocal as to denote the human consubstantiality of the Son with those of whom he is the head. Jurgens then thinks Athanasius to have been first to recognize, with clarity, that Jesus’ double consubstantiality, divine and human, is the direct implication of his Personal unity. Because his consubstantiality is Personal, it is with human persons as well as with divine Persons. Ephesus defined Christ’s human Personhood, and Chalcedon defined his consequent substantial unity with all human beings,in conformity with this signal patristic insight. The Fathers knew the foundation of Christology to be the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father, the head with whom he subsists and images in free substantial unity by his mission as the head of all creation and thereby the source of its free unity, its creator, quite as the Father, as his head, is the source of his Personal unity.
This recognition of the application of the communication of idioms to the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousios of the Son, as the corollary of the Catholic faith that Jesus is Lord, is unique to Athanasius in the fourth century and was little understood well into the fifth. While by 350 the Eusebians had deposed the Oriental bishops who had been Athanasius’s allies at the Council of Nicaea, the Chalcedonian development of the Nicene definition of the homoousios of the Son with the Father offers powerful evidence that Athanasius was personally responsible for its selection at Nicaea as a term which he knew to be uniquely capable of defending the faith of the Church against the radical Arian rejection of the communication of idioms, a denial at once of the humanity as well as the divinity of Jesus.
[6] The nuptial imaging of the Triune God, and consequently the nuptial substantiality of humanity, has been given magisterial standing by John Paul II. Its explicit affirmation appears in the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World," published over the Pope’s signature by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on July 31, 2004, §§ 5-8; see Volume III, endnotes 247, 286, and 308 and, endnotes 36 and 320, infra, for its further discussion.
Karl Rahner, in The Trinity; tr. Joseph Donceel, S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970) has condemned as “tritheism” the traditional ascription to the Trinity of three divine Persons in the sense of the three distinct divine Selves, the three distinct Self-consciousnesses, the three objectively distinct intellectual Supposits, or Subsistences, or Names, or Persons. whose perichōresis constitutes the free unity of the Trinity. Rahner finds it incomprehensible that, e.g., the Son might pray to the Father, or that we may pray to the Father through the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Rahner’s a priori identification of the unity of a self, whether human or divine, with the unity of an intellectual substance, has as its corollary his imputation of tritheism to those who understand the Persons of the Trinity to be distinct Selves. Under his postulated monism of substance, he could not avoid equating an assertion of three Trinitarian Selves with a “tritheist” assertion of three divine substances. Whether Rahner’s metaphysics has a ground in the metaphysics of St. Thomas is discussible, but it has no foundation in the apostolic tradition.
The Trinity is a translation of a section of a work which Rahner published in the latter 1960s: “Der dreifaltige Gott als transzendenter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte,” Mysterium Salutis, Grundriss heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik, edited by Johannes Feiner and Magnus Löhrer, v. 2, Die Heilsgeschichte vor Christus, ch. 5 (Einsiedeln, Benziger Verlag, 1967). During the remaining fourteen years of his life, Rahner offered no correction of the text of The Trinity, which has been very widely distributed in the Unites States as well as in other Anglophone countries. Commentaries on it have been uniformly respectful and, despite its radical rejection of defined Trinitarian, Christological, and sacramental doctrine, it has never been subjected to ecclesial censure. Its influence is difficult to assess. However, now, forty years after his death in 1984, it may be supposed that fewer theologians rely upon his work than at the height of his influence during and immediately following upon the Second Vatican Council. Nonetheless, he has had a profound impact upon professedly Catholic theologians, whose understanding of their position in, and their responsibility to and for the Church, for his normalization of doctrinal dissent is now very largely theirs. John Paul II famously observed that dissent is only dissent, but he spoke rather too late; Rahner had already succeeded in making dissent the default stance of contemporary theologians. In this he was notably assisted by the Thomist rejection of the doctrinal tradition taught by the four Great Councils of Nicaea, I Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon. In dehistoricizing the subject and the text of Jn. 1:14; St. Thomas dehistoricized the Mission of the Son. and consequently was unable to accept the definition at Ephesus that Mary is the Theotokos, the Mother of Jesus who is God. His metaphysical monism contradicted the consubstantiality of Jesus with us, which had been taught at Ephesus and Chalcedon, and finally, having dehistoricized the Incarnation, St. Thomas could not accept the doctrine of Irenaeus, confirmed over and again at Chalcedon, that Jesus is “one and the same Son. His Trinitarian doctrine is either subordinationist or modalist, and his dehistoricization of Jesus the Lord leaves him hovering between a Monarchianism modalism and an alternative subordinationism.
[6] Louis Duchesne has well summarized a basic element of the tactics deployed by Eusebius of Nicomedia in his war upon the Nicene Creed:
Pronounce an anathema upon the Council! The memory of Constantine forbade it.
.Duchesne, The History the Christian Church from its foundation to the end of the fifth century, II, (New York: Longmans and Green, 1922), 176, Tr. from the 4th edition of Histoire Ancienne de l’Eglise II (Paris: A. Fontemoig, 1910), 221-23.
[7] The cosmological quandary of ‘the one versus the many,’ posed perennially by the adherents of the Eusebian subordinationism as the single alternative to the Sabellian heresy, is not to be read into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, nor into the Nicene Creed. Creeds are dogmatic and therefore intrinsically historical statements, whose referent is Jesus the Christ, not the supposedly “immanent Son” of the cosmologically-normed Christologigcal speculation pervading the Orient from the early fourth century down to the middle of the fifth, when the Symbol of Chalcedon eight times rejected the non-historical subject of that speculation, the Son sensu negante, .
The pertinent text of the Nicene Creed, repeated in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, speaks of the subject of the Incarnation as Jesus the Christ, which is of course the apostolic tradition:
τὸν δι’ ἡμας τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ διὰ τὴν ἡμετέραν σωτηρίαν κατελθόντα καὶ σαρκωθέντα, ἐνανθροπήσαντα, παθόντα, καὶ ἀναστάντα τῇ τρίτῇ ἡμέρα, [καὶ] ἀνελθόντα εἰς τοὺς οὐρανούς ἐρχόμενον κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς . καὶ εἰς τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμα.
Qui [propter nos homines et] propter nostram salutem descendit, incarnatus est et homo factus est et passus est, et resurrexit tertia die, et ascendit in caelos, venturus judicare vivos et mortuos. Et in Spiritum Sanctum.
Who for us men and for our salvation descended, was incarnate, and became man and suffered, and rose on the third day, and ascended into heaven, coming again to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit.
Denziger-Schönmetzer, ed. xxxiii (1965), §*125, at 52. See also J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, Third Edition (New York: Longman Group UK Limited; Paperback, 1991; [hereafter, Creeds] at 215-16.
[8] John Meyendorff has summarized the Christological doctrine of the Orthodox Churches of the Byzantine rite in Byzantine Theology: historical trends & doctrinal themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 31- 41.
[9] As to the Western Church, Louis Bouyer, after discussing the inability of Catholic theologians to accept as definitive the doctrine of the Council of Chalcedon, indicates that he also considers the Chalcedonian Symbol to be inadequate in the sense of leaving unresolved the controversy it purported to close. Citing the dissent of the Eastern Churches to its provisions, he observes of the Western theologians that
Les divergences entre les auteurs modernes, tant du point de vue de l’interprétation historique de la formule de Chalcédoine que du point de vue du type de christologie qui devrait résulter de son acceptation, ne sont guères moindres, jusqu’au sein de l’église Catholique.
Le moins qu’on puisse dire est que cela met en lumière le fait que le Concile de Chalcédoine a peut-être réuni les données principales du problème, certaines des plus importantes en tout cas, mais n’a pas réussi à en proposer une synthèse qui s’impose, ni même à indiquer clairement la voie qui pourrait y conduire.13
13Ceci a été mis clairement en lumière en particulier par le Père Serge Boulgakoff dans l’introduction de son livre L’Agneau de Dieu (en Russe). Ces pages, malheureusement, n’ont pas été incluses dans la traduction française. Voir également, Th. Sagi Bun, Problemata theologiae chalcedoniensis, Roma, 1969, pp. 44 ss.
Le fils éternel: Théologie de la Parole de Dieu et christologie (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1974), at 399.
It would seem evident that a Catholic theologian who puts on hold the Church’s formal definition of her faith in the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, pending a synthesis satisfactory to theological community, considerably exceeds his brief. It is not the office of an ecumenical Council to resolve the problems of theologians, nor those posed by disputing theologies, but to transcend them by the authoritative magisterial proclamation of the truth of the Catholic faith threatened by such theological confusion. Theological speculation which cannot accept that proclamation as foundational has ceased to be Catholic. This is the experience of the fourth century, whose Eusebian dissenters to the Nicene homoousios finally realized after I Constantinople that there is no alternative to the Nicene Creed which, unfortunately, they understood to be assimilable to the homoiousian doctrine taught at Meletius’ Council of Antioch in 363. Those who reject the Symbol of Chalcedon suffer from a comparable confusion. As in the fourth century it had no future, so it has none now.
[10] Aloys Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 447-457, 501-23; Louis Bouyer has written to the same effect:
D’ou un double handicap qui pèse sur toutes les christologies modernes; des apories chalcédoniennes qui n’ont jamais été résolues à fond, et des apories impliquées dans toute christologie post-augustinienne, qui n’ont même jamais été clairement perçues, et moins encore dégagées.
Le fils éternel, at 359.
Bouyer has remarked of the Orthodox Byzantine theology that it also finds the Symbol of Chalcedon inadequate, requiring further theological elaboration. John Meyendorff agrees:
While Chalcedon had insisted that the Logos was indeed one in his personal identity, it did not clearly specify that the term hypostasis, used to designate this identity, also designated the hypostasis of the pre-existing Logos. The anti-Chalcedonian opposition in the East so built its entire argument around the point that Byzantine Christology of the age of Justinian committed itself very strongly to excluding the interpretation of Chalcedon which would have considered the prosōpon, or ‘hypostasis” mentioned in the definition as simply the “prosōpon of union” of the old Antiochene School―i.e., the new synthetic reality resulting from the union of the two natures. It affirmed, on the contrary, following Cyril of Alexandria, that Christ’s unique hypostasis is the pre-existing hypostasis of the Logos, that is, that the term is used in Christology with precisely the same meaning as in the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocian Fathers: one of the three eternal hypostases of the Trinity “took flesh,” while remaining essentially the same in its divinity. The hypostasis of Christ, therefore pre-existed in its divinity, but it acquired humanity by the Virgin Mary.
This fundamental position has two important implications. (a) There is no absolute symmetry between divinity and humanity in Christ because the unique hypostasis is only divine and because human will follows the divine. It is precisely a “symmetrical” Christology which was rejected as Nestorian at Ephesus.(431). The “asymmetry” of Orthodox Christianity reflects an idea which Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria stressed so strongly: only God can save, while humanity can only cooperate with the saving acts and will of God. However, as we emphasized earlier, in the patristic concept of man, “theocentricity” is a natural character of humanity: thus asymmetry does not prevent the fact that Christ was fully and “actively” man. (b) The human nature of Christ is not personalized into a separate human hypostasis, which means that the concept of hypostasis is not an expression of natural existence, either in God or in man, but it designates personal existence. Post Chalcedonian Christology postulates that Christ was fully man and also that He was a human individual, but it rejects the Nestorian view that he was a human hypostasis or person.
John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 153-54 (emphasis added).
The “asymmetry” of this ancillary Byzantine Christology, which is theology and not doctrine, thus concludes that Jesus is not a human Person; it assumes that the Chalcedonian assertion of his Personal humanity is a reductively Nestorian separation of Jesus into two hypostases, which is flatly to ignore―or reject―the Chalcedonian doctrine of Jesus’ single hypostasis or subsistence: i.e., the doctrine of his Personal unity. It is also to ignore―or reject―the primordiality of Jesus’ pre-existence as the Alpha, the Beginning, and thereby dehistoricizes the Son qua Son, again in flat contradiction of the insistent Chalcedonian identification of Jesus as “one and the same Son.”
Meyendorff’s Christology is simply that of St. Thomas. Their common denial that Jesus is a human Person, a human Son, relies entirely upon an aprioristic, nonhistorical, cosmologically-governed discovery of the prior impossibility of the Church’s faith that Jesus is Lord. They unreflectively suppose the first task of Christology to be this cosmological quest for the necessary reasons which would underwrite the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord. Throughout most of the fourth century, the same anti-Trinitarian identification of the Father with the divine substance drove the Eusebian resistance to the Nicene homoousios, to the point that the homoiousian dissenters realized that they must evade the choice between the monist divinity of Arius and the mia hypostasis of the Trinity affirmed at Nicaea, and found a via media in an irrational binitarian refusal to affirm the Personal standing of the Holy Spirit.
Given the current academic hegemony of the Thomist denial of the Personal humanity of Jesus the Lord, the obstacle to affirming the Chalcedonian doctrine is the analogous application to the human substance of the Arian and semi-Arian denial of the Trinity, viz., the monist postulate that each human person is a human substance. The absurdity of this postolate has long since been made apparent. The uncritical assumption, that each human being is a distinct substance of course bars the Chalcedonian doctrine of Jesus’ consubstantiality with us, which is more than the corollary of his Personal consubstantiality with the Father: his full, i.e., Personal divinity requires that consubstantiality as his full Personal humanity requires his consubstantiality with those of whom he is the creator and the head. It is of course evident that the denial that Jesus is a human Person must reject Chalcedon’s definition of Jesus’ consubstantiality “with us,” quite as the Eusebian and Arian denial of the Trinity barred Jesus’ homousion with the Father.
Following St. Thomas, Meyendorff accepts as beyond question the standard cosmological identification of the human person with the human substance: for him as for St. Thomas, this cosmological postulate rules out the Chalcedonian Symbol’s further application of the homoousios to designate a numerically single human substance. Thus, with the Thomist theological tradition generally, he rejects out of hand the univocity of the Nicaea’s use of homoousios to denote the numerical unity of the divine substance, which must govern Chalcedon’s application of that term to Jesus. Obviously, it is as subsisting in the one human substance that the Lord Jesus is consubstantial with us, quite as by subsisting in the one divine substance he is consubstantial with the Father. Meyendorff evades or perhaps misses the point:
The Nicene Creed had spoken of the Son as “consubstantial” with the Father: Chalcedon, in order to affirm that in Jesus Christ there were indeed two natures, the divine and the human, proclaims that he was “consubstantial with the Father according to His divinity and consubstantial with us according to His humanity.” Implied in this definition was a condemnation of Eutyches. But, in affirming that the Son with the Father had one substance, Nicaea was following the essential Biblical monotheism: there is one God. However, was Chalcedon implying that there was also one man? Obviously further clarification was needed on the point of how the three are One in God, but the many are not one in humanity.
John Meyendorff, “Justinian, The Empire and the Church” Dumbarton Oaks Papers (1968) 43-60, at 52-53.
Having recited the Council’s dependence upon the Biblical monotheism, and inserted an ambiguity into it by affirming the identity of the divine Substance, the Trinity, with “one God,” an expression as easily understood to designate the Personal unity of each member of the Trinity as the substantial unity of Trinity, Meyendorff might have mentioned that the homoousion of the Son is with the Father, not with the divine substance which is the Trinity. The “Biblical monotheism” identifies the divine substance, the “one God,” with the Trinitarian Community, the Personally consubstantial Father, Son and Spirit, each consubstantial with the others by reason of subsisting in the same divine substance, theTrinity.
The Biblical anthropology is comparably communal, for as created in the image of God, the human substance is Trinity-imaging. The creation of man in the image of God requires that this creation be at once substantial and free: this free substance is the free nuptial community of the second Adam, the second Eve, and their subsistent love; the substantial nuptial community. The One Flesh of Christ and the bridal Church images the substantial Community that is the Trinity. This is the « “Biblical monotheism” of Gen. 1-2. which the patristic tradition understood as a prophecy fulfilled in Jn. 19:34.
Quite as the divine substance, the Trinity, the “one God,” is a free Community, so it must follow that the human substance, created in the image of God, is an analogously free community, a single substance, for the imaging is single, and communal, for it images the Trinity. Finally, unity of substance in which, as a matter of definition, creation terminates, makes it impossible to see two human substances in the creation of Adam and Eve.
In the passage quoted supra, Meyendorf, in common with the Thomist tradition, confronts the cosmological impossibility of Chalcedon’s development of a doctrine already fully in hand at Nicaea: the substantial “sameness” of Jesus with the Father simply by reason of his homoousion with the Father. As Jesus’ Person is fully human and fully divine, he is Personally human and Personally divine: this is the teaching of Chalcedon, and the direct corollary of the Catholic faith that Jesus is the Lord: Chalcedon summed it up, following Irenaeus, by insistently repeated affirmations that Jesus is the one and the same Son.
In affirming Jesus’ Personal homoousion “with us,” Chalcedon goes beyond the Council of Nicaea only in developing in applying that substantial “sameness” to the Son of the Theotokos, the one and the same Son, whom the Council affirms to be homoousios with each of us by reason of his subsistence in the same human substance in which each of us subsists.
The inescapable implication of the Symbol is that every human person, including the Person who is our Lord, is human by personal human subsistence in the same unique human substance. Were this not the case, the ancient doctrine underlying the Catholic Faith that Jesus is the Lord, i.e., the communication of idioms, must fail, and with it the truth of the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Reasoning on the same ground and to the same effect as Meyendorff and Bouyer, Bernard Lonergan has written:
The term homoousion, or consubstantial, is both philosophically and theologically ambiguous. Philosophically, the ambiguity results from different views of human knowing: for what one means by ousia, or substance, (and thus by homoousion, or consubstantial), will depend on whether one thinks that it is known by sense, or only through true judgment. Theologial ambiguity, which presupposes the doctrine of the Trinity, lies in this, that creatures are said to be consubstantial when they belong to the same species, whereas the consubstantiality of the divine persons implies numerical identity of substance.
Lonergan, The Way to Nicaea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology. A Translation by Conn O’Donovan of the First Part of De Deo Trino (Phildelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976) [hereafter, The WaY to Nicaea], at 88; cf. 92-3; underlineation added.
The Catholic doctrinal tradition is a high price to pay for insisting that the human unity must be that of a “species,” than which no more ambiguous term is known to Aristotelian metaphysics. In the De Anima, Aristotle left its unity, hence its meaning, unresolved. In an early work, De Ente et Essentia, St. Thomas provided a resolution of the Aristotelian enigma from whch thereafter he did not depart: it reduced “species” to an abstraction, ‘second substance,” leaving the human membership without community: there is no community between substances nor can there be for, as a matter of definition, each substance is essentially complete: i.e., as human, each person is an agent intellect, a proposition whose fragmentation of humanity Aristotle had been unwilling to concede.
The ascription of potentiality to the human intellect presupposes its participation in a created intellectual substance, but St. Thomas’ reduction, in De Ente et Essentia, of the human species to an abstraction rules this out, while personal participation in the divine Intelligence will not support intersubstantial communication: e.g., we have none with angels as St. Thomas understood them. for each exhausts its species. Benedict XVI, as Cardinal Ratzinger, pointed out this inconsistency in Augustine’s anthropology sixty years ago: see endnote 2, supra.
However, on the nonexistent basis proffered by the radically incoherent cosmological anthropology, whose atomization of the human substance undercuts its own rationality, Meyendorff firmly forecloses that development: “the many are not one in humanity:” this despite the headship of humanity which Paul ascribed to Jesus in I Cor. 11:3, and our defined consubstantiality with him. In agreement with Lonergan, Meyendorff has already identified “one in humanity” as “one man:” i.e.:
But, in affirming that the Son with the Father had one substance, Nicaea was following the essential Biblical monotheism: there is one God. However, was Chalcedon implying that there was also one man?
In the first place, it should be pointed out that the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father refers to Jesus’ possession of the same divine substance as is possessed by the Father: it does not refer to Jesus’ possession of the one divine substance possessed by the Father, for the Father is not the one divine substance, nor is the Son, nor the Spirit. The Nicene use of “same substance” is an explicit rejection of ditheism and tritheism. Inevitably the “same substance” in view at Nicaea is identically the one substance that is the One God, the Trinity, but in affirming the homoousion of the Son, “the essential Biblical monotheism” became what it had not been clearly understood to be, viz., Trinitarian in the sense of the Tri-Personal subjectivity which, however implicit in the homoousion of the Son affirmed at Nicaea, waited nearly forty years for acceptance by the Cappadocian bishops, men whose Christian faith in the One God of “the essential Biblical monotheism” was never in issue. Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa never understood the novelty of the Nicene homoousios, which Athanasius had grasped from the outset as the direct implication of the Nicene mia hypostasis, but which, like Basil and his brother, Meyendorff has missed.
Secondly, in response to Meyendorff’s ironic query: “However, was Chalcedon implying that there was also one man?” it does appear that Paul has said as much in Eph. 2:15:where we read ἴνα τοὺ δὺο κτίσῃ ἐν αὺτῷ εἰς ἕνα καινὸν ἀνθρωπον (in unum novum hominem), and again, a bit further on, in Eph. 4:13: εἰς ἄνδρα τέλειον (in virum perfectum). The exact reading may be left to the exegetes, for the “further clarification” which Meyendorff seeks is theological, and is easily supplied. Quite as the Son’s homoousion with the Father is the unqualified rejection of the cosmological equation of the divine substance with a divine Monas, so also the Chalcedonian doctrine of the One Son’s homoousion with us is the equally unqualified rejection of the cosmological identification of the human substance with a human monas. The Symbol of Chalcedon rejects the anthropological counterpart of Sabellianism along with theological. Just as the homoousion of the Son with the Father barred the Sabellian supposition that the divine Substance is the divine Self, so also the consubstantiality of the Son with us bars equivalent supposition that the human substance is the human self. This is clear enough. Meyendorff’s problem is cosmological. His dissent to the Chalcedonian Symbol never reaches the level of theology.
The adamantine refusal by systematic theologians to accept the doctrinal correction of their cosmological complacency, as instanced by Bouyer, Meyendorff and Lonergan, has issued in their rejection of the defined doctrine of the last of the four Great Councils as the subject of their theological quaerens. Their pseudo=speculation thereby ceases to be fed by the faith, ceases thus to be historical, to become another failed ideology seeking to impose itself upon the free truth of the Catholic faith, which submits to no imposition.
Theologoumena are at their best remain questions; they are never answers. Theology, insofar as it is a methodologically controlled inquiry, does not create its subject.
Jesus’ consubstantiality with humanity, with all human beings, would be merely nominal were the cosmological interpretation of human substantiality accepted, as it is by Lonergan’s witness to the Thomist tradition, and by Meyendorff’s witness to the Byzantine theological tradition. Each ignores the evident fact that theology is not doctrine. The Symbol of Chalcedon is not a theological document. It is a magisterial and therefore liturgical proclamation of the highest level of solemnity: it cannot be annulled by reason of its failure to conform to the cosmological obsessions of theologians.
The basis for this pertinacy in cosmological rationality is evident: the irrefutable, indeed the indiscussible authority of the classic Greek anthropology according to which each person is a distinct intellectual substance. For Meyendorff and Lonergan, as for theological tradition for which they speak, the Nicene refusal of this monism of substance in the dogma of the homoousion of the Son with the Father can have no application to his humanity, for that application is unthinkable. One therefore look elsewhere for the explanation of the “apories” of Chalcedon. Lonergan simply asserts a difference in the meaning of the Chalcedonian use of homoousios from that of the Nicene definition. This is mere inference from his own Thomist anthropology and has no other ground. We have cited Athanasius’ flat rejection of it as the direct implication of the Nicene mia hypostasis, which was for Athanasius the watchword of orthodoxy until his concession, in the Tome to the Antiochenes, to the use of the treis hypostaseis, in the sense given that expression by Origen. (see endnote 354, supra). The “further clarification” sought by Meyendorff is all too evidently sought from theologians, inasmuch as the Magisterium has seen no need for it during the intervening fifteen centuries. The absurdity of a theological clarification of defined doctrine needs little discussion. Theological quaerens intellectum is a quest for an understanding that is in continual need of clarification, but the clarification sought is of theologian’s personal quaerens intellectum, not of its object, the mystery of faith. Bouyer, Lonergan and Meyendorff have it backwards: doctrine clarifies theology, not vice versa.
The systematic surd recited by Bouyer, Meyendorff, and Lonergan among many others did not trouble the Fathers at Chalcedon, who were concerned for the doctrinal tradition, and so understood human substance according to the Biblical-liturgical anthropology, that is, humanity as the single object of the divine creation of man, which is substantial by definition: we have seen that Tertullian’s understanding of “persona” is in full agreement with it. It is in this human substance that Jesus subsists as head, and thereby is consubstantial with us. Like him, we also are human by our personal subsistence in the same human substance, consubstantial with our head.
Because Meyendorff supposes the unity of the human substance―as of substance per se―to be a necessary unity, as conceived by Greek philosophy, the “further clarification” which he requires of Chalcedon can only an impossible accommodation of the biblical anthropology of the creation of man in the free, nuptial unity of one flesh, by which alone is creation seen to be “very good,” to the regnant philosophical rationalization of the human condition, a project with which, not incidentally, the Thomist anthropology is entirely at peace: in fact, insistent.
Fr. Meyendorff’s manipulation of the homoousion of Jesus to mean one thing with respect to his divinity and quite another with respect to his humanity forgets that the Jesus the Lord’s homoousion with the Father, whether in the Nicene Creed or the Symbol of Chalcedon, is Personal, proper to a single Subsistence, and that in consequence it can have but a single meaning unless the Person of “the one and the same Son” so stressed by Chalcedon is to be divided, Nestorian-wise, into two distinct subsistences, the “Two Sons” doctrine disavowed by Diodore of Antioch nearly a century before Chalcedon, and condemned at Ephesus.
St. Thomas’ attribution of a persona composita to Jesus by reason of his subsistence in two natures (S. T. iiia, q. 2, a. 4, c.) is similarly motivated. For St. Thomas as for Meyendorff, the mystery of Jesus’ Person must be unraveled. If it is to be intelligible it must be shown to be antecedently possible, i.e., intelligible then in the context of an uncritically accepted monist metaphysics of man, an anthropology which knows no more of the distinction between the human hypostasis and the human ousia than does its cosmological counterpart know of the distinction between the divine hypostasis and the divine ousia.
But it is precisely these distinctions that conversion to the faith of the Church in the Lord Jesus requires: “composition” of the human and the divine in Jesus is barred by the Chalcedonian Symbol, which identifies the Son of Mary and the Son of the Father: one and the same Son who, as a Person, cannot but be incommunicable, which is to say, omnino simplex, utterly simple, whose intelligibility is his Name, to which no speculative analysis can apply. The search for the antecedent justification of that faith is to ignore the evident fact that the union of divinity and humanity in the Person of Jesus the Christ the Lord, precisely the Mysterium fidei, has no prior possibility. The inevitable discovery of its a priori analytic impossibility by the classic cosmological anthropologies, whether Latin or Greek, is beside the point, for the cosmological postulates which impose that impossibility are entirely irrelevant to the task of theology, whose concern is rather with discovering the implications of the Catholic faith that Jesus is the Lord. It is he whose truth, whose mystery, is foundational for Christian theology. Theology otherwise understood, i.e., as controlled by, for example, the uncritical acceptance of the cosmological postulate that God cannot but be the Absolute, and that, as Absolute, cannot but be radically immanent, incapable of relation to what is not God (e.g., S. T. Ia, q. 13, a. 7; applied to Christology in S. T. iiia, q. 2, a. 7, c. & ad 2), must deal with the implications of that abstract theologoumen, not with those consequent upon the faith of the Church that Jesus is Lord:. His reality is historical, free, concrete: as the actual revelation of the Trinity, Jesus the Lord transcends all cosmologically-conceived possibility; faith in his Lordship is a liberation from the determinisms of cosmological rationality. The historical discovery of this liturgically mediated truth initiates the development of doctrine; the first four Councils recite the liberation of Christological doctrine from the confines and confusion of cosmological rationality: as the Nicene proclamation of the homoousion of the Son with the Father is the immediate product of that liberation; so the Chalcedonian proclamation of the homoousion of the Son with those for who are created in him as their head is its triumph.
St. Thomas’ use of persona composita to describe the Personal unity of the Christ has its nominal warrant in the use of this language in Latin text of the Canons of II Constantinople: he quotes one Canon, the fourth, to this effect:
Theodori autem et Nestorii sequaces, divisione gaudentes, affectualem unitatem introducunt; sancta vera Dei Ecclesia, utriusque perfidiae impietatem reiciens, unionem Dei Verbi ad carnem secundum compositionem confitetur, quod est secundum subsistentiam.
S. T. iiia, q.2, a. 4, c. (DS §*425)
The same Conciliar reference to the Personal unity of the Christ as a “compositio” had appeared in Latin text of Canons 5 and 7. “Composition” is a possible translation of the Greek σύνθεσις» (synthesis) but Liddell & Scott (7th ed., at 1492b), prefers ‘junction’: viz., “b. in concrete sense, a junction, ὀστῶν)” (a junction, ‘of bones’), while reserving its translation as “composition” to a more abstract technical usage, as in grammar and music. The apparent simplicity of this term is deceiving. Supposing that the primitive meaning of σύνθεσις designating the union of bones in the knee or the elbow, was later generalized to refer to any physical association of distinct continua, it remains to be known whether the two distinct continua compose to constitute this union or, rather, whether the union of the two continua is distinct from the two coninua. . For example, is the knee, as “the junction of bones,” intelligible as distinct from the bones (the continua) which meet at the knee and therefore is not to be understood as constituted by them. To restate the alternatives: are the bones, the continua, joined in such wise that their junction is the prius of their intelligibility or, on the contrary, are the two bones prior in intelligibility to their σύνθεσις, their junction? If the former, the distinct bones, or continua, are intelligible only in their union; if the later, the union is explained in terms of the prior intelligibility of the duality of the bones, which does not appear to make sense, for the intelligibility of an object, here the junction, is in terms of its unity, not of its duality, its “composition” which St. Thomas considers to be ratione numeri, “by reason of number,” as will be seen.
St. Thomas’ assumes, with Aristotle, the intelligible unity of a continuum; see the citation infra of S. T. iiia q. 2, a. 4, ad 3). This is is to reject the Platonic analysis, whose underlying Eleatic (binary) logic forces the reduction of the unity of a line (τὰ μαθηματικά) to a sequence of dimensionless points; this in turn requires that any point be intelligible as the terminus of a line. In the absence of a continuum, a line, this poses an evident paradox. St. Thomas, by insisting to the contrary on the continuity of a line, must understand a point to be the intersection of two continuous lines, each of whose single dimension of length is potentially unlimited, possessing no intrinsic limit. Thus for St. Thomas, the junction here in view, the intersection of two continuous lines, constitutes a point that is actual as the limit of their potentially indefinite or infinite length; Otherwise put, the potentially intelligible lines are rendered finite and actually intelligible by the point of their juncture.
The Christological dimension of this question is evident. The human and divine natures of Christ are distinct from each other, and Jesus the Christ, as their “synthesis,” their “junction,” their “hypostatic union,”, is so as completely, i.e., personally, distinct from each of them simply because he is the source, the cause, of their intelligible unity, which is actual only as limited, and therefore is intelligible only by their junction in him. Consequently, he is not their mixture, not their merger. Such a merger of natures in Christ is the Apollinarist error.
The σύνθεσις to which these canons refer is clearly concrete: the union of irreducibly distinct 'natures,' divine and human, in the Person of Christ. In response to an objection, St. Thomas provides a nominal explanation of his understanding of “composition,” i.e., of “σύνθεσις,” in the Christ:
Ad secundum: dicendum quod illa compositio personae ex naturis non dicitur causa ratione partium, sed potius ratione numeri: sicut omne illud in quo duae convenient, potest dici ex eis compositum.
As to the second (objection) it must be said that this composition of person from natures is not said by reference to parts, but rather by reference to number; thus all that in which two come together can be said to be composed of them.
S. T. iiia, q. 2, a. 4, ad 2 (emphasis added).
At the letter, Thomas replies that were the duality of the natures asserted to be the cause (ratione partium) of the compositum, their unitio, who is the Christ, the assertion would be of a metaphysical impossibility: duality cannot be the source of unity. St. Thomas proposes therefore that the unitio or compositio personae is caused “ratione numeri”; by reason of number. He leaves his explanation there, but the number required to cause the unity of the “persona composite” that is Jesus the Christ can only be “unus,” and its causality is extrinsic. In brief, St. Thomas’ reply to the objection is intelligible only as nominal, i.e., as assertion, not as analysis.
In the next article, Thomas responds to an objection that a composition must be homgenous with its components:
Ad tertium: dicendum quod non in omni compositione hoc verificatur, quod illud quod componitur sit homogeneum cum componentibus, sed solum in partibus continui, nam continuum non componitur nisi ex continuiis. Animal vero componitur ex anima et corpore, quorum neutrum est animal.
Ibid, ad 3.
It is evident that there is no continuum between Christ’s humanity and his divinity, between his human nature and his divine nature, while the compositum, the “σύνθεσις,” the subsistence or hypostasis that is Jesus the Christ, is irreducible to his “natures,” as they are to each other. The uman and divine natures of Jesus do not constitute his Personal unity in any sense whatever, even that of the nominal ratio numeri, for their combination produces multiplicity, not unity.
St. Thomas’ discussion of the hypostatic union, understood as “illa compositio personae ex naturis,” focuses upon “alia et alia ratio subsistendi:”
Respondeo dicendum quod persona sive hypostasis Christi dupliciter considerari potest. Uno modo, secundum id quod est in se. Et sic est omnino simplex: sicut et natura Verbi. Alio modo, secundum rationem personae vel hypostasis, ad quam pertinet subsistere in aliqua natura. Et secundum hoc, persona Christi subsistit in duabus naturis. Unde, licet sit ibi unum subsistens, est tamen ibi alia et alia ratio subsistendi. Et sic dicitur persona composita, inquantum unus in duabis subsistit.
S. T. iiia, q. 2, a. 4, c. (emphasis added; cf. endnote 369, infra).
Keeping in mind that, for St. Thomas, the una subsistens, “secundum quod est in se,” is the Verbum, sensu negante, it must follow that the distinct (alia et alia) rationes subsistendi, simply as rationes, are abstract, not concrete. The “composition” which they imply in the Person of Christ is not ratione partium, not then the actual composition of distinct natures which the last sentence of Canon 4 of II Constantinople rejects (St. Thomas’ excerpt from Canon 4 omits this sentence). There can be no concrete division, as of parts, in the mystery of Christ. It must follow that the persona composita of S. T. IIIa, q. 2 a. 4, c., is an ens rationis. St. Thomas appears to accept this; his explanatory appeal to a ratio numeri refers to the two distinct natures of the Christ, and so does not correspond to the concrete meaning of the Greek term, σύνθεσις» (synthesis) whose Latin translation, “compositio,” appears to underlie St. Thomas’ use of “persona composita” to describe the Person of Christ which can only be single.
The synthesis or compositio, the “junction” of his two natures, is a non-composite unity of the natures in the Person of Christ who, in the mathematical analogy suggested by the Conciliar reference to his unity as a σύνθεσις synthesis), may be likened to the apex of an angle that is constitutes the intelligibility of its limbs, which is not constituted by them. In short, the meaning of God and of man are revealed in the Christ;, while the Christological heresies suppose the prior cosmological intelligibility of divinity and humanity to control what the Christ’s reality may be.
It mut be stressed St. Thomas understands the clause in the passage cited supra, “persona Christi subsistit in duas naturas”―which is in verbal agreement with the Symbol of Chalcedon―to refer to the Verbum Dei, sensu negante. Thomas should not be understood here to be speaking of Jesus the Lord, for the single subsistence, in which the Symbol of Chalcedon teaches the human and the divine to be personally united in “one and the same Son,” is there attributed to Jesus the Christ: it is Jesus, eight times referred to as “one and the same Son” whom the Symbol declares and affirms to subsist in humanity and divinity. St. Thomas has difficulties with this ancient description of the Christ
Manifestem est autem quod non una et eadem nativitate Christus est natus ex Patre ab aeterno et ex matre ex tempore. Nec nativitas est unius specie. Unde, quantum ad hoc, oporteret dicere in Christo esse diversas filiationes, unam temporalem et aliam aeternam. Sed quia subjectum filiationis non est natura aut pars naturae, sed solum persona vel hypostasis, in Christo autem non est hypostasis vel persona nisi aeterna: non potest in Christo esse aliqua filiatio nisi quae sit in hypostasi aeterna. Omnis autem relatio quae ex tempore de Deo dicitur, non ponit in ipso Deo aeterno aliquid secundem rem, sed secundem rationem tantum, sicut in Primo Parte10 habitum est. Et ideo filiatio qua Christus refertur ad matrem, non potest esse realis relatio, sed solum secundum rationem.11 (emphasis added)
10. Q. 13, a. 7
11 Hinc dicitur in symboli Athanasii: « Deus est ex substantia Patris ante saecula genitus, homo est ex substantia matris in saeculo natus qui licet Delus set et homo, non duo tamen, sed unus est Christus ».
S. T. iiia, a. 35, a. 5, c.
To this reference to the Athanasian Creed, another r eference may be adjoined: the Symbol of Chalcedon asserts eight times that Jesus the Christ is “the one and the same Son” Obviously, this cannot be said of the Verbum who, in St. Thomas’ theology, divine is Absolute, incapable of relation to his mother, and incapable of subsistence in humanity, although elsewhere Thomas follows Chalcedon in asserting that the Verbum subsists in humanity:
Et quia igitur natura humana sic unitur Verbo ut Verbum in ea subsistat, non autem ut aliquid addatur ei ad rationem suae naturae, vel ut eius natura in aliquid transmutetur, ideo unio facta est in persona, non in natura.
S.T. iiia, q. 2, a. 2, ad 1 (emphasis added).
Non autem dicitur divina natura assumpta ab humana sed e converso: quia human natura adjuncta est ad personalitatem divinam, ut scilicet persona divina in humana natura subsistat.
S.T. iiia, q. 2, a. 8, c (emphasis added)
This is curious language, for it is evident that St. Thomas understands the hypostasis of Jesus to be the Verbum, divine and therefore absolute, to be incapable of relation to his humanity: see S.T. iiia, q. 2, a 7, c. & ad 2, cited supra in this endnote. Yet this language appears twice, at the beginning and the end of the long second “Quaestio” of his treatment of the Incarnation, and must be taken to be in some manner integral to his Christology.
The only possible explanation of its use is St. Thomas’ intent to conform to the wording of the Symbol of Chalcedon, which he cites in S.T. iiia, q. 2, a. 1, sed contra, and in S.T. iiia, q. 2, a. 2, sed contra. He cannot be ignorant of the insistence of the Symbol upon the homoousion of the “one and the same Son” with every human person. Consubstantiality refers to persons: it is affirmed of Jesus with Father at Nicaea, and with the Father, and “with us” Ephesus and at Chalcedon. Consubstantiality cannot refer to an impersonal human nature, instrumentally related to the Absolute Verbum who, as absolute is without relation to it, for there exists no impersonal human nature as a matter of definition. But for St. Thomas, the union of divinity and humanity is in the creature, not in the Verbum. This raises difficulties He understands the created human nature of Christ to subsist in the hypostasis of the eternal Son, although a “created human nature” is personal by definition, and therefore is incomemunicable, incapable of subsisting other than as this concrete human person. In sum, a created human nature is a created human person who, qua tale, cannot but subsist. The Symbol of Chalcedon corrected St. Thomas’ Christology antecedently in an intensive and extensive statement of the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ, and of the consequent communication of divine and human idioms in him, as the one and the same Son of the Father and of our Lady:
2. unum eundemque confiteri Filium [= one and the same Son is to be confessed]
3. Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum [= Our Lord Jesus Christ]
4. consonanter omnes docentes [= we teach with one voice]
5. eundem perfectum in deitate [= the same, perfect in Godhead]
6. eundem perfectum in humanitate [= the same, perfect in manhood]
7. Deum vere et hominem vere [= true God and true man]
8. eundem ex anima rationali et corpore [= the same consisting of a reasonable soul and a human body]
9. consubstantialem Patri secundum deitatem [= consubstantial with the Father as touching his Godhead]
10. et consubstantialem nobis eundem secundum humanitatem [= and the same consubstantial with us as touching his manhood]
11. per omnia nobis similem absque peccato, [= made in all things like unto us, sin only excepted]
12. ante saecula quidem de Patre genitum secundum deitatem [= begotten of his Father before the worlds according to his Godhead]
13. in novissimis autem diebus [= but in these last days]
14. eundem propter nos et propter nostram salutem [= the same, for us men and for our salvation]
15. ex Maria Virgine Dei genitrice secundum humanitatem [= (born) of the Virgin Mary the Mother of God according to his manhood]
16. unum eundemque Christum Filium Dominum unigenitum [= This one and the same Jesus Christ the Lord, only-begotten Son (of God)]
17. in duabus naturis [= in two natures]
18. inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivise, inseparabiliter agnoscendum, [= must be confessed to be (in two natures) unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably (united)]
19. nusquam sublata differentia naturarum propter unitionem [= and nowhere is the distinction of the natures taken away by that union]
20. magisque salva proprietate utriusque naturae [= but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved]
21. et in unum personam atque subsistentiam concurrente [= and being united in one Person and subsistence]
22. non in duas personas partitum sive divisum [= not separated or divided into two persons]
23. sed unum et eundem filium unigenitum [= but one and the same Son and only-begotten]
24. Deum verbum dominum Jesum Christum [= God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ]
The Latin text is taken from DS §*301-*302; its English translation is from the Woodstock College theologate document previously cited.
Here, subsistence in humanity is attributed to Jesus the Christ, it is inescapable that he is thereby a human Person, which inference St. Thomas refuses, a refusal that is the corollary of his denial that Jesus the Lord is the subject of the Incarnation. Consequently, his accommodation of his Christology to the Symbol of Chalcedon can be no more than nominal, for it affirms of “the one and the same Son,” Jesus the Christ, that he Personally subsists in two sustances, in divinity and humanity, whereby his mother is the mother of God. The assertions of the subsistence of the Verbum in humanity cited above are metaphysically impossible. His explanation of them admits only their merely nominal conformity with the Chalcedonian insistence upon the Personal unity of the One and the same Son, and upon Mary’s personal motherhood of the Son who is God, Jesus Christ the Lord. Insisting upon the distinction between the Christological meaning of assumption and of union as that between action and relation, he concludes the corpus of article 8 as follows:
Ex eodem etiam sequitur tertia differentia: quod relatio, pracipue aequiparantiae, non magis se habet ad unum extremum quam ad aliud; actio autem et passio diversimode se habent ad agens et patiens, et ad diversos terminus. Et ideo assumptio determinat terminum et a quo et ad quem, dicitur enim assumptio quasi ab alia ad se assumpto: unio autem nihil horum determinat. Unde indifferenter dicitur quod humana natura est unita divinae, et e converso. Non autem dicitur divina natura assumpta ab humana, sed e converse: quia humana natura adjuncta est ad personalitatem divinam, ut scilicet persona divina in human natura subsistat.
S.T. iiia, q. 2, a. 8, c.
This passage presents an instance of nominalist rationale not uncommon in the Summa. It assumes what it would prove by the simple device of making “relatio” to be a static and consequently abstract polarity, while “actio,” as defined by its dynamic effect “in passo,” cannot but be concrete. St. Thomas then proceeds to concretize the abstract polarity into a mutuality of subsistence: viz., of a created human nature in the Verbum, long since affirmed and defended, and now as its logical reflex, the subsistence of the Verbum in man. This is mere nominalism, a playing with words in a game without metaphysical foundation, thus without rules, and therefore entirely beside the point.
But it is not beside the point to recognize that in the Genesis creation accounts, the creation of man and woman is unitary, a single nuptial reality, a single imaging of God, by whose coming to be the whole of the Good Creation is seen by its Creator to be very good. This free creation of man is the creation of a free unity, not a piece-meal production of distinct human substances, but of the primordially unfallen, free substantial unity of the One Flesh, whose prophecy in Gen. 2 the Fathers saw to have been fulfilled on the Cross. Neither is it beside the point to note that our consubstantiality with Christ, the head of humanity, is the sole possible explanation of the solidarity with him set out in Rom. 5 as at one with our redemption by him. Our parallel solidarity with the fallen Adam’s refusal of the headship offered him in the Beginning is there presented as the basis of our own fallenness. The two solidarities, in the two Adams, are effective in the schism within each of us between pneuma and sarx. Theology of grace has suffered much from the failure to recognize this solidarity as our consubstantility at once with our Lord, and with him whose refusal of the nuptial headship offered him in creation was the refusal of the only unity our humanity has. Theological relegation of that unity to a species of fungible members has consequences all too familiar.
Once again, it is necessary to insist that the product of speculative rationality, whether theological or philosophical, does not trump the faith of the Church. The rationalization of mystery is equivalently its rejection. Chalcedon insisted eight times that Jesus is “one and the same Son,” which is to say, one and the same Person: Jesus, the one Son of the Father and of Mary. It is indisputable that “Son” is a Personal Name. By his single subsistence in divinity and humanity, defined at Chalcedon, Jesus, the one Son, cannot but be a human Person as well as a divine Person. Further, the substances in which he subsists are distinct: the human and the divine. Neither can be identified with a Monad who exhausts the substance in which he exists, given the Conciliar definition of Jesus’ consubstantiality with the Father and with ourselves. The divine and the human substance are consequently poly-personal. The free numerical unity of the human substance, of the One Flesh, the New Covenant, of the good creation, is clearly a scriptural datum: the one flesh of the Good Creation.
Τhe Symbol of Chalcedon poses no difficulties once it is understood that the perennial problem of arranging for the humanity of the otherwise immanent (as “pre-existing ab aeterno”) Logos is a false problem, for that dilemma arises precisely out of ignoring the text of the Chalcedonian Symbol in favor of an effectively unanimous sub-theological dehistoricization of Jn. 1:14 in the time-honored fashion first deployed systematically by Arius: i.e., by submitting it to unexamined cosmological postulates. The Fathers at Chalcedon refused the dilemmas thereafter posed by this autonomous rationality, whether deployed by the Antiochene diophysism, the so-called “Logos-anthrōpos” analysis, or by the Alexandrine monophysism, the so-called “Logos-sarx” analysis The Fathers at Chalcedon, like those at Nicaea, understood the subject: of the Incarnation, the subject of the Christological faith of the Catholic Church, to be, not the “immanent Logos,“ whether in its Aristotelian or its Platonic guise, but rather, the incarnate Word, Jesus the Christ, the Beginning, the Alpha as well as the Omega, the one and the same.Son of the Father and of the Theotokos. It is this historical Jesus, the subject of Phil. 2:5-11, of Jn. 1:1 - 14, whom the Symbol asserts to be homoousios with the Father, and with us. They understood his consubstantiality with us to be in entire conformity with his nuptial unity with the second Eve, the Theotokos of the Council of Ephesus: as the second Eve, proceeding from her Head, the second Adam, and joined in One Flesh with him, she cannot but be consubstantial with him.
Catholic theology has by definition no other object than the faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord, despite the more than sesqui-millennial devotion of theologians to the false problem of arranging for the prior possibility of the Incarnation on the unexamined supposition that only thus can it be rendered theologically intelligible. The faith that Jesus is the Lord is the foundation of theological rationality: when that foundation is ignored in favor of a rationalistic examination of its prior possibility, the product is not theology but a merely autonomous human construct which refuses the mystery of faith affirmed by the Church, in the Councils of Nicaea, of I Constantinople, of Ephesus, and of Chalcedon: that Jesus is Lord. Contemporary scholarship disagrees: e.g.,:
The problem of Christology, in the narrow sense of the word, is to define the relation of the divine and the human in Christ.
J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 138.
Thus conceived “in the narrow sense of the word,” Christology becomes a futility, for it then consists in a standing a priori rejection of the Personal unity of the Lord Jesus, in order that it may undertake the impossible task of reconstituting that ineffable mystery of the faith: this cosmological a priori has immobilized Christology almost from its outset.
Chalcedon, as unconcerned as had been Nicaea for the consequent cosmological quandary, taught the homoousion, not of the ímmanent Logos, but of Jesus the Christ who, subsisting eternally in the divine substance by which he is consubstantial with the Father, subsists primordially in the human substance, by which subsistence he is consubstantial with us. It is Jesus, the one and the same Son, not the cosmologically postulated nonhistorical, immanent Logos of a thereby cosmologized Christology, who is consubstantial with us in our historical humanity, as with the Father and the Spirit in their divinity. Doctrinally this is accounted for by the historical Jesus’ unique, Personal, free subsistence in two substances: viz., Jesus subsists at once in the freedom of the divine Trinitarian Substance, and in the freedom of the nuptially-ordered human substance whose creation is identical to his free subsistence in it. We know ex aliunde (I Cor 11:3; Col. 1:17) that Jesus’s subsistence in humanity is that of its head: viz., he subsists in humanity as the Head of the nuptial Body, as the Bridegroom, who is the immanent source of the free, nuptial unity of the human substance, quite as the Father, the Head par excellence, is the immanent source of the free unity of the Trinitarian Substance of which the nuptially-ordered human substance is the created image. A current exegesis of this passage, exemplified by Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s According to Paul: Studies in theology of t he Apostle (New York and Mahwah, N.J.: Pauline Press, 1992), dehistoricizes Paul’s doctrine of headship as it dehistoricizes all else it touches. Fr. Fitzmyer’s fascination with the philological criticism for which he is famous is coupled with a complete disinterest in the soteriological significance of headship as liberation, apart from which Romans 5 is unintelligible.
It is all too clear that the Chalcedonian Symbol requires a radical revision of the traditional theological metaphysics, a necessity effectively ignored by East and West over the more than fifteen centuries intervening between the Council of Chalcedon and this first decade of the twenty-first century. A theological statement of that conversion of theological metaphysics from its uncritical fascination with abstractions to the concrete historicity of the Catholic tradition is presented in the earlier volumes of Covenantal Theology.
We may be quite sure that these “apories chalcédoniennes” as conceived by theologians whether in their Eastern or Western guise, will never be clearly perceived nor reduced for as long as the task of the Council of Chalcedon is taken to have been the discovery of a via media between the cosmologically-poised, equally impossible alternatives of diophysism and monophysism. The Symbol of the Council of Chalcedon is a definitive clarification and development of the faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord. Councils are not called to settle squabbles between theological schools, nor to produce “syntheses” which would reconcile their conflicting sub-theological viewpoints, but to affirm and defend the Church’s worship in truth against the submission of its freedom to any supposed a priori rational necessity a given cosmology may seek to impose/ At Nicaea, that cosmology which required Arius to deny that Jesus is the Lord was dismissed and Arius’ reliance upon it condemned. At Chalcedon, the cosmological fixation which required the dehistoricization of the Logos sarx egeneto by the Antiochene and the Alexandrine disputants was condemned. The heirs in interest of those determinisms, the advocates of current Christologies “from above” and “from below,” still submit to them today.
In fine, the only “aporie” pertinent to Chalcedon is the refusal of Catholic and Orthodox theologians to do theology instead of cosmology.
[11] J. L. McKenzie, "Annotations on the Christology of Theodore of Mopsuestia," Theological Studies (1958) 3, 345-373. The tenderness to Nestorius and his mentor, Theodore of Mopsuestia, displayed by McKenzie and most of the Christological publication during latter decades of the twentieth century has accurately been labeled a romanticism by John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts.,at 21. The controvery raised by the discovery (1932-33) of Theodore’s Catechetical Homilies has been taken up again by Frederick G. McLeod in Theodore of Mopsuestia; col. The Early Church Fathers (London and New York, Routledge, 2009), . The widespread sympathy for Nestorius over against Cyril has its source rather in commitment to a Rahnerian version of “Christology from below” than in an acquaintance with Nestorius’s Christology at the time of its condemnation at Ephesus. On this see also Bouyer, Le fils eternal, at 401-02.
[12] Raymond Tonneau, O.P. and Robert Devereesse, Les homélies catéchétiques de Théodore de Mopsueste ; traduction, introduction, notes par Raymond Tonneau en collaboration avec Robert Devreesse (Vatican : Vatican Apostolic Library, 1949), Hom. ix, 6, pp. 223-225. The modalist-subordinationist dilemma at least implicit in Theodore’s application to Trinitarian theology of Aristotle’s monist notion of substance, arose again with the twelfth-century exploitation of the “new logic” for theological purposes, notably by Abelard and Hugh of St. Victor. E.g., Michael J. Deem cites a startlingly modalist use of language by St. Anselm a half-century earlier:
But what precisely constitutes "the Son" for Anselm ? In his Monologion, Anselm understands the Son to be the one Word of the Supreme Essence (summa substantia) through which all things were created.27 This Word is "consubstantial" (consubstantiale) and like the Supreme Essence in all ways.28 The former is begotten eternally from the wisdom, consciousness and essence of the latter. Thus, it is proper to call the Word "Truest Son" and the Supreme Essence "Truest Father"29".
27 Monologion 12. . Schmitt, 1.26.26-33.
28 Ibid., 35. Schmitt, 1.54.6-8.
29 “Vellem iam quidem et forte possem illum esse verissime patrem, hoc vero esse verissime filium concludere”.
Deems, “A Christological Renaissance: The Chalcedonian Turn of St. Anselm of Canterbury, ” St. Anselm Journal, Vol. 2, no. 1) 42-51, at 47.
Anselm’s identification of the Father with the “Supreme Essence” is problematic inasmuch as, at the letter, it bars the orthodox identification of the divine Substance, the One God, i.e., with the Trinity, and would imply the Trinitarian subordinationism condemned at Nicaea, were it not for the Anselm’s affirmation of the homoousion of the Son as consequent upon the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father. Anselm’s Christology is here reminiscent of the usual interpretation of Origen as a subordinationist despite his affirmation of the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son, and his clear distinction between the objectivity of divine unity as substantial (ousia) and the objectivity of the Personal unity of the Father, of the Son and of the Spirit as hypostasis, here using a Stoic term to achieve a conceptual clarity whose recognition would wait upon Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes nearly two and a half centuries century later, although Tertullian had grasped the Trinitarian significance of its Latin parallel, persona, in the late second century.
Deem further notes and approves Anselm’s interpretation of the Chalcedonian attribution of homoousios to the humanity of Jesus who, as man, is consubstantial “cum nobis”: e.g.
Anselm is careful to note that the term “human being” does not refer to a human person, but to that nature common to all humanity.31.
31 “Nam cum proferetur “homo,” natura tantum quae communis omnibus est hominibus significatur.” Epistola de Incarnatione Verbi 11. Schmitt 2.29.4-6. Thus, the criticisms leveled by Symeon Rodger that Anselm’s formulations are “frequently awkward or contradictory” and “almost Nestorian, rather than Chalcedonian,” are quite unsubstantiated. “The Soteriology of St. Anselm of Canterbury: An Orthodox Perspective,“ Greek Orthodox Theological Review 34 (1989) 22-24.
Deem, loc. cit.
Unfortunately, a “nature common to all humanity” can too easily connote, if not denote, abstract membership in an abstract species, and thus invoke by implication the "Neo-Nicene" avoidance of the human homoousion of Jesus because it denotes his Personal subsistence in identically and therefore numerically the same, presumptively incommunicable, human substance. This supposed incommunicability of the substances in which Jesus in fac personally subsists, defined as to his divinity and Personal unity at Nicaea, and as to his humanity and Personal unity at Ephesus and Chalcedon, is entirely incompatible with the monist postulate underlying the classic Platonizing metaphysics which appears here to have led Anselm, as it had some third-century Monarchians, to infer a modalism from the incommunicability of the divine substance. The same monist identification of “person” with “intellectual substance” would bar the recognition of Jesus’ consubstantiality with the human persons of whom he is the Head. Distinct intellectual substances, whether human or divine, cannot as a matter of definition be consubstantial with each other in the intra-substantial sense of homoousios that is indispensable to the Church’s faith in the full divinity, the full humanity and the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ. “Incommunicability,” like “consubstantiality,” is proper to persons, not to intellectual substances, a distinction which is forced as to divine Persons by the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, and as to human persons by the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon.
In this context, it should be kept in mind that the “Neo-Nicene” label has been used to designate the late fourth century movement, led by Gregory of Nazianzen, to recognize the full Personal (“hypostatic”) divinity of the Holy Spirit; see J. A. McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York, 2001). pp. 92, n. 28, 105, n. 64, and. 136 [hereafter, Gregory of Nazianzus]. This has nothing to do with that “Neo-Nicenism” which Harnack held to have been taught by the Provincial Council of Alexandria in 362, and by the First Council of Contantinople in 381 viz., a homoiousian interpretation of the Nicene definition of the homoousios of the Son with the Father, requiring a subordinationist and therefore divisible God.
The modalist failure to recognize the Trinitarian, tri-Personal reality of the One God would also bar Anselm from recognizing the multipersonality of the unique and equally indivisible human substance in which Jesus subsists, consubstantial with us as our Head and source. It is thus that we are created in him and by him: i.e., by his subsistence in our humanity as its head and source. As that subsistence is the Personal and therefore single Archē of our humanity, so also is its consequence, our substantial creation in Christ.
It is in this context that Anselm’s careful identification of “human being” as “human nature” falls short, for Jesus is a human Person by his Personal consubstantiality with us, quite as he is a divine Person by his Personal consubstantiality with the Father. Quite as Jesus’ possession of the fullness of divinity is Personal, so also is his possession of the fullness of humanity: Jesus is at once a human and a divine Person by his single subsistence in divinity and in humanity―a clear cosmological impossibility, but a historical fact, concretely revealed in his “becoming flesh;” for it is Jesus, not the immanent Son, who became flesh, who emptied himself, assuming the form of a slave, like us in all but sin. There is no concrete human nature which he might “assume,” as though proceeding from some non-human status quo ante: the quest for the ‘how” whereby a nonhistorical Son and a nonhistorical humanity, abstractions of which the historical Catholic tradition knows nothing, may be understood to constitute the personal unity of Jesus the Lord, is entirely futile. Because it is concretely actual in history, Jesus’ humanity, like ours, can only be Personal: as Chalcedon emphasized over and again, he is one and the same Son―and “Son” names Jesus’ Person.
On the other hand, in defense of the orthodoxy of Anselm’s Christology, Deem also notes (48-49) Anselm’s stress upon Jesus’ possession of the fullness of humanity as well as the fullness of divinity, which is not only entirely consistent with the Chalcedonian Christology, but is explainable on no other basis than Jesus’ subsistence in our indivisible human substance as its head, as he subsists in the indivisible divine substance, the Trinity, by his procession from the Father, his Head, as the Father’s Glory.
Anselm’s authority as a Latin Doctor is not dependent upon his theology, but upon his eloquent witness to the faith, which is not challenged by this criticism of his theological exposition of that faith. Anselm’s theology is a continuing inquiry into the Church’s mediation of the Truth of Christ; as with all such endeavors, it is confused by the quandaries which an ever-renewed cosmological temptation poses to our fallen reason: the transcendence of the spontaneously cosmological rationality of our fallen or sarkic reason is the permanent task of theological quaeren intellectums, the worship of the mind freed from “necessary reasons” by the faith of the Church in the Truth who became flesh for our liberation from sarkic necessity. Anselm knew what theology should be: the ever-further methodologically-controlled entry into the inexhaustible mystery of Christ, a quaerens intellectum which arise only out of the liturgical affirmation that Jesus is Lord, for by that affirmation alone is it sustained. Anselm has provided a splendid expression of the faith in Christ which feeds the Catholic quaerens intellectum in the homily in the Office of Readings for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception:
To Mary God gave his only-begotten Son, whom he loved as himself. Through Mary God made himself a Son, not different but the same, by nature Son of God and Son of Mary. The whole universe was created by God, and God was born of Mary. God created all things, and Mary gave birth to God. The God who made all things gave himself form through Mary, and thus he made his own creation. He who could create all things from nothing would not remake his ruined creation without Mary.
God then is the Father of the created world and Mary is the mother of the re-created world. God is the Father by whom all things were given life, and Mary the mother through whom all things are given new life. For God begot the Son, through whom all things were made, and Mary gave birth to him as the Savior of the world. Without God’s Son, nothing could exist; without Mary’s Son, nothing could be redeemed.
Anselm of Bec, Orat 52; (PL 158: 955-56), Liturgy of the Hours I, at 1229.
It is here in point to observe that the generic notion of substance as divisible, as capable of being shared, is as inapplicable to the human substance as it is to the divine. Just as to subsist in the Trinity is to possess the fullness of divinity in such wise as to be of the same substance, homoousios, consubstantial, with the other Persons subsisting in it, so for Jesus to subsist in humanity is to possess the fullness of humanity, and so to be consubstantial “with us,” whose consubstantiality with our head images Jesus’ consubstantiality with the Father. There is no generic divinity, divisible among the Persons “sharing” in it, despite the penchant for so speaking among notable historians of doctrine. Equally, there is no generic humanity, divisible among the persons “sharing” it. The implication of that idiom is inescapably either subordinationist or Sabellian, whether in its divine or human application. Humanity is no more comprehensible as an Aristotelian species or Platonic form or Stoic hypokeimenon than is divinity. As Cardinal Arinze observed inter alia in a letter wherein he caustically remarked upon the evident inability of the I.C.E.L. translators to come to terms with Liturgiam authenticam, the easy recourse to “sharing” language has little if any place in the liturgy. See Cardinal Arinze’s “Observations on the English-language Translation of the Roman Missal,” Rome, 16 March 2002, addressed to the Presidents of the Anglophone National Conferences of Bishops.
[13] See the observations by Louis Bouyer in his survey of late-twentieth century Christology: Le Fils éternal, 466-68. In sum, Bouyer accepts the plaint of Paul Tillich that Chalcedon left unresolved the Personal unity of Christ. Since this is the ultimate mystery of the faith, its lack of academic resolution does not trouble those who accept the authority of the Symbol as foundational for theology qua tale. At this point, Boyer does not appear to be at ease among among them, although earlier in the same work, he had been.
[14] Karl Rahner’s The Trinity is a work of theological compression which offered a revisionist and dissenting interpretation of the Church’s Trinitarian and Christological faith, denying Jesus’ subsistence in the Trinity and, further, requiring that the Trinity be understood as a single Self who “subsists” in three Trinitarian Persons who are not subjectively distinct from the One Self of the divine Substance and who, in consequence, can be only modally distinct from each other. His Trinitarian theology, encapsulated in The Trinity, asserts an immanent change in God which bars the reduction of the Trinity to a Monas. His explanation of what an immanent change in God might be is not persuasive.
Rahner’s small book has had an influence sufficient for its dissent from the doctrinal tradition to be remarked here. It is evident that his denials of divinity of Jesus, and of the uniquely Personal subjectivities of the Father, of the Son and of the Spirit, radically contradict the Symbol of Chalcedon. He justifies his view of Trinitarian subsistence as proper to a single divine Self by denying the intelligibility of an intellectual subsistence that would not be unique to and identical with an intellectual substance. His insistence that “self” as such is intelligible only as monadic, as exhaustive of the intellectual substance proper to it, has long been widely accepted in Catholic theology, with the substantial Trinity however excepted from this monadism of substance. Rahner has rejected this exception on methodological grounds: his metaphysics will not permit it. His theological method has the single virtue of accepting the implications of its monist a priori, thus providing insight into the source of theological “apories“ which Bouyer has instanced (see note 361, supra). but which are otherwise ignored in favor of doctrinal orthodoxy.
[15] Louis Bouyer, op. cit., citing (p. 321) Kittel’s article “Logos” in theologische Worterbuch, concludes his examination of Jn. 1:14 with the following summary of the New Testament use of “the Word of God”:
Douze fois dans les Actes, deux fois dans les épîtres aux Thessaloniciens, trois dans celles aux Corinthiens, une dans celle aux Colossiens, quatre dans les pastorales, deux dans l’épître aux Hébreux, une dans la Prima Petri, cette expression « Parole de Dieu » n’a évidemment pas d’autre sens. Même chose quatre fois dans l’évangile de Luc. C’est ici, dans cette équivalence entre la « Parole de Dieu » et l’évangile dont non seulement l’objet est Jésus-Christ mais qui est Jésus-Christ, tel que le saisit la foi chrétienne, que se trouve, comme Kittel l’a souligné, l’origine véritable de la christologie du prologue du quatrième évangile.
Ibid., 322 (emphasis added).
Following this introduction, Bouyer proceeds to demonstrate that the New Testament identifies “Word of God” and “Word” with Christ without qualification, as in the Prologue:
La Parole Joannique
Toute d’abord, comme le montre Kittel, dans ce contexte, « Parole de Dieu » trouve un équivalent dans « Parole du Seigneur », c’est-à-dire du Christ. Mais il y a plus : le Christ, ce qu’il signifie, toute la métamorphose que son introduction dans notre histoire, individuelle, collective, cosmique même, représente, quand on en est là, est prêt à absorber tout ce que le seul mot de « Parole » pouvait signifier dans le contexte biblique. En fait, avant le quatrième évangile, et indépendamment de lui, c’est ce qui s’était déjà produit. De cet emploi absolu de « Parole », sans nul complément, gardant tout ce que la tradition biblique avait pu attacher au vocable et ce que nous avons analysé, Kittel relève maints exemples : neuf rien que dans les Actes, un dans les épîtres aux Thessaloniciens, un dans les Galates, un dans les Colossiens, cinq dans les pastorales, deux dans la Prima Petri et un dans l’épître des Jacques. Parmi les autres évangélistes, Matthieu, dans son seul chapître 13 en p résent e quatre exemples. Luc, trois, également groupés, dans son chapitre 8. Mais l’exemple le plus remarquable, il fallait s’y attendre, est celui de Marc : neuf fois dans son seul chapître 4 il emploie « Parole » absolument dans ce sens, une autre fois ailleurs, sans compter un exemple supplémentaire dans la conclusion, sans doute postiche, que donnent la plupart des manuscrits. Enfin, dans le corps de l’évangile johannique lui-même, le procédé est constant : on peut relever plus de vingt emplois.
Ibid., 326-27.
The clarity of the apostolic liturgical-scriptural recognition of “Logos” as a title of Jesus the Christ was refused early in the fourth century by Arius, his followers and his sympathizers, who denied the divinity of Jesus the Lord. Although condemned by the Council of Nicaea, Arius had offered a cosmological critique of the apostolic tradition which gave later Arian Roman emperors, notably Constantius II, Julian and Valens a ground for renewing Diocletian’s persecution of Christians as threating the unity of the Empire by their refusal to worship the Roman pantheon. This persecution ceased with the so-called Edict of Milan in 311, which put a stop to the persecution of religions in general and of course protected Christians. Constantine ordered the return of their confiscated property; he clearly favored Christianity and may be considered a convert, although like many at that time, he postponed his baptism to his deathbed, finally being baptized by the Arian bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia. Constantine’s baptism may stand as a metaphor for the ambiguity of his Christianity. A year after defeating and executing Licinus, thereby becoming the sole ruler of the Roman Empire, he called the Council of Nicaea to defend the Church against the Arian heresy, and approved the excommunication of those who opposed its Creed, Arian bishops Theonas of Marmerica and Secunndus of Ptolemais. Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia both signed the Creed, but remained in full sympathy with Arius. However, within two years he restored them to his favor and accepted their formula for religious peace in the Empire by ordering Athanasius, who had just succeeded Alexander of Alexandria to the See of Alexandria, to restore Arius to communion; Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia had persuaded him that the excommunication of Arius by the Council had been a mistake. This is the first instance of nearly fifty years of repeated imperial demand that the Church’s doctrine be subject to negotiation in view of the need for religious unity in the Empire. Athanasius refused to negotiate, angering Constantine but not losing his respect; Constantine did not depose him, but he tacitly encouraged the persecution of Athanasius by the ‘two Eusebii, of Caesarea and of Nicomedia, whom Athanasius had angered two years earlier at the Council of Nicaea. From this time until his death in 473, Athanasius upheld the Church’s independence of imperial authority. Those bishops who were allied with Alexander and Athanasius at the Council, Marcellus of Ancyra, Ossius of Cordoba, Macarius of Jerusalem,
The Carolingian fascination with the “new logic” in the late eighth century led to a revival of the Eleatic binary fragmentation of the realism of the patristic sacramental paradigm, sacramentum-res sacrament, whose foundation was liturgical, as de Lubac has shown. Under this inspiration the Carolingian theologians proceeded to dissociate the sacramentum from the res sacramenti, i.e. the sacramental efficacy from the sacramental effect, and so to question the free truth, unity and sacramental significance, i.e., the efficacy, of the Eucharistic words of institution. Two centuries later, under Berengarius’ simpliste linguistic analysis, it was evident that the Eucharistic words of institution could not be true: “Berengarius reduced the Words of Institution, “This is my Body” – This is my Blood” to “This is That,” a manifest absurdity, forced, as Zeno knew. by the Eleatic reduction of reality to identity.
The Berengarian challenge to the sacramental realism of Catholic worship required theological defense. It had been anticipated by the greatest of the Carolingian theologians, Paschasius, the abbot of Corby, author of Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini (831), a later (844) version of which he dedicated to the Emperor, Charles the Bald. Paschasius insisted on the identity of the Eucharistic and risen Christ, under the figure of bread and wine. He was also notable for his upholding of the tradition of Eucharistic realism and Eucharistic sacrifice which the dévots of the new logic, such as Ratramnus of Corbie and Rhabanus Maurus, had put in issue.
The Eleatic rationale of this first Eucharistic heresy was clearly open to further application. This it received from the lay preachers of eleventh and early twelfth century following the unrest, at once civil and religious, indistinguishably, consequent upon the Gregorian Reform. However, it is with the introduction of the Neoplatonic “dialectic” by the Victorines, notably Hugh of St. Victor, in company with Abelard, in the first half of the twelfth century, that the Logos of Jn 1:14, the subject of the Incarnation and consequently the “Jesus” who, for Paul in the parallel text of Phil 2:7, is the subject of the Kenōsis, was unreflectively conceded to be the nonhistorical Son, the antecedent possibility of whose Incarnation was presupposed. Its quest, thus revived, continues to baffle Catholic theological speculation, where that waning interest still exists.
[16] This description of early Christian piety is contained in a letter of Pliny the Younger to Emperor Trajan, ca. 112-113; see J. N. D., Doctrines; at 143, citing Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan. The Emperor’s reply, a rescript setting out the procedures to be followed by Roman officials in their dealings with Christians, is discussed by Karl Baus in Church History, II, at 133-134. Martin Hengel has devoted a chapter of his fine Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), “The Song about Christ in Earliest Worship” to a detailed discussion of this early hymnic material: see esp. pp. 284-91.
[17] Under Middle Platonic influence, the “Logos,” the subject of the Incarnation in Jn. 1:14, was read as the an antecedently non-human divine principle who, as divine, was incapable of change, i.e., of “becoming;” at the same time, “flesh,” (sarx) was read simply as soma, body, for “flesh” and “body” were interchangeable terms within that essentially pagan context, whereas for the Evangelist, “Logos sarx egeneto” recited the entry of the primordial Jesus the Lord into personal fallenness, equivalently the Kenōsis of Phil. 2, 7. That this “becoming” is a metaphysical impossibility was early recognized; it was to be struggled over perennially thereafter: see J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 95-104, and Bouyer, Le Fils éternel, 321, n. 9. Bouyer discusses the dehistoricizing conesquences of this mistake at 368-71, et passim. Inexplicably, he thereafter incorporates them into his own systematic Christology.
[18] It has been noted that in the Libellus Emendationionis Augustine refused the Nestorian latency of the Origenistic mediante anima Christology. Augustine was prompted to write this work to correct the proto-Nestorianism of a monk, Leporius, who had sought refuge with him after exile from his monastery for a perceived failure of orthodoxy. This Christology’s supposition of the immateriality of the soul is simply that of the pagan soteriology generally. While it is echoed in much of theological anthropology, its equation of “spiritual” with “immaterial” has no foundation in the Catholic liturgical, scriptural and doctrinal tradition. For a theological development of the biblical anthropology, see the articles cited in endnote 86, supra.
[19] That “Son” is a personal name is beyond discussion, as is also that Jesus’ Personal Name is a matter of revelation: Mt. 1:21; Lk. 1:31: Nonetheless, the assertion that Jesus is a human Person as well as a divine Person is commonly heard as Nestorian, although it is in fact Chalcedonian, for the Symbol of that Council teaches that Jesus, homoousios with the Father as the Only-Begotten, is the divine and eternal Son. The Ephesian Formula of Union and the Symbol of Chalcedon teach that, as Personally homoousios “with us,” Jesus is the Personally human Son of the Theotokos, without prejudice to his divine Sonship: he is “one and the same Son.” From the viewpoint which finds technical expression in a cosmological and monist metaphysics, this is impossible, at which point one must choose either to abandon cosmology or, with St. Thomas, attempt an impossible compromise with it, as in S. T. iiia, q. 2, ad 2; also, q. 2, a. 4, c.
[20] We have seen St. Thomas assert that the subject of subsistence in human nature, to whom he incongruously refers as the Christ, can only be the ‘immanent Son;’ similarly, he affirms Mary to be the Theotokos, but only metaphorically, i.e., as the mother of her Son’s humanity, not of his Person. For St. Thomas, the Son is not Mary’s Son simply because the cosmologically absolute Trinity-immanent Son of God can have no relation, filial or otherwise, to a creature; still less can the Son, thus cosmologized, be the historical subject of Jn. 1:14. St. Thomas maintains that while Mary has the relation of maternity to her Son, it is only physical, to his humanity, which is to say that she is the mother of an impersonal, consequently abstract, human “nature. Therefore Mary is, not the mother of a human Person. She is not then the mother of the Man who is Jesus the Christ. Inasmuch as the Thomist metaphysics does not permit the human nature of Jesus to be a physical reality, for reality connotes concreteness, whereas human nature is an insubstantial abstraction, a “second substance,” unless concretely realized in a human person, i.e., a subsistence in that nature, it must follow that for St. Thomas, the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, is neither the mother of the immanent Logos whom St. Thomas understands to be the subject of the Incarnation, nor the mother of a human Son. In short, Mary is not in fact a mother: St. Thomas’ notion of a Theotokos who is not the mother of the human Person who is the one and the same Son is not even a metaphor; it is a contradiction in terms.
The Thomist theology of the Incarnation is impossible to reconcile with Lukan Infancy Narrative of the Christ’s Naming by the Angel Gabriel, and its parallel in the Matthean Infancy Narrative. Since Tertullian, “name” and “person” are correlative in Western theology, as the baptismal formula takes for granted. The Thomist theology is comparably inconsistent with the liturgical celebration of Jesus’ birth. That it can be read into the Gospels and the liturgy, and into the Symbol of Chalcedon as St. Thomas has done is evident; however, that reading revives the dilemma which Chalcedon transcended by refusing its underlying cosmological postulate, viz., that Jesus, the Son of God, is simply the Trinity-immanent non-human eternal Son. Chalcedon teaches that it is Jesus who is the subject of the Incarnation, thus of the double subsistence, in divinity and in humanity. This, as has been seen, Thomas did not accept. For him, the subject of the Incarnation is the immanent Logos. So also for much of contemporary exegesis.
It is further quite evidently impossible to deny that Jesus is a human Person while referring to him as the Christ, the anointed King. Such considerations may be indefinitely extended, but finally they are irrelevant, for it is the faith of the Church that Jesus is Lord. Catholicism knows no abstract Absolute incapable of extrinsic relation: that is cosmology. It has no bearing upon the Church’s doctrine, nor can it govern her theology. The Catholic faith in the finally nuptial relation of the God of the Covenant to his elect people is not submitted to cosmological verification.
It is because of this ancient theological commitment to the uniquely divine Sonship of Jesus that Mary’s historical, therefore “in Personam,” motherhood of God, was defined by the Formula of Union setting out the doctrine of the Council of Ephesus. God is a Person: she is the mother of that Person, the Lord Jesus, God from God. Consubstantial with her, he is consubstantial with us. Obviously, a denial that Jesus is a human Person similarly deforms the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus and the Symbol of Chalcedon, which speak only of the historical Jesus the Christ, “one and the same Son” who, as human, is consubstantial “with us” by reason of his subsistence in the human substance, and who, as divine, is consubstantial with the Father (and the Spirit) by reason of his subsistence in the Trinity, the divine Substance. St. Thomas understands Jesus to subsist in the Verbum, the Logos, and thereby to possess a higher dignity than would be his were he a human Person: what that dignity might be is impossible to say, since he is thereby neither divine nor human.
Chalcedon asserts that Jesus, as one and the same Son, which is to say, one and the same Person, subsists in two distinct and unmixed substances: St. Thomas teaches the same doctrine verbally, but imposes upon it a quasi-monophysite extinction of the human dignity of that single subsistence by the transcendent dignity of the divine Son, in such wise that the greater dignity of the Son as God absorbs or otherwise qualifies the lesser dignity of the Son as man, which in that conjunction is diminished to the point that his human subjectivity, his human Person, is excluded: St, Thomas concludes that Jesus is therefore not a human Subject, not a human Person: the alternative would be the double personality of the Nestorian heresy condemned at Ephesus, at Chalcedon, and at II Constantinople. Thomas’ alternative to the doctrine of Ephesus and Chalcedon is difficult to understand otherwise than as identifying Jesus as a duality of personal dignities (persona composita) resolved in a unity of natures, not the distinction of natures resolved in the transcendent unity of the Person of Jesus the Christ as taught by Chalcedon. However, as we have seen, St. Thomas insists, over and again, upon the Personal unity of the Christ―understood, however, suo modo, as “composite:”
Respondeo dicendum quod persona sive hypostasis Christi dupliciter considerari potest. Uno modo, secundum id quod est in se. Et sic est omnino simplex: sicut et natura Verbi.—Alio modo, secundum rationem personae vel hypostasis, ad quam pertinet subsistere in aliqua natura. Et secundum hoc, persona Christi subsistit in duabus naturis. Unde, licet sit ibi unum subsistens, est tamen ibi alia et alia ratio subsistendi. Et sic dicitur persona composita, inquantum unus in duabis subsistit.
S. T. iiia, q. 2, a. 4, c. (emphasis added; see the extended discussion of this article in endnotes 357-358. supra).
St. Thomas could not but have known that Augustine had affirmed without qualification the two distinct substances in the Personal unity -
gemina substantia, una persona.
Augustine, Contra sermonem Arianorum, § vii.
and must have known as well that Boethius had passed this on to the Middle Ages:
Fitque in eo gemina natura geminaque substantia, quoniam homo-deus unaque persona, quoniam idem homo atque deus. Mediaque est haec inter duas haereses uia.
Contra sermonum Eutychii et Nestorii, § 6.
This is the course which Cyril of Alexander thought to have followed. There can be no question of his orthodoxy, but there is every reason to think that in the fifth century he found himself confronting the same quandary faced by St. Thomas in the thirteenth. As we have seen John McGuckin emphasize, Cyril wished to explain the “how” of the Incarnation (see endnote 391, infra). This is but another instance of the cosmological confusion resolved in principle at Nicaea and in toto at Ephesus and Chalcedon.
St. Thomas’ inference of “alia et alia ratio subsistendi” requires, a priori, the submission of the Mysterium of the Incarnation to the effectively superior truth of theologicowal analysis: i.e., “considerari potest… secundum rationem personae vel hypostasis, ad quam pertinet subsistere in aliqua natura.“ This submits the Person of Christ, the most profound mystery of the Faith, to a rationalist quest for “necessary reasons” whose supposed intrinsic necessity proceeds inevitably to dehistoricize the mystery and thereby reduce its truth to abstract rationes, i.e., to the systematic dehistoricization of the doctrinal tradition, reducing its Mysterium, its historically immanent, history-transcending truth, to a technical problem rather than entering upon theological fides quaerens intellectum whose object is not a problem rationally to be transcended but rather is the Mysterium fidei, to which the Catholic fides quaerens intellectum stands as the mind’s worship of the Truth whom it cannot transcend but only adore, quaerens intellectum. Because the truth sought is free, it is also beautiful ; the Catholic quaerens is always also a quaerens pulchrum. Elsewhere in this work it has been proposed that Jesus the Christ is the Beauty by which those for whom Christ died are drawn to him, apart from whom no one has access to the Father. Jesus is then that utterly universal grace, the trahi a Deo, “the ancient beauty that is forever new.” by which we are drawn to God.
For St. Thomas, however, the object of that worship, i.e., the Person in se of Christ, can only be the hypostasis of the Verbum, omnino simplex, the abstract, nonhistorical a priori of the rationale he provides, the prime analogate of his cosmological theology. Thomas understands this absolute simplicity to be proper to the divine nature which, thus understood, is incapable of relation to what is not God, and thus incapable of the institution of the New Covenant.
St. Thomas failed to ground his theology on the dogmatic fact of the unqualified Personal unity (“omnino simplex”) of divinity and humanity in Jesus the Christ upon which fact the ecclesial mediation of our salvation in Christ depends: Jesus the Christ, the Lord, acts in Personam, as the single agent of our salvation: at once Man and God. The Church knows no eternal Word who is not Jesus the Christ, the Redeemer. St. Thomas reserves that Personal simplicity to the “hypostasis Christi” which he identifies with the “natura Verbi.” His distinction between the non-composite, omnino simplex Persona of the divine Verbum, and the composite Persona of Jesus is simply incoherent, while his supposition that the human nature of Jesus stands to his divine nature as accident to substance insofar as concerns the sacramental mediation of our salvation, amounts to a quasi-monophysite melding of divinity and humanity into a single intellectual substance, the persona composita of Jesus who, unlike the immanent Logos, subsists in two natures: cf. S.T. iiia, q. 2, a. 4, c.
As for the “alia et alia ratio subsistendi,” each ratio is either an abstract ens rationis, without metaphysical standing, whose composition to form a Person is meaningless, or each of the distinct rationes subsistendi has metaphysical standing and, insofar as “alia et alia ratio” constitute a composite, they must stand to each other as act and potency, for St. Thomas’ metaphysics provides no alternative. Rationes may compose nominally in an affirmation or negation, but not in the divine Person, Jesus the Son, whose radical mystery defies the act-potency metaphysical analysis, or any other cosmological analysis. Moreover, the “natures” (i.e., the fullness of humanity and the fullness of divinity in which Jesus the Christ subsists do not “compose” in his Person; they are entirely distinct in his unqualified, omnino simplex Personal unity, which the Council of Chalcedon accounts for by teaching Jesus’ subsistence at once in humanity and in divinity: this truth is at one with the mystery of the faith: i.e., that Jesus Christ is Lord. The assertion that Jesus’ Person, his subsistence in the Trinity and in humanity, is a composition of distinct rationes subsistendi is in either case entirely unintelligible: not taken seriously, but merely nominally: e.g.:
illa composition personae ex naturis non dicitur esse ratione partium, sed potius ratione numeri: sicut omne illud in quo duo convenient dici ex eis compositum.
S. T. iiia, q.2, a. 4, ad 2,
This nominal, merely numerical conjunction of irreducibly distinct natures is no longer undersood as composition of parts, thus dependent upon the act-potency analysis, but something less, the conventio which offers a numerical unity. None the less, if it be a historical unity, it cannot but invoke the act-potency analysis of the Thomist metaphysics, which analysis bears upon finite material substance, not upon subsistence in irreducibly distinct substances.
St. Thomas’ Christology is simply incoherent, not only becasuse it presupposes an impossible anthropology, a monadology of man and a consequent dehistoricization of Jesus the Christ, whose historicity can only be that of the fully human Person, the Lord Jesus, whom the Theotokos conceived and bore, but also because it oscillates, irremediably, between affirming and denying a concrete relation of the Verbum to Jesus the Christ.
St Thomas conceals this consequence by referring to Jesus as the single and unique subject who subsists in two natures, although he will deny that Jesus is a human Person, a human subsistence, from which it follows that for Thomas it must be the Verbum who subsists in humanity (S. T. iiia, q. 2, a. 2, ad 1) ; here he relies upon his interpretation of the second anathema of the Council of Ephesus, which teaches that Jesus is a single divine hypostasis, and upon the 4th anathema, which insists upon the hypostatic union of humanity and divinity in Jesus. These dogmatic facts are not in issue except insofar as St. Thomas supposes, with Cyril of Alexandria, the incompatibility of the single divine hypostasis with Jesus’ human Person. Ephesus and Chalcedon taught definitively on this latter point, in affirming Jesus’ Personal consubstantiality with us―for consubstantiality can only be personal. Jesus Personal consubstantiality with us had been found implicit in the doctrine that Mary is the Theotokos, but this St. Thomas also misreads, although upon this matter Chalcedon is precise, as also is II Constantinople: Mary is the Mother of God, not in rem, as the mother of his human natjure, as Thomas supposes, but in Persona: the Formula of Union of the Council of Ephesus, and the Symbol of Chalcedon; the Theotokos doctrine of II Constantinople merely reaffirmed that of the Formula of Union and the Symbol of Chalcedon.
There is therefore no composition in the “one and the same Son,” whose subsistence in the Trinity and in humanity is single, that of Jesus the Christ, the Lord: It is he, Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega, who subsists at once in the Trinity and in the human substance whose free nuptial unity is its creation in Christ, its creation in the image of the Triune God, in such wise that he, Jesus the Lord, is consubstantial with the Father and with each of the human persons of whom he is the head, of whose free unity he is the source and, consequently, the Creator, by his fulfillment of his mission, the Giving of the Spiritus Creator:
14. eundem propter nos et propter nostram salutem [= the same, for us men and for our salvation
15. ex Maria Virgine Dei genitrice secundum humanitatem [= (conceived) of the Virgin Mary the Mother of God according to his manhood]
16. unum eundemque Christum Filium Dominum unigenitum [= This one and the same Jesus Christ the Lord, only-begotten Son (of God)]
17. in duabus naturis [= in two natures]
18. inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivise, inseparabiliter agnoscendum, [= must be confessed to be (in two natures) unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably (united)]
19. nusquam sublata differentia naturarum propter unitionem [= and nowhere is the distinction of the natures taken away by that union]
St. Thomas reads the second paragraph of Canon 4 of II Constantinople as though making the eternal or ‘immanent’ Word to be the subject of the Incarnation. His citation of its text omits its opening anathema, quoted below: The first paragraph of the two-paragraph canon quoted infra is taken from D.S. §*424; The text of the Canon’s second paragraph omitted by St. Thomas is italicized:
Canon 4 :Si quis dixit, secundum gratiam, vel secundam operationem, vel secundum dignitatem, vel secundum aequalitatis honoris, vel secudum auctoritatem, aut relationem, aut affectum, seu virtutem, unitionem Dei Verbi ad hominem factum esse, vel secundum bonam voluntatem, quasi placuit Deo Verbo, eo quod bene visum est ei de ipso, sicut Theodorus insaniens dicit : vel secundum homonymiam, per quam Nestoriani Deum Verbum Filium et Christum vocantes, et duas personas evidenter dicentes, per solam nominationem, et honorem, et dignitatem, et adorationem, unam personam, unum Filium, et unum Christum configunt dicere : sed non confitetur unitatem compositionem sive secundum subsistentiam factum esse, sicut sancti Patres docuerunt, et ideo unam eius subsistentiam compositam, qui est Dominus (noster) Jesus Christus, unus de Sancta Trinitas, talis an. st.
DS §*424.
Cum multis modis unitas intelligatur, qui iniquitatem Apollinaris et Eutychetis sequuntur, interemptionem eorum quae convenerunt colentes, (idest interimentes utramque naturam), unionem secundum confusionem dicunt; Theodori autem et Nestorii sequaces, divisione gaudentes, affectualem unitatem introducunt; sancta vero Dei Ecclesia, utriusque perfidiae impietatem reiciens, unionem Dei Verbi ad carnem secundum compositionem confitetur, quod est secundum subsistentiam.
S. T. iiia, q. 2, a. 6, following DS *425
Unitio enim per compositionem in mysterio Christi non solum inconfuse ea, quae convenerunt, conservat, sed nec divisionem suscipit. ).
DS §*425. St. Thomas omits this text, which immediately follows the section of the text of D.S. 425 which he quotes.
St. Thomas reads “Dei Verbi” sensu negante, as though referring to the “immanent Word,” rather than to Jesus the Lord, but this is mere eisegesis, for Canon 2 of II Constantinople had affirmed of the Verbum Dei what cannot be said of the hypostasis of the Verbum sensu negante, but only of the Person of Jesus the Lord:
Can. 2. Si quis non confitetur Dei Verbi duas esse nativitates, unam quidem ante saecula ex patre sine tempore incorporaliter, alteram vero in ultimis diebus eiusdem ipsius, qui de caelis descendit, et incarnatus est de Sancta gloriosa Dei Genitrice et semper Virgine Maria, natus est, ex ipsa, talis an. s.
DS §*422.
Each of the Council’s fourteen Canons is concerned with the Nestorian errors recited in Justinian’s condemnation of the “Three Chapters.” In the second Canon the Council condemns the Nestorian assertion of two hypostases in the Christ, which assertion rests on the diophysite postulate of the metaphysical impossibility of the Logos being the man, the human Person, Jesus the Lord, the one and the same Son: the r eliance of this canon on the definition of Mary’s motherhood of God, thus on the communication of idioms in Christ, is obvious.
Canon 3 returns to the same theme, affirming the Mysterium, the single object of the faith of the Church that in Jesus the Lord, the Christ, in his incomunicable Self, God and man are at one:
Can. 3. Si quis dicit, alium esse Deum Verbum qui miracula fecit, et alium Christum qui passus est, vel Deum Verbum cum Christo esse nascente de muliere, vel in ipsum esse ut alterum in altero, et non unum eundemque Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, Dei Verbum incarnatum et hominem factum, et eiusdem ipsius miracula et passiones quae voluntarie carne sustinet, talis a. s.
DS §*423
Thus only Jesus can say, “Ego eimi.” Theology has no other task than to seek always to understand the Lord Jesus more profoundly, knowing the Mysterium of his Person to be an inexhaustible revelation, Jesus, the Truth incarnate. All fourteen canons of II Constantinople (DS §*421-438) rely upon the doctrine of Chalcedon: their sole subject is Jesus the Christ, whose single subsistence in divinity and humanity is denied in those Nestorian contexts which deny his Personal unity.
The divine Name, “I Am,” was first revealed to Moses at Sinai (Exodus 3:14). Its revelation to Moses is usually understood to be the revelation by the Father of his personal Name as the Head of the Trinity, by which Naming he reveals his unqualified Personal simplicity, that proper to him as the head, the source, of the Son and the Spirit each uniquely, Personally, Jesus possesses, by his unique relation of origin from the Father, the fullness of divinity of which the Father is the source, and consequently is consubstantial with him However, with scriptural as well as patristic warrant, we may read this Exodus passage as the manifestation of the Lord Jesus, relying upon the ego eimi passages in the Gospel of John. In fact, with the older exegetical tradition represented by Justin and Irenaeus, we may understand all of the Old Testament epiphanies to be manifestations of the primordial Jesus, the Lord, the historical Son sent by the Father , whose final and full manifestation is given only in Jesus the Christ, who is the Ego εimi (Ἐγώ εἰμί) of Exodus 3:14, whose Lordship is proleptic in the Old Covenant, and plenary in New. Nothing in the canons of II Constantinople runs counter to this ancient Christology.
To speak of Jesus the Christ as a composite Person is to deny the historical revelation in Christ of his unqualified Personal unity, that of his Name. This denial can issue only in a return to a long-condemned monophysism as the sole alternative to a diophysite “two Sons” Christology. In the abstract, persona composita is an unintelligible expression, for “person” posits the incommunicability that is self-awareness. The insertion of composition into the Self that is Jesus is to deny that Jesus is “one and the same Son.” Bede knew better:
Above all the other saints, (Mary) alone could truly rejoice in Jesus, her savior, for she knew that he who was the source of eternal salvation would be born in time in her body, in one person both her own Son and her Lord.
From a homily of St. Bede the Venerable, Liturgy of the Hours, II, the Feast of the Visitation, Office of Readings, Second Reading, at 1846 (Lib. 1, 4: CCL 122, 25-26, 30)
Very clearly, Irenaeus’ stress upon “one and the same,” seven times repeated, is applied by the Symbol of Chalcedon to the one Son who is Jesus; there is no mention of a ”Filius Dei” who is not concretely, historically, “in Personam,” the human Son of Mary. Had St. Thomas recognized the metaphysical import of this doctrine, those systematic theologians who have commented upon him might have been spared the bafflement which Bouyer describes in Le Fils éternel, 445-49, yet which Bouyer himself (at 429) unaccountably endorsed, despite the proof offered in the first pages of that work that the New Testament knows no Logos who is not Jesus the Christ. The same dehistoricizing postulate of a non-historical “immanent Logos, who is the “subject of the Incarnation” dominates his own systematic Christology.
On the other hand, St. Thomas has elsewhere written:
Since it was the will of God’s only-begotten Son that men should share in his divinity, he assumed our nature in order that by becoming man he might make men gods. Moreover, when he took our flesh he dedicated the whole of its substance to our salvation (emphasis added).
Opusculum 57, in festo Corporis Christi, lect 1; The Liturgy of the Hours III, The Solemnity of Corpus Christi, Morning Prayer, Second Reading, at 610. The translation, “share in his divinity” is an instance of what may be called “ICEL-ese:” divinity is not shared.
Read at the letter, St. Thomas here understands the fallen flesh of humanity, “our flesh,” in which our Lord subsists as its Head, to be a single substance: viz., he “dedicated the whole of its substance to our salvation.” It cannot be so read; St. Thomas refers by this phrase to “the nature he assumed,” thus to the subject of the action of “the only-begotten Son.” St. Thomas goes on to treat the offering of this assumed “substance” as Jesus’ own offering of himself, which offering may be more comprehensively understood, albeit not by St. Thomas, as the sacrificial recapitulation of the human substance by its Head, the immanent source of the free communal unity of humanity that is finally the bridal Church, the second Eve, which Event has nothing to do with the abstract notion of a divine assumption of a human nature.
St. Thomas can hardly have intended the alternative supposition, as latterly proposed by Paul Tillich, that personal redemption is by way of the assimilation of Jesus’ personal finitude, his suffering as proper to a centered self, by the plenary Person of the redeeming Christ, the “Essential God-Manhood” whose redemptive office requires his never having left the divine Center. Thus for Tillich, Jesus the Lord is not a “centered self,” nor can be, insofar as Redeemer, insofar as human. Tillich reads Jesus’ sacrificial death as his dissociation from his human finitude, his return to the divine Center, Essential God-Manhood, the Redeemer who is not Jesus. See Tillich, Systematic Theology II: Existence and the Christ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), I: 48, 52, 60-61, 70, 72, 134, 150-180; II, 114, et passim. Some passages in the systematic section of Bouyer’s Le fils éternel are open to this reading of our redemption, for: Bouyer understands Jesus’ salvific transcendence to be that of a collective or corporate personality, not a human hypostasis: see his citation of Leontius of Byzantium on p. 405 of that work, quoted at length in Vol. IV, at pp. 853ff, supra. St. Thomas however insists upon the individuation, if not the human personhood, of the human nature of Christ: this would appear to exclude his approval of any “representative” notion of the Christ, still less of Tillich’s “Essential God-Manhood;” see S. T. iiia, q. 4, a. 4.
This leaves without alternative the conclusion that in this passage St. Thomas identifies human nature with human substance, and his subsistence in the Verbum (sensu negante) as an exception to the otherwise universal identification of the individuated human nature as subsisting uniquely in a human substance whose potentialities he exhausts by that unique subsistence. The distinction Thomas poses between the concrete human nature or substance, and the concrete human person, is therefore abstract: the supposition of an impersonal concrete human nature available as the subject of assumption by the Verbum and which subsists impersonally in the Verbum makes no metaphysical sense, for St. Thomas had long since, in the De ente et essentia, reduced the human species, i.e., the human “second substance,” to an abstract ens rationis, in which nothing can participate, nothing subsist, which can support no human community or communication, and whose individuation can only be by personal subsistence in “first substance.”
Ipsa enim natura humana in intellectu habet esse abstractum ab omnibus individuantibus, et ideo habet rationem uniformem ad omnia individua, quae sunt extra animam, prout aequaliter est similitudo omnium et ducens in omnium cognitionem in quantum sunt homines. Et ex hoc quod talem relationem habet ad omnia individua intellectus adinvenit rationem speciei et attribuit sibi.
In English translation:
Human nature has, in the intellect, existence abstracted from all individuals, and thus it is related uniformly to all individuals that exist outside the soul, as it is equally similar to all of them, and it leads to knowledge of all insofar as they are men. Since the nature in the intellect has this relation to each individual, the intellect invents the notion of species and attributes it to itself.
De ente et essentia, c. iii; tr. Robert T. Miller, 1997, for the Internet Medieval Sourcebook (Emphasis added).
The consequently merely nominal unity of humanity at large cannot support the soteriological significance which St. Thomas here attributes to “our nature” and “our flesh.” He admits that “human nature has, in the intellect, existence abstracted from all personal individuation,” but he fails to note that in the concrete, human nature is always a person. Absent this personal subsistence in the human first substance, the individuated human nature, there can be no concrete humanity. Further, if the human substance is as St. Thomas understands it, simply the concrete human person, there can be no human communication; if on the other hand, the human substance is as Averrhoes understood it, i.e., as the humn species, there can be no free human communication. Only that human substance which, created in Christ, has our Lord immanent in it as its head, the source of its free unity, thus its creator, can annul these determinist surds.
[21] St. Thomas poses the question: “Utrum Christus, secundum quod homo, habuerit potestatem operandi effectum sacramentorum,” and replies:
Respondeo dicendum quod interiorem sacramentorum effectum operatur Christus et secundum quod est Deus, et secundum quod est homo: aliter tamen et aliter. Nam secundum quod est Deus, operatur in sacramentis per auctoritatem. Secundum autem quod est homo, operatur ad interiores effectus sacramentorum meritorie, et efficienter, sed instrumentaliter. Dictum est enim quod passio Christi, quae competit ei secundum humanam naturam, causa est nostrae justificationis et meritorie, et effective, non quidem per modem principalis agentis, sive per auctoritatem, sed per modum instrumenti, in quantum humanitas est instrumentum divinitatis eius, ut supra dictum est (q. 13, a.2, c; q. 19, a.1;
S. T. iiia, q. 64 a. 3, c; cf. q. 78, a. 4, ad. 2.; see also q. 13, a. 2, c.( emphasis added).
This stance is at one with the supposition that the Eternal Son suffered “in his humanity.” Given that Jesus’ suffering was his Personal expiation of the sins of the world, it is clear that he suffered in the unity of his Person, that of the one and the same Son. Any limiting of his suffering to his human nature not only violates the communication of idioms as rooted in the Church’s faith that Jesus is Lord, for it amounts to a denial that Jesus suffered in his divinity, but it also supposes his human nature to be concrete, which it cannot be except as a human Person. St. Thomas’ refusal to admit that the Eternal Son suffered Personally is still a commonplace: e.g., Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000). Weinandy returns to his dehistoricized analysis of the Chalcedonian Symbol in “The Council of Chalcedon: Some Contemporary Christological Issues,” Theology Digest 53/4 (Winter, 2006) 345-356: e.g.:
The Council of Chalcedon and the apostolic tradition it embodies demand that Christology always be ontologically ‘from above’: the Incarnation is always the Son of God’s ontologically assuming a human nature and so coming to exist as man.
Weinandy, Art. cit., at 346.
Inasmuch as the single subject of the Symbol of Chalcedon is Jesus, the one and the same Son” of the Father and of our Lady, who in that document is repeatedly referred to by that title, it must follow that Fr. Weinandy’s dehistoricization ut supra of that “one and the same Son” has no foundation whether in the Chalcedonian definition or “in the apostolic tradition which it embodies.”. The Symbol of Chalcedon has comprehensively affirmed the full Personal humanity of “the subject of the Incarnation.” One may be loyal, with St. Thomas, to the radically insoluble Logos-sarx dilemma or, one may be loyal, with the Church, to the doctrinal tradition affirmed in the Symbol of Chalcedon. It is not possible to be loyal to both, for they are mutually exclusive.
[22] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 119. A further discussion of Rahner’s theological monism is provided infra as Appendix IV.
[23] Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes, provides a significant exception to this exegesis and, while Cyril of Alexandria’s Christology exemplifies it, Cyril’s liturgically inspired insistence upon Mary’s motherhood of God departs from it entirely, returning to the communication of idioms in Jesus upon which he is the first of the Fathers to insist as a matter of Eucharistic doctrine. Lawrence J. Welch has explored, in Christology and Eucharist in the Early Thought of Cyril of Alexandria (San Francisco: Catholic Scholars Press, 1994) the fourth and fifth century Alexandrine interpretation of sarx. There he has found reason to question the common opnion that Cyril, and Athanasius upon whom Cyril depended, always understood sarx to denote an unsouled human nature in such wise as to bar a human ‘subject of the Incarnation,’ whom the Church knows as the Man, the human Son of Mary, who is Jesus, the Word made flesh, “one and the same.” It is a point worth more attention than has lately been given it: viz., that the biblical meaning of sarx (flesh) is irreducible to human nature, souled or unsouled; it refers to our existential fallenness, which can only be personal. Jesus, the primordial second Adam, the Johannine Alpha and Omega, in becoming flesh did not “become human,” despite the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed’s literal assertion to that effect, which as doctrinal is to be read historically, not analytically. Sed contra, cf. Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, esp. 318-28. replying to the criticism, particularly by A. Grillmeier, bearing upon the role of the soul of Christ in Athanasius’ Christology as set out in the Tome, Annick Martin observes:
La question de la réalité de l’âme humaine du Christ ne s’était tout simplement pas posée à Athanase. De plus, en le coupant ainsi du reste du Tome, c’est la cohérence de la démonstration voulue par Athanase qui se trouve détruite. Soucieux de faire accepter unanimement le Nicaenum à ceux qu’il cherche à unir en Orient, celui-ci a parfaitement compris le danger représenté par les Eustathiens qui brandissaient la formule de Sardique pour justifier une doctrine proche de celle de Marcel d’Ancyre, blanchi par ce même concile Considérée comme source de disputes sans fin précisément à cause de son fort relent marcellien, une telle formule ne pouvait qu’être écartée car elle faisait obstacle à la unité recherché. L’ensemble du Tome, y compris le paragraphe 7, doit donc bien être lu comme un réponse à la formule des Occidentaux à Sardique, très proche de ce que M. Simonetti a si justement appelé le monarchianisme moderé35, et cette réponse est tout entière continue dans l’affirmation de la foi de Nicée, ici précisée, que la formule de Sardique, en s’abstenant d’en reprendre les termes, semblait remettre en cause. C’est, du reste, ce qu’indique fort clairement à la fin du Tome, la souscription d’Eusèbe de Verceil, qui, après avoir confirmé son accord sur les hypostases et l’Incarnation, s’achève sur la reconnaissance de la seule foi de Nicée, à l’exclusion explicite de «°La lettre de Sardique.°».36
35 Sabellio e il sabellianismo, dans Studi storico religiosi, 4, 1980, p. 7-28.
36 10, 3. p. 328 (= 808 C) «et puisque la lettre de Sardique est exclue pour ne pas avoir été produite à coté de la foi de Nicée, moi aussi je donne mon accord.»
Annick Martin, Athanase, 555-56. Cf. J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 277-79.
Martin goes on to develop Athanasius’ Christology, resting it on Origen’s defense of the full and consequently Personal humanity and Personal divinity whose primordial union, Henōsis, is the primordial event, i.e. “the Beginning,” of the single Subsistence in the divine and human substances who is Jesus Christ the Lord. The Alexandrines from Origen through the later Cyril upheld the Personal unity of Jesus, and the substantial unity of the Trinity. In this, they were entirely vindicated at Chalcedon.
[24] A Jesuit scriptural scholar, the late Fr. George MacCrae, the first tenured (sic) Charles Chauncy Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard, gave the 1976 Bellarmine Lecture at St. Louis University, in which he praised the Modernist movement as the prophet and harbinger of post-Conciliar Catholicism: see "The Gospel and The Church," Theology Digest 24 (1976) 338-348.
[25] For example, one may compare the methodological insouciance marking the first volume of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991) with the relative moderation of its second and third volumes.
2[26] Pace St. Thomas, the terminus of the Mission of the Son to give the Spirit cannot be the Incarnation in the static sense of the hypostatic union. The Son’s presence in the world is historical, that of the Head, whose immanence in his historical creation is, in sum, his giving of the Spiritus Creator for which he was sent. It must follow that the Mission of the Son terminates in the full gift of the Spirit, which in fallen history is the event of the sacrificial institution of the New Covenant of which Jesus, one and the same Son, is the Head, the source of its free and nuptial unity, consubstantial with his bridal Church. The foundation of this nuptial consubstantiality is given in Gen. 2:24; cf. endnotes 122 and 284, supra.
[27] For Johannes Betz, Die Eucharistie in der Zeit der greichischen Väter; zweite, überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage; Herder; Freiburg: I/1, 1955, II/1, 1976: Band I/1: Die Akualpräsenz der Person und des Heilswerkes Jesu im Abendmahl nach der vorephesinischen griechischen P natristik; Band II/1: Die Realpräsenz des Leibes und Blutes Jesu im Abendmahl nach dem Neuen Testament; for Alexander Gerken, see "Dogmengeschichtliche Reflexion über die heutige Wende in der Eucharistielehre," ZKTh 94 (1972) 199-226, Theologie der Eucharistie (München: Kösel-Verlag, 1973), and “Kann sich die Eucharistielehre ändern?" ZKTh 97 (1975) 415-429. The static interpretation of “Real Presence“ is further reflected in the efforts to substitute “transignification” for “transubstantiation,” in that the illustrations provided are static objects; e.g., a strip of cloth which may be recognized as a flag. These drew the attention of Paul VI: see "Mysterium Fidei: Litterae Encyclicae," AAS 57 (1965) 753-774, issued on September 3, 1965, at the close of the Second Vatican Council.
[28] Augustine’s famous text should be at hand :
Spiritualiter intelligite quod locutus sum. Non hoc corpus quod videtis manducaturi estis et bibituri illum sanguinem quem fusuri sunt qui me crucifigent. Sacramentum aliquid vobis commendavi: spiritualiter intellectum vivificabit vos. Etsi necesse est illud visibiliter celebrari, oportet tamen invisibiliter intellegi.1
Enarr. in Ps . xcviii, 9.
See Th. Camelot, "Réalisme et symbolisme dans la doctrine eucharistique de s. Augustin,”, 394-410, at 408; this article, twice cited by de Lubac in his classic study of Eucharistic theology, Corpus mysticum, at p. 152 and at p. 200 in footnote 58, is a brilliantly succinct exposition and defense of Augustine’s Eucharistic orthodoxy. Augustine’s Eucharistic realism is affirmed by the Anglican scholar, J. N. D. Kelley, (Doctrines, 446-50, 454) but which has been put in issue by nearly every modern Catholic Church historian from Karl Adam to Johannes Betz. Camelot’s article is now difficult to find, and deserves its republication in this volume as the classic that it is: see Appendix IV, infra. The sharp distinction drawn by Augustine between “spiritualis,” as designating sacramental reality, and “corporalis” as designating empirical reality, is due for a revival. The need for it became evident over thirty years ago with the immediate acclaim awarded Tad Guzie’s Jesus and the Eucharist (New York: Paulist Press, 1974), which neatly identified the historical with the empirical, and the non-empirical with the subjective. By reason of this unwarranted accolade, it became required reading in the undergraduate religion and theology courses of many professedly Catholic colleges and universities, and remains so at the present writing (2009).
[29] See, e.g., John O’Malley’s "Reform, Historical Consciousness, and Vatican II's Aggiornamento," Theological Studies, 32 (Dec., 1971) 573‑601, which at once announced and welcomed the revolutionary character of the new historical conscioussness, in that it postulates the reversibility of Church history insofar as it is free. This "breakthrough" (so described in the editorial introduction to the article) was understood to be liberating precisely insofar as relativizing the Church's tradition. The consequence is that an academic veto stands between the Catholic historical tradition and its use by the Magisterium, if one takes seriously the contemporary academic mediation of church‑historical consciousness—as did, e.g., Bernard Lonergan. He proposed that “philology” has deprived the dogmatic theologian of his sources by making manifest their historical conditioning and consequent relativity: see his The Philosophy of God and Theology (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1973), at 32. On this basis, one must conclude that bishops can no longer teach. Catholic doctrine having been identified with theological opinion, it belongs to the academy—specifically, to Lonergan’s practitioners of “philology,” a point of view also implicit in Lonergan’s identification of faith with love. Lonergan’s Method in Theology (New York, Herder and Herder, 1972), at 27 ff., 278, develops the supposedly non-intellectual character of religious assent. In Lonergan’s view, neither Augustine nor Newman transcended the level of “common sense:” see A Second Collection, ed. W. J. Ryan and J. B. Tyrrell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), at 227.
[30] As cited earlier, () it reads:
The
letter teaches events; allegory what you should believe;
Morality teaches what you should do; anagogy what mark you should be aiming
for.
The Latin is rather more succinct, as befits a memnomic:
Littera
gesta docet, quid credas allegoria
Moralis quid agas, quo tendas (quid speres) anagogia.
De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis I, 1. De Lubac has determined the aurhor of this distich to be Augustine of Dacia, a Scandinavian monk who wrote it ca. 1260 and died in 1282.
As already noted, the patristic development of the sacramental realism underlying this medieval couplet is the subject of the two volumes of de Lubac’s Exégèse médiévale. The sacramental foundation of this medieval “distich” links it to the medieval development of the paradigm of sacramental realism (sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum) whereby the Eucharistic signing is foundational for a theology of history and so also for de Lubac’s extraordinarily learned exposition of the historicity of the patristic and medieval exegesis: see the present writer’s “Rescuing theology of History,” Faith 36/2 (Mar.-Apr., 2004), 14-23.
[31] N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, at 36.
[32] The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the undivided Church. Their canons and dogmatic decrees, together with the canons of all the local synods which have received ecumenical acceptance. Edited with notes gathered from the writings of the greatest scholars by Henry. R. Percival, M.A., D.D., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 14, (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995). Ed. Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D, and Henry Wace, D.D.) p. 264B. (6).
[33] Part II, Sections I and II of this Appendix, entitled “The Chalcedonian Christology―a resumé of the history and doctrine of the Chalcedonian Symbol”—is a compilation made in the 1950s by the Jesuit theology faculty of Woodstock College, MD, of translated excerpts from Ortiz de Urbina, S.J., "Das Glaubenssymbol von Chalkedon - sein Text, sein Werden, seine dogmatische Bedeutung," (ET: The Faith-Symbol of Chalcedon: its text, its composition, its doctrinal significance) in Das Konzil von Chalkedon; Geschichte und Gegenwart / Im Auftrag der theologischen Fakultat S.J., Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt/Main, hrsg. von Aloys Grillmeier und Heinrich Bacht (Würzburg; Echter-Verlag, 3 vols., 1951-1954), I, 389-418. The compilation was composed by the faculty of Woodstock College in Maryland for the use of the Jesuit scholastics then attending the College who, as candidates for ordination, made there theological studies then required of Jesuit candidates for ordination to the priesthood. The present writer was among them and, in the years thereafter, has found no comparably succinct and accurate account of the Chalcedonian Christology.
In this connection, it is to be noted that the work entitled The Christian Faith in the doctrinal documents of the Catholic Church. Revised edition edited by J. N. Neuner, S.J. & J. Dupuis, S.J. (New York: Alba House, Society of St. Paul, n.d.) is deliberately disinterested in the Council of Chalcedon, omitting its Symbol, and sacrificing its focus upon the historical Jesus, the “one and the same Son,” to a programmatic evisceration of the Catholic faith by the usual device of dehistorizing of the Church’s Conciliar witnesses to her doctrinal tradition. For its authors, this has entailed the dismissal of the Council of Chalcedon, whose Symbol is the definitive statement of the Church’s faith that Jesus Christ is Lord.
[34] The density of the Hebrew word transliterated as “Bereshith,” which opens the Genesis account of creation, is susceptible of various translations, all relative to the divine act of creation as recited in Gen. 1 and 2, and thus to the Christian development of that term, particularly that of St. John and St. Paul, which understands creation to be “in Christ.” Bernard Lonergan has pointed out some of the patristic explorations of the meaning of bereshith:
The exegesis of Gen. 1:129
Clement of Alexandria, adducing in support the Kerygma of Peter, took the opening words, “In the beginning”, to mean “in the first-born and therefore in the Son.30 According to Jerome, Aristo of Pella in his Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus translated the Hebrew thus: “In his Son God made heaven and Earth.31 Irenaeus, giving first the Hebrew text, then translated: “A Son in the beginning God established, then heaven and earth”.32 Tertullian was acquainted with a similar rendering, but he considered it dubious: “. . . There are some who say that in the Hebrew text Genesis begins, “In the beginning God made himself a Son”.33 Hilary, finally, says “Bereshith is a Hebrew word, which has three meanings: in the beginning, in the head, and in the Son”.34
More recently, C. F. Burney offered the opinion that St. Paul had expounded three different meanings of the Hebrew Word, reshi'th, in teaching that Christ was “before all”, “the head of the body, which is the Church”, and “the first-born of all creation” (Col1:13-18).35
Certain Gnostics―Ptolemy, for instance―identified “the beginning” with the Son, and so they understood the Word as coming from the Son.35 Justin, however, took the word, the Beginning, and the Son to be one and the same;37. for Tatian the “beginning” was the power of the word;38 Theophilus of Antioch understood what was said of the “beginning” to apply to the Word;39; for Origen the “Beginning” was our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ, the first-born of all creation, the Word, and he also said that the Christ is the beginning, inasmuch as he is Wisdom.40
29 J. Daniéliou, op. cit. [Theology of Jewish Christianity], 106ff.
30 Clem. Alex, Strom., VI,7, 58, I; Stahlin (GCS15), 461; (cf. VI, 5, 39, 2), 451.
31 Jerome, QQ. hebr. In Gen. I, 1: ML 23, 937.
32 Iren., Proof …43; Smith, p. 75
33 Tert., Ad Prax., 5; translation by E. Evans, London, SPCK, 1948, 93, 9f,.
34 Hilar., Tract. Ps.II, 2; ML 9, 263 A.
35 C. F. Burney, Journal of Theological Studies 27 (1926), p. 175f. Cf. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, pp. 150-153.
36 Iren., Adv. Haer, I, 8, 5’ W. W. Harvey I, 76; cf. I, 18, 1; Harvey I, 169, where we are told of a certain Gnostic who discovers the thitry Aeons in the first chapter of the book of Genesis.
37 Just., Dial, 61, 1; 72, 4. Note that it is established by other texts that Christ is the Beginning, e.g., col. 1, 18; Rev. 3, 14 (cf 3, 21); Prov., 8, 22; John 8, 25.
38 Tatian, Orat., 5.
39 Theophilus, Ad Autol., II, 10.
40 Origen, Hom. Gen. I, 1; W. A. Baehrens (GCS 29)1, 9; In Joan., I, 29; E Preuschen (GCS 10) 10, 19.
Lonergan, The Way to Nicaea, at 23-24
These insights have been largely ignored by the classic Christology, whose Logos fixation routinely dehistoricizes “bereshith” in service of the Logos’ presumed divine immanence: thus theological tradition has long read “In the beginning” as “from eternity.” This misreading has had an evident impact upon patristic and exegetical scholarship, not least as regards I Cor. 11:3, for it bars Christ from possessing consubstantiality with the members of the human substance in which he subsists as head. This dehistoricizing mistake, along with many others akin to it, was corrected by the Symbol of Chalcedon, although the correction is one which, with few exceptions, contemporary theologians have chosen to ignore.
[35] In this Letter, confirmed by John Paul II a year before his death, we read:
5. The first biblical texts to examine are the first three chapters of Genesis. Here we “enter into the setting of the biblical ‘beginning'. In it the revealed truth concerning the human person as ‘the image and likeness' of God constitutes the immutable basis of all Christian anthropology”.4
The first text (Gen. 1:1-2:4) describes the creative power of the Word of God, which makes distinctions in the original chaos. Light and darkness appear, sea and dry land, day and night, grass and trees, fish and birds, “each according to its kind”. An ordered world is born out of differences, carrying with them also the promise of relationships. Here we see a sketch of the framework in which the creation of the human race takes place: “God said ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness'” (Gen. 1:26). And then: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gn1:27). From the very beginning therefore, humanity is described as articulated in the male-female relationship. This is the humanity, sexually differentiated, which is explicitly declared “the image of God”.
6. The second creation account (Gen. 2:4-25) confirms in a definitive way the importance of sexual difference. Formed by God and placed in the garden which he was to cultivate, the man, who is still referred to with the generic expression Adam, experienced a loneliness which the presence of the animals is not able to overcome. He needs a helpmate who will be his partner. The term here does not refer to an inferior, but to a vital helper.5 This is so that Adam's life does not sink into a sterile and, in the end, baneful encounter with himself. It is necessary that he enter into relationship with another being on his own level. Only the woman, created from the same “flesh” and cloaked in the same mystery, can give a future to the life of the man. It is therefore above all on the ontological level that this takes place, in the sense that God's creation of woman characterizes humanity as a relational reality. In this encounter, the man speaks words for the first time, expressive of his wonderment: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23).
4. John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Mulieris dignitatem (August 15, 1988), 6: AAS 80 (1988), 1662; cf. St. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, 5, 6, 1; 5, 16, 2-3: SC 153, 72-81; 216-221; St. Gregory of Nyssa, De hominis opificio, 16: PG 44, 180; In Canticum homilia, 2: PG 44, 805-808; St.Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum, 4, 8: CCL 38, 17.
5. The Hebrew word ezer which is translated as “helpmate” indicates the assistance which only a person can render to another. It carries no implication of inferiority or exploitation if we remember that God too is at times called ezer with regard to human beings (cf. Ex 18:4; Ps 10:14).
“Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.” Rome, from the Offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, May 31, 2004, the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Joseph Card. Ratzinger, Prefect; Angelo Amato, SDB, Titular Archbishop of Sila, Secretary.
Salva reverentia, it may be in point to suggest that “Adam,” in the account in Gen. 2 of the primordial Good Creation, whose goodness is complete only as freely unified in the “one flesh” of Gen. 2:24, names the primordial head of that creation. Antecedent to the creation of the woman in the Gen. 2 account, “Adam” is not an abstraction, not then “generic” humanity, or collective humanity, or humanity as awaiting completion, but the Head from whom the woman is to be taken. Otherwise, apart from his personal re-creation, she could not have her origin in him, as the creation account in Gen. 2 attests that she does, for his standing as head is prerequisite to her procession from him. Therefore “Adam” in Gen. 2 does not name or stand for an as-yet undifferentiated humanity. ”Adam” can only be understood as the name of the pre-fallen Head, the prospective source of the free unity of the thereby nuptially and covenantally ordered, primordially Good Creation which, even as fallen, is created, exists, and is good only by the free subsistence in it of the second Adam, Jesus the Lord, the Head, the Bridegroom of the second Eve. On this naming by the head, see “Image and Analogy: The Naming of Man and God, Covenantal Theology II (1996), Appendix, C., at 670-676.
[36] Joseph Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17/3 (Fall, 1990) 439-54. This article is a translation and reprint of a German original written by Ratzinger while on theology faculty at Tübingen and published originally in the latter 1960s before his departure to Regensburg. In it, Ratzinger has pointed to Augustine’s failure to apply to human persons his discovery of the intra-substantial relationality of the Trinitarian Persons. Such an insight could only have issued in the affirmation of a free, communitarian human substance, as alone capable of such interrelation. As has been seen, this understanding of human substance as multi-personal is presupposed by the Chalcedonian doctrine of the Son’s homoousion “cum nobis.”
[37] The exception to a circumambient Platonism were the Antiochene theologians who tended to Aristotelianism in their philosophy: Lucian’s school of exegesis taught a literalist exegesis to the “collucianists” among whom Arius, Asterius the sophist, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Leontius of Antioch are numbered. The influence of that literalism is evident in Theodore of Mopsuestia’s reliance upon Aristotelianism to rationalize the Trinity into a modalism and the Incarnation into the radical diophysism that induced the Nestorian heresy.
[38] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1, 183-206, esp. 197-8. Barth provides an elaborate examination of the patristic and medieval exegesis of Gen. 1:27. Augustine had been deflected from finding the image of God in marriage by his supposition of the substantial standing of each human person: this monist anthropology also underlies his rejection of the image of God in the familial unity of husband, wife, and their offspring.
Barth has been much criticized for his insistence that the Pauline description of the relation of wife to husband as one of "submission" refers to "order in history" and does not involve any inferiority: see endnote 70 and 235, supra. It has earlier been noted that Anaximander, who founded cosmological speculation in the sixth century B.C., inevitably did so on a monist basis. This foundation required that all physical differentiation be quantitative, a matter of possessing more or less of a single bonum. Under this rubric, all differentiation had to be identified with inequality and therefore with injustice. This monist morality required that physical motion, i.e., transitive movement, be driven by a cosmic quest for justice. This remote invocation of the second law of thermodynamics as the criterion of morality has found current theological expression: see Covenantal Theology, Volume II, Ch. Two, endnote 173.
[39] See the Public Relations Office, National Catholic Education Association 1077 30th Street, N.W. Suite 100 Washington, DC 20007-3852 (202) 337-6232 FAX: (202) 333-6706 e-mail:
For Immediate Release; Contact Barbara Keebler or Carolyn Stratford. March 24, 2000
THOMAS H. GROOME TO RECEIVE NATIONAL AWARD WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The National Association of Parish Catechetical Directors (NPCD) is pleased to present the year 2000 NPCD Emmaus Award for Excellence in Catechesis to Thomas H. Groome at the 8th annual NPCD Convocation in Baltimore, April 25-28. This award, is presented to an outstanding national leader in the field of catechesis who has consistently generated significant contributions to that field. According to Stephen Palmer, Associate Executive Director of the NCEA Department of Religious Education, "Thomas Groome is certainly one of these leaders and has distinguished himself as an educator, author and lecturer."
Dr. Groome is professor of theology and education at Boston College having completed doctoral studies at Columbia University Teacher's College and Union Theological Seminary in New York. He has lectured widely throughout the world and is the author of a number of books including: Christian Religious Education; Educating for Life; and most recently, Christian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Vision, as well as Sharing Faith: A Comprehensive Approach to Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry: The Way of Shared Praxis. As a keynote presenter after receiving his award, Dr. Groome will be speaking on "Total Catechesis: The Hope for the New Millennium."
The NPCD Convocation is held in conjunction with the National Catholic Educational Association Convention each year and this year will be in Baltimore during Easter Week, April 25-28, 2000. The award will be presented on Friday, April 28 at 2:30 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore. The honor is sponsored by Benziger/Glencoe. NCEA is the largest private, professional education association in the world. Founded in 1904, the association's membership represents more than 200,000 educators serving 7.6 million students at all levels of Catholic education.
About the NPCD Convocation : Taking theme,
"Excellence in Catechesis: Broad Stripes and Bright Stars" was theme of the three day meeting. NPCD, working within the Department of Religious Education of the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), successfully convened renowned speakers and catechetical leaders for general sessions, workshops and liturgical celebrations that explored topics including catechesis, morality, social justice, liturgy and spirituality.
Groome first set out his vision of politicized Catholicism in Christian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Vision (HarperSan Francisco, 19811980). In the intervening decades his “total catechesis” has succeeded in infecting most of English catechetical publication. His sole published opponent appears to be a courageous Australian layman, Eamonn Keane, whose critique of Groome’s ‘shared praxis’, A Generation Betrayed (Heatherleigh Press: NY, 2002) has finally drawn, four years after its publication, what Groome considers an appropriate academic response: viz., the threat of a lawsuit. Keane has continued to publish his criticism; a decade later, Groome has filed no lawsuit against him, nor will he. Groome has published a number of works since Christian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Vision (HarperSan Francisco, 19811980) but they are no more than commentary upon it, for that book announces the program for all that Groome has since written, down to what is for the moment the latest: Encountering Christ in the Sacraments, published a few months after Credo: the Body of Christ: the Church (2012). The current edition of his programmatic Christian Religious Education (1980) is the lavishly entitled Sharing Faith: A Comprehensive Approach to Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry: The Way of Shared Praxis. His other works include What Makes us Catholic; Christian Religious Education; Educating for At last count,Groome has published eleven books Life; and, most recently, Christian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Vision. Like the late Andrew Greeley, he has no unpublished thoughts, so to speak.
[40] This monist deformation of the doctrine of the Trinity is currently instanced in Karl Rahner’s denial of self-aware subjectivity, i.e., Selfhood, to the Persons of the Trinity, in order that he may reserve Personal subjectivity to the divine substance. See The Trinity, 41-42, et passim.
Rahner’s reduction of the free Substance, the Trinitarian Community, to a monadic Self invokes a metaphysical dualism issuing in a denial of the divinity of Jesus the Christ, and consequently a rejection of the Son’s homoousios with the Father as defined at Nicaea, and of his homoousios with the Spirit, which alone is consistent with the dogma of the divinity of the Spirit defined at I Constantinople. Further, Rahner‘s attempt to construct a theology of the Trinity by way of a mono-personal notion of our human imaging of God cannot but deform that mystery by conforming it to the immanent, monist necessities of our fallen rationality.
Augustine avoids this determinism by limiting that imaging to worship, but does not develop the sacramentality of that worship, which is of course free because nuptially ordered by its central sacrament, the Eucharist. St. Thomas’ development of St. Augustine’s Trinitarian psychological analogy in terms of hiw own commitment to an analytical faculty psychology, offers an illustration of this monist deformation; the abstract analysis of human intellection can offer no model adequate to the free, Tri-Personal circumincession that is the substantial Trinity, the One God.
For St. Thomas, as for St. Augustine and for most contemporary theologians, the unity of substance is assumed to be monadic. While an exception to this monadism must be made for the Trinity, a created, free communitarian substance adequate to the imaging of the Trinitarian circumincession is evidently theologically inconceivable. This is perhaps why the Trinity had to be revealed: it could not be excogitated. It is of course revealed by its created Image, the free substantial unity of the nuptial One Flesh.
42 For summaries of the biblical use of the imago dei, see J. L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible; the Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible (1963) and Xavier Leon Dufour’s Dictionary of Biblical Theology (1973), svv. Head, Glory. Their common failure of insight into the doctrinal significance of I Cor. 11:3 deprives their scholarship of much of its Christological interest; see endnote 392, infra.
[42] See Covenantal Theology (1996), Appendix I, “The Naming of God and Man.”
[43] Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine. Editio vicesima secunda (Stuttgart: Würtemburgischer Bibelanstalt, 1963), 490.
[44] The biblical dictionaries and the current commentaries on Ephesians ignore the reference of this term to the doctrine of headship taught in I Cor. 10-11 and deployed also in Col. 1:15: e.g., The Jerome Biblical Commentary II, at 341a, dismisses the topic: “The verb “anakephalaiosasthai” means literally to place on the top of a column the sum of figures that have been added.” The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, at 486b, recognizes its reference to the universal efficacy of the Christ as the fulfillment of the OT prophecy, but without reference to headship. The International Bible Commentary (1986) sums up Eph. 1:10 in a single sentence: “God’s purpose is not limited to man’s salvation; it is a cosmic intention to bring all things together in heaven and earth under the control of Christ (cf. Heb. 2:5-8). Henry Chadwick ignores I Cor. 11:3 in favor of a pagan source for Paul’s use of “head:”
Though incarnate as Man, as God’s creative wisdom, Christ is the head of all angelic powers, and so in him all things find their apex or head, their coherence, and their principle of unity. He is the linchpin of the great chain of being, transcendent over it and at the same time immanent within the whole (cf. 2:20; 1C 15:24-8). By this language Paul imports a specifically Christian content into the contemporary cosmology, for which there was no more burning question than the source of harmony in a world of diversity and freedom.
Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, 982b-83a, (§ 859a).
Harper’s Bible Dictionary, Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible (2nd Edition), and Xavier Léon-Dufour’s Dictionary of Biblical Theology have no entries under ‘recapitulation’ or under anakephalaiosasthai or its substantive, anakephalaiosis. Finally, The Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church (2005), has a brief entry:
The term is used in its verbal form in Eph. 1:10, where God is said to sum up all things in Christ and from this passage was taken over by the Fathers. This concepttion of recapitulation was elaborated esp. by St. Irenaeus, who interpreted it both as the restoration of fallen humanity to communion with God through the obedience of Christ and as the summing-up of the previous revelations of God in past ages in the Incarnation. Besides these two meanings, which are common in patristic literature, there is a third found in St. Chrysostom, who applies the word to the reunion of both angels and men under Christ as their common head.
S.v. at 1380a
Here again there is no mention of I Cor. 11:3. Cf. Margaret Y. McDonald, Colossians, Ephesians; ser. Sacra Pagina, vol. 17 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), at 201-03. The editors of The New Dictionary of Theology, (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1987), at 827-28, recognize in recapitulation a restoration of unity, but again in the general sense of “fulfilling all OT prophecies and types, of bringing back into unity all that sin has scattered, and of realizing God’s original plan for humanity.”
In sum, contemporary exegetical scholarship ignores, as the Fathers did with the single exception of Clement of Alexandria, (see endnote 115, infra), and as theologians continue to do, the linkage of recapitulation (Eph. 1:10) to Christ’s nuptially-ordered headship as set out in I Cor. 11:3; this is true even of Louis Bouyer’s brilliant exegesis of the Pauline corpus; in Le fils eternel where his discussion of of Ephesians also fails to make this connection: op. cit., at 272-73.
Irenaeus knew better: In “Christ’s Role in the Universe According to St. Irenaeus,” Franciscan Studies 26, New Series, Volume 5 (1945), Part I: 3-20; Part II: 114-37, at 128-135, Dominic Unger provides a careful exposition of Irenaeus’ understanding of the Christ’s recapitulation of all things, citing a passage in Adv. Haer. (l. 3, c. 16, n. 6) wherein Irenaeus explicitly links recapitulation to the Pauline doctrine of headship set out in I Cor. 10-11 and Col. 1:18. Irenaeus reads the latter passage as Christ’s “making himself the head” (apponens seipsum caput) of “the body, the Church”, thus linking Eph. 1:10 to Col. 1:18. It would be too much to infer from the reference to Eph. 1 that Irenaeus has in view also the bridegroom-bride relation taught in Eph. 5:23ff. but, in the light of I Cor. 11, “apponens seipsum caput” cannot be read to describe an unfree, organic relation of Christ, the head, to the ecclesial body. Paul understands Christ’s headship to have a Trinitarian foundation, whose created analogue is nuptial, as is clear in I Cor. 11:3ff. and yet more so in Eph. 5:21-33, with its explicit citation of Gen. 2:24. We have seen that the clarification of the nuptiality of our imaging of God attained magisterial standing during the final year of the pontificate of John Paul II: cf. endnote 3, supra. It is no longer possible for Catholic theologians to ignore the historicity of our imaging of God by reliance upon the time-honored monist terms of classical Thomism and Augustinianism.
For the correlative exegetical dissociation of the use of ‘headship” in the Captivity Epistles from that use found in I Cor. 11:3, see endnote 70, supra.
[45] Little is known of the life of Athanasius before his appearance at the Council of Nicaea . It is evident that the argument presented here can do no more than propose a source more capable than those asserted by Eusebius (Constantine) or by Arius (its prior currency among Gnostics and Manichaeans) of having persuaded the Fathers at Nicaea that Jesus’ homoousios with the Father is indispensable to the faith of the Church,
None of the proposed alternatives can explain the triumph of the homoousios at Nicaea: only a brilliant, inspired exposition of its utter doctrinal necessity could have penetrated the pervasive cosmological confusion of the regnant theology, whether Aristotelian or Middle Platonist, which Arius’ essay in public relations, the Thalia, had so cleverly communicated. Debate with it would have been interminable, between contradictory world-views, as became evident over the next six decades. In there and then of the Council of Nicaea the tension between cosmological loyalties and the historical apostolic tradition could be transcended only by an extraordinary clarity of mind joined to an indomitable courage and a personal stature explicable only as prophetic. These qualities, in a man scarcely thirty years old, are more properly reckoned the gifts of the Holy Spirit than of nature. In this office of effective leadership, confirmed by his succession to the See of Alexandria three years later, and by his refusal to compromise his fidelity to Nicaea throughout his forty-five year oversight of that huge unruly diocese. Athanasius had no peers at Nicaea, and none throughout the fourth century . He has had few since.
[46] Their agnosticism is reflected in the summary article, “Homoousios”, by the late James M. Carmody, S.J., in the First Edition of the New Catholic Encyclopedia, v. 7, at 65-66. The Second Edition provided the opportu;nity for Fr. Carmody to distance himeslf from this position. J. N. D. Kelly provides a fuller statement of this argument: see Doctrines, 233ff. It rests upon the rather uncritical supposition that ecumenical councils are subject to exit polls.
[47] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 266, citing Amphilocius, Frag. 15 (P. G. 39, 112): τρόπος ὑπάρξεως ἤτουν σχέσεως ; (the divine names do not stand for the divine essence, but each “for a mode of existence or relation “ Kelly’s appreciation of the “Cappadocian” Trinitarian theology is hampered by his supposition of their unanimity, and by his continual reference to the “sharing” of the Persons in the substantial Trinity, a usage reflecting his similarly insistent translation of the Nicene homoousios as “one substance.” Taken seriously, which assuredly Kelly does not intend, that language forces a choice between Sabellianism and tritheism. Yet precisely this error attends all subordinationism: the Sabellian heresy is immediately perceived, as by Eusebius of Caesarea, to be its sole alternative. Thus we find Basil of Caesarea, while himself unable to affirm the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit, charging the pro-Nicene Eustathians with Sabellianism.
[48] The Greek of Phil. 2:6-7 has "μορφὴν δούλου" “the form of a slave.” Paul understands our fallen condition to be slavery, a view further spelled out in Heb. 2:15. It is thus that in his “becoming flesh” (in the parallel Joannine idiom), Jesus “emptied himself” of his primordial integrity, accepting our fallenness as his own in order that, having entered into its depths, having been “made sin” for us, having become imprisoned like us by the fear of death in order that he might by dying conquer death, he might free us all from that slavery and bondage. It is thus that his Resurrection is the “first fruits” of the New Creation.
Origen recognized, following the Apostolic Fathers, that the communication of idioms implicit in the Lordship of Jesus requires that the kenōsis which Paul ascribes to Jesus in Phil. 2:6-7 be referred to the primordial Lord Jesus, not to a non-historical Logos; see Henri Crouzel, Origen. at 193.
[49] As is evident from the passage quoted below,John Paul II relies heavily for this identification upon Mt. 19:9 and its parallels:
To call into question the permanent structural elements of man which are connected with his own bodily dimension would not only conflict with common experience, but would render meaningless Jesus' reference to the "beginning", precisely where the social and cultural context of the time had distorted the primordial meaning and the role of certain moral norms (cf. Mt. 19:1-9). This is the reason why "the Church affirms that underlying so many changes there are some things which do not change and are ultimately founded upon Christ, who is ”the same yesterday and today and for ever." Christ is the "Beginning" who, having taken on human nature, definitively illumines it in its constitutive elements and in its dynamism of charity towards God and neighbour.
Veritatis Splendor, par. 53.
The Pope may also have had in mind Paul’s explicit naming of Jesus as “the Beginning:’
He is the head of the body, the Church; he is the beginning, the first born from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent (emphasis added).
Col. 1:18:
See also John Paul II’s Evangelium vitae, para. 30, 50, 103.
[50] See Covenantal Theology (1996), Vol. I, Chapter 2, passim., and esp. endnotes 2 and 3. George Vandervelde, in Original Sin: Two Major Trends in Contemporary Roman Catholic Interpretation (Washington: University Press of America, 1975), has pointed out the facility with which Catholic theologians, after Vatican II, abandoned the doctrine of original sin, largely in favor of the dualism implicit in Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary theology; it had long been taken for granted, as by Karl Rahner’s articles on the relative merits of a monogenist and polygenist human origin, that the original sin and fall were historical in the sense that all other events in our fallen history are historical, as located on the same time line. This mistake refuses the primordial historicity of creation and fall and consequently poses entirely false and therefore insoluble pseudo-problems for theologians who have subscribed to it.
[51] It has earlier been emphasized that the Mission of the Son terminates in the Good Creation, which is to say, in the institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of the second Adam and the Second Eve. We have seen that the outflowing of blood and water from the side of the dead Jesus recited in Jn. 19:34 has been uniformly interpreted by the Fathers as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Genesis 2, i.e., as the procession of the second Eve, the Church, from the side of the sleeping Second Adam, Christ her Head. This terminus of the Son’s mission, the Good Creation, is identically the “beginning” referred to throughout the New Testament, which Paul names Jesus:―“He is the beginning”―in Col. 1:18. This “Beginning” is nuptially ordered, the primordial union in One Flesh of the Church with her head, whom Augustine named the “whole Christ,” and who appeared to Saul on the road to Damascus. In the sacrificial institution of this free unity, at once on the Altar and the Cross, the High Priest, the Lord of history, represents through his priests his fulfillment of his Mission, his assumption of the Headship of all creation of all history, sacramentally mediated in our fallen history by his bridal Church until he comes again. By his Lordly Eucharistic transcendence of history, his freedom is offered to all men in its sacramental actuality, in the free unity of its historical efficacy: as sacramentum tantum to those outside the Church, as res et sacramentum to those within it, as res tantum in the Kingdom of God.
[52] It is very nearly a theological commonplace that “God cannot die;” by the same logic, that of metaphysics of a pagan monism, we must infer with St. Thomas that God can have no positive relation to whatever is not God. Karl Rahner has published the dehistoricizing implications of this rationalization to their limit in The Trinity, However, the radical despair of finding God in history, which is inherent in this monism, is defeated by the One Sacrifice of the Christ at the Last Supper, andr and on the Cross, and cannot be permitted to control the Revelation summed up in the mystery of life and death of Jesus the Lord, by whose salvific headship of our humanity hope has entered the fallen world of man.
[53] Its classic statement is Augustine’s prayer to the intus Magister:
Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi.
Confessiones. 10, 27; (CChr.SL 27:175); E.T. in Liturgy of the Hours, IV, 1357.
[54] For an approach to this inquiry, see D. J. Keefe, "A Methodological Critique of von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics," Communio 5 (Spring, 1978) 23-43.
[55] Viz., Florus of Lyons, Ratramnus of Corbie, Rhabanus Maurus, Gottschalk, and perhaps John Scotus Eriugen, severally used the “new dialectic” to fragment the free unity of the monastic religious tradition wherein what would later be named “theology” had been a liturgically-grounded meditation upon the mysterium mediated by the liturgy and Scripture. Monastic traditionalists such as Peter Damien in the eleventh century and Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth were alert to the danger of the subordination of Christian faith to the immanent necessities of thought, unveiled as binary by the “new logic” but nonetheless in St. Anselm the theological quest for a priori explanation prevailed. His naive supposition that the truths of faith could be explained in terms of “necessary reasons” anticipated the Thomist application of the act-potency analysis of Aristotelianism to explain, e.g., Eucharistic transubstantiation. This was to turn the fides quaerens intellectum upside down as a matter of theological method, whose twelfth-century development entailed the displacement of the Augustinian phenomenology of liturgical worship by an increasingly detached analysis of sacramental objectivity, a project whose expression in the Thomist metaphysical synthesis has survived only as a scholasticism, an academic loyalty rather than a fides quaerens intellectum.
[56] The life and thought of John Scotus Eriugena is surveyed in Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, v. II: Medieval Philosophy: From Augustine to Scotus (Westrminster, Md., The Newman Press, 1957), Part Two: “The Carolingian Renaissance, Ch. xii & xiii, 116-135. The similarity of Spinoza’s Ethics to Eriugena’s De Divisione Naturae has long been recognized. Von Balthasar briefly vindicated his distrust of classic (cosmological) metaphysics in Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 20041963)
[57] S. T. iiia, q. 2, a. 4, c . See endnotes 358 and 368, supra. The text from the Summa Theologiae is quoted in endnote 369.
[58] Grillmeier opens Christian Tradition II/1, Section One, p. 4, with the suggestion that perhaps the authors of the Symbol of Chalcedon intended nothing more than a mediating statement, one satisfactory to both the contesting monophysite and diophysite factions, which would have quietly entered into the dogmatic tradition. This hope, had it existed, cannot have rested upon a commplete reading of the document itself, which eight times stresses that its subject is Jesus the Lord, not the nonhistorical Logos basic to the monophysite and diophysite Christologies, and to Grillmeier’s Thomist Christology..
The impressive scholarship which went into this work rests very largely upon the supposition, condemned long since, that Conciliar documents are not decisive per se; they require “reception.” This refusal of the authority of the Church’s Magisterium has haunted the Orthodox Church since its break with Rome; and has fragmented the churches of the Reform, who lack not only a Magisterium but liturgical unity as well; They are condemned to the same politicization of doctrine that haunted the Oriental Church throughout the fourth century. Today it threatens the res Catholica by way of the reception of dissent among the academicians who increasingly look to the Federal government for their vindication.
[59] The juridical connotations of “reception” are not far to seek: its use is primarily canonical, and points to the fact that some laws are ignored, rather than received, and for good reason: one might instance the law fixing the speed limit in metropolitan New York at thirty miles an hour which, were it enforced, much less observed, would impose an instant gridlock upon the metropolitan traffic. Common sense then takes over and the law is ignored; it is not “received.” The Eighteenth Amendment provides the classic example of a law never received because universally ignored. More fundamentally, “reception” points to the impossibility of governance by fiat, and looks to a practical resolution, by the consensus of a free polity, of the tension, permanent in a fallen world, between the rule of law and its application.
Transferred to the realm of theological discourse―as opposed to the Church’s doctrinal tradition―“reception” is applied to the Church’s doctrinal affirmations; it supposes that their legitimacy, their truth in fact, waits upon a consensus arrived at by an independent authority, nowadays usually academic: i.e., a consensus of Catholic theologians. Thus deployed, a requirement of doctrinal “reception” amounts to a rejection of magisterial authority, assimilating its exercise to the juridical context of practical governance. This notion became popular in the fourteenth century, when in the wake of the nominalist movement, canonical rationes began to displace those of theologians over the authority of the sacerdotium versus that of the imperium. Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis provides the classic illustration of this reductionism. James Hitchcock has meticulously examined its contemporary version in The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life; two volumes; ser. New Forum Books, ed. Robert P. George (Princeton and Oxford, the Princeton University Press, 2004).
[60] The hasty concession of the Canon Law Society to the untutored drive for ordination of women has no other foundation: see Volume I, “Introduction,” endnote 107, citing the C.L.S.A. Report, "Women in Canon Law," Origins 5 (1975) 200-204.
[61] See Institutes of the Christian Religion, in two volumes, by John Calvin, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1936), 1.11.8. at 122.
[62] It should be noted that Irenaeus gave this title to Jesus in Adversus Haereses (see J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 147) at the end of the second century without any recorded contestation: it was simply his witness to the apostolic tradition, from Paul and John the Evangelist, through Ignatius and Polycarp, of the unity of Christ against the Docetic denial of his Personal humanity. The Lucan invocation of Jesus’ “Name” in Acts is the invocation of his Person, of his Lordship, of his salvific authority, at once divine and human. As Tertullian recognized, the unity of his Name cannot but be the unity of his Person, the Son of the Father and the Son of Mary, one and the same Son. The Fathers at Chalcedon invoked Irenaeus’ characterization of Jesus’ unity as a Catholic commonplace, a foundational theme unchallenged in the Church’s tradition: e.g., a few years before Chalcedon, Augustine had used it twice in the Libellus Emendationis, a summary of Latin Christological orthodoxy.
[63] Jurgens considers the best easily available English translation of Pope Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians to be that of Kirsopp Lake in The Apostolic Fathers I:. The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd.: 1975), at 9-121. For reasons not easy to confute, Jurgens lowers the date of I Clement to ca. 80 A.D.: Early Fathers I, at 6. He concludes that the traditional dating of Clement’s pontificate (92-101 AD) is “unworthy of credence.”
[64] Quasten remarks of the Apostolic Fathers, in Patrology I (Utrecht-Antwerp: Spectrum Publishers; nd), at 48, that “Their most important function is the celebration of the liturgy, to offer the gifts or present the offerings.” I Clement 44, 4 reads: “Surely we will be guilty of no small sin if we thrust out of their office of bishop those who have offered the gifts in a blameless and holy fashion.” (tr. Robert M. Grant and Holt H. Graham, The Apostolic Fathers: A New Translation and Commentary. First and Second Clement (London, Toronto and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965) II, 73-74. Here “gifts” is a translation of πrοσφορά, viz., ‘things brought forward:’ i.e., offerings or, as here, gifts. J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 214, reads “прοσφορά” as the technical term for ‘sacrifice,’ since by universal consent in the early Church, the “offering” in Christian worship is the sacrifice of Christ. So also Kirsopp Lake, op. cit. at 85. Jurgens agrees: Early Fathers, I, at 11, 44, 4. Clement of Rome’s “Letter to the Corinthians” was written precisely to rebuke the lay expulsion of clergy standing in apostolic succession to offer the One Sacrifice.
Edward Schillebeeckx, in Ministry: Leadership in the Community of Jesus Christ (New York: Crossroad, 1981), has been at pains to deny this witness of I Clement (i.e., Pope Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians, as distinct from II Clement, the early homily by an unknown author, dated about 150 AD) to the sacrificial office of the priesthood. in a section which he has devoted to arguing that the early Church would have found "perverse" the question whether a layman could preside at the Eucharist, Schillebeeckx writes:
I Clement already assumes that it is normal for the episkopos presbyter to preside at the eucharist, but he adds: 'or other eminent members, with the approval of the whole church' since 'everything must be done in order.’
Ministry, at 51.
For the quoted material, Schillebeeckx refers his readers to I Clement 44:4-6. The Grant-Graham translation of the pertinent text reads as follows:
. . .(1) and our apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife over the title of bishop.(2) So for this reason, because they had been given full foreknowledge, they appointed those mentioned above, and afterward added the stipulation that if these should die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry. (3) those therefore who were appointed by them or afterward by other reputable men with the consent of the whole church, who in humility have ministered to the flock of Christ blamelessly, quietly and unselfishly, and who have long been approved by all--these men we consider are being unjustly removed from their ministry. (4) Surely we will be guilty of no small sin if we thrust out of their office of bishop those who have offered the gifts in a blameless and holy fashion. (5) Blessed indeed* are the presbyters who have already passed on, who had a fruitful and perfect departure, for they need not be concerned lest someone remove them from the place established for them. (6) But you, we observe, have removed some who were conducting themselves well from the ministry they have irreproachably honored. (44, 1-6)
Schillebeeckx has simply dropped the phrase from I Clement 44, 3 which tells against his case, consisting in the first seven words, and the ninth word, in the English translation provided by H. Graham, leaving the reader with the impression that I Clement provides a textual endorsement of a lay Eucharistic ministry. Further, to add weight to his contention that such ministry is by designation of the laity, Schillebeeckx translates the Greek word syneudokesases (συνευδοκησάσης) as "approval;" i.e., "with the approval of the whole church." Graham, in agreement with Kirsopp Lake in the Loeb Classical Library translation, reads "consent." Within the same passage, Schillebeeckx translates prosenegkontas ta dōra (προσενεγκόντας τὰ δῶρα) as "preside over the gifts," to underwrite the non-sacrificial leadership function which he attributes to the priesthood, whereas Graham and Lake both read it as "offer the sacrifices."
Sustained by such scholarship, Schillebeeckx is emboldened to conclude: "Thus the decisive element is the acceptance of a president by the church." In the same page of Ministry (51), he goes on to examine Tertullian's De Praescriptione Haereticorum, written during Tertullian's orthodox period, and his De Exhortatione Castitatis, written after Tertullian became a Montanist. In the latter piece, Tertullian affirms the legitimacy, in case of need, of a lay Eucharistic ministry. Schillebeeckx insists that this affirmation is not in consequence of Tertullian's conversion to Montanism. However, so eminent an authority as Henry Bettenson is of another opinion: he quotes the pertinent passage in De Exhort. Cast. 7, 3 and then adds:
With this teaching on the priesthood of the laity contrast the following, written before Tertullian became a Montanist.
(c) Casual Ordinations among Heretics
The appointees of the heretics are careless, frivolous, capricious. Now they set up neophytes, now those engaged in secular pursuits, now apostates from us. . . . Advancement is nowhere easier than in the rebels' camp; just to be there is to be certain of promotion. Thus one man is a bishop today, another tomorrow. A man is a deacon today, tomorrow a reader; today a presbyter, tomorrow a layman, for they even attach priestly functions to laymen.
De Praescriptione Haereticorum, tr. from Bettenson,The Early Christian Fathers, A selection from the writings of the Fathers from St. Clement of Rome to St. Athanasius; edited and translated by Henry Bettenson (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1963), at 150.
Bettenson repeats this judgment in his Documents of the Christian Church; second edition (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University. Press, 1963) at 71:
On this oft-quoted passage it is to be observed: (i) that Tertullian is writing as a Montanist, against second marriages, as unlawful equally for laity and clergy, and he himself, in his orthodox days, reproached heretics because 'they endue even the laity with the functions of priesthood' (De Praescriptione Haereticorum, 41) (ii) that, even so, he is speaking of cases of necessity.
Thus on a single page of Schillebeeckx’ Ministry we encounter a deliberate omission of pertinent language from a cited passage in I Clement, two highly debatable translations of key Greek terms, and an egregious exegesis of a work of Tertullian's Montanist period, all grist for Schillebeeckx's mill.
[65] Clement of Rome, Letter to the Corinthians 36, 3ff., cited by Kelly, Doctrines at 51.
[66] Quasten, Patrology I, at 40.
[67] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 144, in a discussion of the Spirit Christology of Ignatius Martyr, links that Christology to Clement of Rome, noting that ”Christ addresses us in the Psalms ’through holy spirit’,” citing I Clement 22, 1. Note the absence of the definite article in ‘through holy spirit.’ It corresponds to the Greek of Lk. 1:35, where the lack of the definite article in the recital of the Annunciation refers to Gabriel’s reply the Virgin Mary’s questioning of the possibility of her becoming the mother of Jesus; she is reassured by Gabrield that she will become the mother of Jesus by the descent of “holy spirit” upon her. This can only refer to the primordial Jesus, the Bridegroom; its all to often attribution to the Holy Spirit amounts to a rejection of the unchinging liturgical order (τάξις) of the divine Persons in which the Name of the Father always precedes the Name of the Son, and the Name of the Son always precedes the Name of the Holy Spirit.
[69] Jurgens, Early Fathers I, at 17. Jurgens recommends Kirsopp Lake’s translation of Ignatius’ Letters in The Apostolic Fathers, The Loeb Library Edition, I, 167-277.
[70] James Kleist, S.J., “Introduction” to “The Fragments of Papias,” The Didache, The Epistle of Barnabas, [hereafter, Barnabas,], The Epistles and Martyrdom of St. Polycarp [hereafter, Polycarp], The Fragments of Papias, and The Epistle to Diognetus; col. Ancient Christian Writers no. 6 (Mahwah, N.J.: The Paulist Press, 1948), at 108.
[71] Ignatius’ Spirit Christology, with its inseparable stress upon the unity of the Church, of her hierarchy, of her Eucharistic worship, all resting upon the historical unity of God and man in the Name of Jesus the Lord, pervades his Letters: he insists upon the paradoxical unity of divinity and humanity in Jesus the Christ, upon the unity of the Church under the bishops, priests and deacons, upon on the unity of the Eucharistic worship under the bishops, and upon the consequent personal unity of Christians with their risen Lord. Msgr. William Jurgens’ invaluable work, The Faith of the Early Fathers, vol. I, provides English translations of selections from Ignatius’ Letters together with a learned commentary; we rely upon them here. Ignatius’ Christology is most fully set out in his Letters to the Churches of Ephesus, Trallia, Philadelphia and Smyrna: his ecclesiology and Eucharistic doctrine are found particularly in those letters as well, and in those to the Magnesians and the Romans. Excerpts below of Msgr. Jurgens’s translations of them in his first volume are cited by page and section.
Christological excerpts:
Ad Eph. 7, 2: There is one Physician, who is both flesh and spirit, born and not born, who is God in man, true life in death, both from Mary and from God, first able to suffer and then unable to suffer, Jesus Christ our Lord. (p. 18, §39)
Ad Eph. 18, 2 – 19, 1: For our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary in accord with God’s plan: of the seed of David, it is true, but alsoHoly Spirit. He was born and was baptized so that by His submission He might purify the water. [19, 1] The virginity of Mary, her giving birth, and also the death of the Lord, were hidden from the prince of this world: three mysteries loudly proclaimed, but wrought in the silence of God. (page 18, § 42)
Ad Trall 9, 1-2: Turn a deaf ear, then, when anyone speaks to you apart from Jesus Christ, who was of the family of David and of Mary, who was truly born, who ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died in the sight of those in heaven and on earth and in the underworld, [2] who also was truly raised from the dead when His Father raised Him up. And in the same manner His Father will raise us up in Christ Jesus, if we believe in Him without whom we have no hope. (p. 21, § 51)
Ad Phil. 8, 2: I beseech you therefore do nothing in a spirit of division, but act according to Christian teaching. Indeed, I heard some men saying: “If I do not find it in the official records in the Gospel I do not believe.” And when I made answer to them, “It is written!” they replied, “that is the point at issue.” But to me the official record is Jesus Christ: the inviolable record is His Cross, His death, and His resurrection, and the faith which He brings about:--in these I desire to be justified by your prayers. (p. 23, § 60)
Ad Smyrn 1, 1-2: I give glory to Jesus Christ, the God who has made you wise; for I have observed that you are set in faith unshakable, as if nailed to the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ in body and in soul; and that your are confirmed in love by the Blood of Christ, firmly believing in regard to our Lord that he is truly of the family of David according to the flesh and God’s Son by the will and power of God, truly born of a Virgin, baptized by John so that all justice might be fulfilled by Him [2] in the time of Pontius Pilate and Herod the Tetrarch truly nailed in the flesh on our behalf, -- and we are of the fruit of His divinely blessed passion, -- so that by means of His resurrection He might raise aloft a banner for His saints and believers in every age, whether among the Jews or among the gentiles, united in a single body in His Church. ( p. 24, § 62)
Ad Smyrn 2; 3, 1-3: He underwent all these sufferings for us, so that we might be saved; and He truly suffered, just as He truly raised Himself, not as some unbelievers contend, when they say that His passion was merely in appearance. It is they who exist only in appearance; and as their notion, so shall it happen to them: they will be bodiless and ghost-like shapes. [3, 1] I know and believe that He was in the flesh even after the resurrection. [2] And when He came to those with Peter He said to them: “Here, now, touch Me, and see that I am not a bodiless ghost.” Immediately they touched Him and, because of the merging of His flesh and spirit, they believed. For the same reason they despised death and in fact were proven superior to death. [3] After His resurrection He ate and drank with them as a being of flesh, although He was united in spirit to the Father. (p. 24, § 63)
Eucharistic-Ecclesial excerpts
Ad Ephes 20, 2: I will [send you further doctrinal explanations] especially if the Lord should reveal to me that all of you to a man, through grace derived from the Name, join in the common meeting in one faith, and in Jesus Christ, who was of the family of David according to the flesh, the Son of man and the Son of God, so that you give ear to the bishop and to the presbytery with an undivided mind, breaking one Bread, which is the medicine of immortality, the antidote against death, enabling us to live forever in Jesus Christ. (pp. 18-19, § 43)
Ad Phil. 3, 2-3; 4, 1: Those indeed who belong to God and to Jesus Christ – they are with the bishop. And those who repent and come to the unity of the Church – they too shall be of God, and will be living according to Jesus Christ. [3] Do not err, my brethren: if anyone follow a schismatic, he will not inherit the Kingdom of God. If any man walk about with strange doctrine, he cannot lie down with the Passion. [4, 1]: Take care, then, to use one Eucharist, so that whatever you do, you do according to God: for there is one Flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup in the union of His Blood; one Altar, as there is one bishop with the presbytery and my fellow servants, the deacons. (pp. 22-23; § 56)
Ad Smyrn 6, 1: Let no one be deceived: even the heavenly beings and the angels in their glory, and rulsers visible and invisible, -- even for these there will be judgment, if they do not believe in Blood of Christ. (p. 25, § 63b)
Ad Smyrn 8, 1-2: You must all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the Father, and the presbytery as you would the Apostles. Reverence the deacons as you would the command of God. Let no one do anything of concern to the Church without the Bishop. Let that be considered a valid Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop or by one whom he appoints. (p. 25, § 65)
[2] Wherever the bishop appears, let the people be there; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. Nor is it permitted without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate the agape; but whatever he approve, this too is pleasing to God, so that whatever is done will be secure and valid. (pp. 25-26, § 65)
Ad Magnes 13, 1-2: Take care therefore to be confirmed in the decrees of the Lord and of the Apostles, in order that in everything you do, you may prosper in body and in soul, in faith and in love, in Son and in Father and in Spirit, in beginning and in end, together with your most reverend bishop: and with that fittingly woven spiritual crown, the presbytery; and with the deacons, men of God. [2] Be subject to the bishop and to one another, as Jesus Christ was subject to the Father; so that there may be unity in both body and spirit. (p. 20, §47a)
Ad Trall 2, 1-3: Indeed when you submit to the bishop as you would to Jesus Christ, it is clear to me that you are living not in the manner of men but as Jesus Christ, who died for us, that through faith in His death you may escape dying. [2] It is necessary therefore,--and such is your practice,--that you do nothing without the bishop, and that you be subject also to the presbytery as to the Apostles of Jesus Christ our hope, in whom we shall be found, if we live in him. [3] It is necessary also that deacons, the dispensers of the mysteries of Jesus Christ, be in every way pleasing to all men. For they are not the deacons of food and drink, but servants of the Church of God. They must, therefore, guard against blame as against fire. (p. 20, §48)
Ad Rom. 4, 1: I am writing to all the Churches and I enjoin all, that I am dying willingly for God’s sake, if only you do not prevent it. I beg of you, do not do me an untimely kindness. Allow me to be eaten by the beasts, which are my way of reaching to God. I am God’s wheat, and I am to be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, so that I may become the pure bread of Christ. (pp. 21-22, § 53a)
Ad Rom. 7, 3: I have no taste for corruptible food nor for the pleasures of this life. I desire the bread of God which is the Flesh of Jesus Christ, who was of the seed of David; and for drink I desire His Blood, which is love incorruptible. (p. 22, §54a)
[72] The literal interpretation of “extra ecclesia nulla salus” implication of the indispensability of the sacramental mediation of the grace of Christ was last affirmed by Fr. Leonard Sweeney in a famous debate between his St. Benedict’s Center and the Jesuit theologians of Boston College. Fr. Feeney refused to heed his Jesuit superior’s orders to cease teaching this docttrine and was excommunicatied by Pius XII on that ground. When, years later, he was reconciled with the Church, he was not required to recant.
In 1994, Josef Ratzinger, then the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, commented on Cyprian’s famous apothegm as follows:
We must remember that this expression was formulated by St. Cyprian in the third century in a quite concrete situation. There were those who thought they were better Christians who were unhappy with the Church of bishops and separated themselves from her. In answer to that, Cyprian says: separation from the Church community separates one from salvation. But he did not mean to lay down a theory on the eternal fate of all baptized and non-baptized persons .
"Ratzinger Speaks," The Catholic World Report, January 1994, p. 23).
[73] Kelly observes of the early patristic exegesis of the Lucan account of the Incarnation that:
The all but unanimous exegetical tradition9 of Lk. 1:35 equated the “holy spirit” and the “power of the Most High” which were to come upon Mary, not with the third Person of the Trinity, but with the Christ who, pre-existing as Spirit or Word, was to incarnate himself in her womb.
9 Cf. J. M. Creed, The Gospel according to St. Luke (London, 1930), ad loc.
Kelly, Doctrines, at 144-45.
In this footnote, Kelly refers to his earlier treatment, at 103, of the Apologists’ confusion over the Trinitarian Names, i.e., that in speaking of the “Spirit” they often refer to the Son. However, it is not necessary to impute confusion to the Apologists’s use of the term in the Pauline sense in which it had been understood by their predecessors, untouched by the programmatic dehistoricization which the primordial pre-existence of the “Logos” would undergo at the hands of later theologians. The Johannine Prologue, Phil 2:7, Lk. 1:26-38, 2:21, witnessing to the Word who was Named Jesus before he was conceived, and Lk 22-52, all witness to the Spirit Christology of the apostolic tradition, n fact, evidently without noticing it, Kelly mentions two other fourth-century witnesses to the perdurance of the Spirit Christology: the first is Eustathius of Antioch, whom Kelly quotes as follows:
“Why are they so set,” he inquired, “on demonstrating that Christ took a body without a soul, grossly deceiving their followers? In order that, if only they can induce some to believe this false theory, they may then attribute the changes due to the passions to the divine Spirit, and thus easily persuade them that what is so changeable could not have been begotten from the unchanging nature’ (i.e., from the Father).
Kelly, Doctrines, at 283. The “divine Spirit,” “begotten from the unchanging nature” can only refer to the Son.
The second fourth-century witness cited by Kelly is Diodore of Tarsus. In the passage under discussion, he opposes the Apollinarian union of the Word and the flesh in Christ in which the Logos becomes the hegemonikon of his union with the unsouled body of Christ in a theanthropic physis: As Kelly observes,
…his own theory strove to hold them apart, and thus he was led to distinguish2 the Son of God and the Son of David. Scripture, he pleaded,3 draws a sharp line of demarcation between the activities of the ‘two Sons.” The union was not the result of any fusion (‘mixture’) of the Word with the flesh; if it had been, why should those who blaspheme against the Son of man receive forgiveness while those who blaspheme against the Spirit do not?4
2 Frg. 42 (Abram.)’
3 Frg. 19: cf. frg. 42 (Abram.)
4 Frg. 20 (Abram.)
Ibid, at 303. This instance may be less obvious: the ‘two Sons” to which Diodore refers are the Word, and the Spirit. The “Spirit,” whose fusion with the Son of Man, i.e., the flesh, by Apollinarius, Diodore rejects, can only be the Son of God, the Word.
In so speaking of the Word as Spirit, the Apologists and their fourth century heirs are witnesses to the Spirit Christology of the Apostles, the Apostolic Fathers such as Ignatius, Hermas, Barnabas and the author of II Clement, for all of whom “Spirit” meant what it had for Paul, viz., a reference to, or personal participation in, the victory of Christ over fallenness and death, and his restoration of the primordiallyl unfallen good creation, a meaning incompatible with the Middle Platonic imagination which uncritically dehistoricized everything it touched. This cosmological mindsent, the commonplace of the later Christological speculation, is most particularly evident in the unreflective dehumanizing of the New Testament’s use of “Logos” as a title of Jesus the Christ whose pre-existence “in the Beginning,” could only be primordial and integral, unfallen, thus that of Spirit as opposed to ‘flesh,’ and whose risen life is that of the “life-giving Spirit.”
Ernest Evans confirms the universality of this early patristic exegesis with an ample documentation: see his Against Praxeas, 63-70. He remarks (at 69) that its last exponent seems to have been Athanasius, and approves the “common-sense” criticism of this reading of the Lucan Infancy Narrative as “Sabellian” (Eusebius contra marcellum, (P.G. 24:704-824, at 781-783), ed. Paris ii, 2, 35D) by Eusebius of Caesarea which, Evans surmises, led to its being “tacitly” dropped by the later Fathers as “obsolete.” Here Evans, writing in the late nineteen-forties, assumes provisionally the Athanasian authorship of the Oratio Contra Arianos IV, and attribution now commonly rejected. A few pages earlier (p. 13), Evans had attributed the Contra Arianos IV to "St. Athanasius (or whoever is the author …) etc." In any case, the Contra Arianos IV is a fourth century document, which suffices for Evan’s point.
This account requires of the influence of Eusebius of Caesarea requires some unpacking. To avoid condemnation by the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius had been forced to subscribe to the Conciliar definition of the homoousion, of the Son with the Father but, after the Council, he continued to find Sabellianism in those dedicated to the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with t he Father . Despite his pro forma recognition of the decree of Nicaea, his sympathies lay elsewhere and always had. Although fulsome in his praise of Origen, he had rejected Origen’s teaching of the co-eternity of the Son, remaining wedded to the subordinationist impact of the cosmology of Middle Platonism, which he thought to control whatever the Church might teach. Much of contemporary Catholic exegesis labors under the same misapprehension. .
Eusebius remained a subordinationist all his life, convinced that anyone who did not understand in that sense the Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father to be at least latently a Sabellian. There was an evident defensive tactic in the relentless Eusebian assault upon Eustathius, Marcellus,.and other pro-Nicene bishops the Eusebians indicted as Sabellians, for their subordinationism carries an inescapable implication of materiality in whatever is not the divine substance: this is the heart of the Arian rejection of the divinity of the Son. This unanswerable objection to the Eusebian subordinationism could only be fended off by keeping the defenders of the Nicene “mia ousia , mia hypostasis” on the defensive: thus his relentless assault upon the orthodoxy of the upholders of the unqualified unity of God, and of the consequent consubstantiality of the divine Son, as immediately Sabellian. Eusebius’ anti-Sabellianism had become a paranoia.
His first major target was Eustathius, the Bishop of Syrian Antioch, against whom Eusebius had a personal animus. Eustathius who, as the Primate of the major Syrian See, with metropolitan jurisdiction over Palestinian Caesarea, had been promoted to the See of Antioch by a provincial council presided over by Ossius of Cordoba, at that time Constantine’s theological advisor. This emphatically pro-Nicene council condemned Eusebius’ subordinationist Trinitarian doctrine and deposed him from his suffragan See of Caesarea. While Eusebius was not an Arian ex professo, he was certainly a sympathizer: he could recognize no alternative between his own subordinationist Trinitarianism and the Sabellianism which had been condemned in Paul of Samosata sixty years before the Council of Nicaea.
It is then understandable that a decade later, in 335, when the Arian opposition to the Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son, led by Eusebius of Nicomedia, had won the support of Constantine, and the orthodox bishops as such were under the displeasure of Constantine for their anti-Arian stance and consequently were under threat of deposition by Constantine from their sees, that Eusebius, supported by his namesake of Nicomedia and implicitly by Constantine, should join in bringing about the condemnation of Eustathius of Antioch on charges of immorality unworthy of credence, but also of “constructive” Sabellianism. At the Council of Nicaea Eustathius had been a close ally of Athanasius and a firm supporter at once of the homoousion of the Son and the unqualified substantial unity, mia hypostasis, of the divine Substance, the Trinity. This sufficed for his condemnation. At a synod dominated by “the two Eusebii,” of Caesarea and of Nicomedia, he was deposed from the See of Antioch and died a year or two later, leaving behind an assertion of the full divinity of Jesus the Son that would characterize the School of Antioch thereafter.
Eusebius’ other major target was Marcellus, the Bishop of Ancyra who, like Eustathius, had been a loyal supporter of Athanasius at the Council, and a vigorous upholder of the homoousion of the Son and so of the Nicene condemnation of subordinationism. Eusebius devoted two polemical works to his condemnation: Contra Marcellum in 335 and De Ecclesiastica Theologia a year later.
Eusebius read the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son not only as irreconciliable with the subordinationist interpretation of the divine unity required by his cosmology, for on that same basis he also read the Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son nonhistorically: i.e., as referring to the cosmologically-dehistoricized Son, viz., the “immanent” or nonhistorical, pre-human Son, rather than to the historical Jesus the Christ, the subject of the Nicene Creed, the conciliar affirmation of the faith of the Church that Jesus is Lord. Thus inspired, Eusebius took for granted that the pre-existence of the Son must be that of the immanent Son, thus ab aeterno. Consequently, in the passages from his Contra Marcellum cited by Evans (P. G. 24:704-824, at 781-783, ed. Paris ii, 2, 35D, he was simply blind to the Spirit Christology which Marcllus took for granted. See the further discussion in endnote 625 infra. Eusebius reads Jn. 1:1 (in the beginning) in that cosmological sense, i.e., ab aeterno, at once subordinationist and nonhistorical, thus implicitly Arian, which the Fathers at Nicaea had rejected in condemning the Arian heresy. Marcellus and Eustathius had supported that condemnation to the hilt. Their unqualified support of Athanasius’ insistence upon the absolute unity of the Godhead, and the full divinity of Jesus the Son, had earned them the implacable enimity of Eusebius of Caesarea.
It is thus that Eusebius condemned Marcellus’ subscription to the ancient ‘Spirit Christology:” it is cosmologically incomprehensible, and not only to Eusebius. The fourth century saw the ascendency of the two-stage Logos-sarx theology, whose converts blithely took for granted Eusebius’ dehistoricized exegesis of the Johnnine Logos sarx egeneto: henceforth in the Orient it was understood to be “common sense,” as Evans puts it, that the subject of the Incarnation be the immanent Logos, not Jesus the Lord. Soon after Nicaea, any application of Jn. 1:14 to Jesus the Lord in the Orient apart from Alexandria, and its corollary, the “Spirit Christology’s exegesis of Lk. 1:35, became “obsolete,” despite their antiquity and clear apostolicity. Evans admits that Eusebius’ condemnation, as Sabellian, of the Spirit Christology of the Apostolic Fathers, was accepted only “tacitly:” i.e., without discussion, thus unreflectively. That failure of reflection continues down to the present, having long since found its way into the Catholic liturgy, which routinely identifies the Holy Spirit, in the sense of the third Person of the Trinity, with the “ἅγιον πνεῦμα” of Lk. 1:35. This absurdity accepts without reflection an economy of salvation which rejects the Trinitarian τάξις revealed in the Father’s Mission of the primordial Jesus, the Son ,to give the Holy Spirit.
It is not surprising that a cosmologically-oriented theologian such as Eusebius should have rejected then-traditional exegesis of Lk. 1:35. In the passage cited by Evans (Against Praxeas, at 69-70), Eusebius identifies “Holy Spirit” with the cosmologized divine substance, which, given his rejection of the Trinity, could not be other than the Father. Hencehence he read Marcellus’ Spirit Christology as teaching a Sabellian (i.e., Patripassian) incarnation of the Father.
In a “moment of reason,” (Crouzel, Traité des principes II, 180, note 30, referring the term to Origen’s attempt to find in a mediatorial role in Jesus’ human soul the condition of possibility of the Incarnation) Eustathius of Antioch similarly mulled over the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son, as though pertaining to the cosmological or 'immanent Logos.’ This Christological lapse echoes Tertullian “moment of reason” in Adversus Praxean 27, in which concern for the divinity of the nonhistorical absolute Sermo as the subject of the Incarnation required an examination of the possible modality of his having “becoming flesh,” in such wise as to require the “clothing” imagery of “indutus carnem” rather than the denial of his divinity inherent in the alternative, the “transfiguratus in carnem” of the ‘immanent Son.’ Only when it is recognized that Tertullian could not have intended here to put in issue the concretely historical fact, the center of his apostolic faith, viz., the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord which he described as that of the union of the divine and the human substances in his Person, and whose vivid exposition in De Carne Christ has echoed down the ages as “Credo quia impossibile,” can he be drrm not to have invoked a proto-Nestorian failure of Personal unity in Christ as human, as a Jesus who is not divine, not the Lord. The same is true of Eustathius of Antioch : he had upheld the Nicene Creed at Nicaea as a senior bishop, the patriarch of the ancient Petrine See of Antioch, from which faith he never departed. His Christology is confused by his assertion of the full and therefore Personal humanity of Jesus, without having understood that Jesus’ Personal consubstantiality with the Father; could not but include his humanity as well as hid divinity, In short, the confusion is Christological his Trinitarian doctrine is not confused. For insisting upon it he was persecuted, deposed, exiled, and perhaps martyred.
In his bitter controversy with the Arians, Eustathius was intent upon affirming the full humanity of Jesus the Son, which he was probably the first to see Arius’ proto-monophysite Christology to have denied. In this Eustathius anticipated, not so much Chalcedon’s definition of Jesus’ consubstantiality “with us,” as Nestorius’ inability to identify Jesus with the Son, but Eustathius cannot be dismissed as diophysite; J. N. D. Kelly, after surveying Eustathius’ diophysite language, finally remarks that, «”although he could give no satisfactory acount of it, he was deeply concerned for the unity.(of Jesus)” , as also Spanneut has shown; (see endnote.411) Eusebius’ Christology tacitly subscribed to the cosmological dehistoricization of Jn. 1:14, and so also to the dehistoricizing of Lk. 1:35, reading ”holy Spirit” of the third Person of the Trinity, in such wise as to suppose the immanent Logos, not Jesus the Christ, to be the subject of the Incarnation: However, Eustathius’ Christology is not reducible to such diophysism, as Spanneut has contended, with ample warrant.
This cosmological confusion forced Eustathius to anticipate the Nestorian heresy: e.g., his use of a “clothing” idiom witnesses to his recognition that the immanent Son is incapable of a cosmologically-governed identification with Jesus the Son of Mary. This problem specified the diophysite Antiochene tradition thenceforth, as the counterpoise to the Alexandrine monophysism: both Christologies were intent upon resolving the insoluble problem of providing for Personal unity of the historical Christ.
The error underlying both of these defective and finally failed Christologies is the cosmologization, the dehistorzation, of the Father‘s Mission of the one and the same Son to give the Spirit, a mission, economic by definition, which as economic cannot but be historical, for it is the Mission of Jesus, the Son whom the Council of Nicaea proclaimed to be Personally consubstantial with the Father and both the Ephesian Formula of Union and the Symbol Chalcedon proclaimed to be Personally consubstantial with us.
The Catholic liturgical and consequently doctrinal tradition has from the beginning understood the subject of that Mission to be the subject of the Kenōsis, thus to be historical, quite as the subject of the Incarnation is historical: it is the primordial Jesus the Christ who is sent into our fallen history to give the Spirit by whom the universe is recreated in integrity, a Mission which, in consequence of the Fall, the Son fulfills on the Altar and on the Cross. When the subject of the Mission of the Son is taken to be nonhistorical, viz., the cosmological Son, some such Trinitarian aberration as Rahner’s is logically inevitable: there is no divine presence, no gratia Christi, in history, no sacramental mediation of that grace, no historical faith, and no historical Church. The economy of salvation then becomes incapable of historical expression, with the consequence of an incoherent “dialectic” between a corrupt history and nonhistorical “Christ of faith” of whom nothing can be known or taught.
The early apostolic exegesis of the Lucan Infancy Narrative (Lk 1:35) which took for granted the Virgin Mary’s concepttion―and motherhood―of Jesus the Lord, is therefore of the highest doctrinal interest, for it conforms to the Symbol of Chalcedon, as the later exegesis does not, for it reads, the Lucan πνευματος ἁγίου as a reference to the Holy Spirit whom the Son is sent to give, for Chalcedon knows only the Incarnate Son, the Jesus whose Incarnation is the precondition of his giving of the Holy Spirit.
Reference has several times been made to St. Augustine’s liturgically-grounded insistence that the Mission of the Holy Spirit is dependent upon the Mission of Son―whose Mission is precisely to give the Holy Spirit, “another Paraclete.” This stress upon the irreducible Personal distinction between the Son and the Holy Spirit, which Tertullian’s doctrine of the tri-Personal Trinitas was the first to clarify, is nowhere more crucial than our Lady’s conception of her Son. The Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed asserts that “she conceived of the Holy Spirit,” which is now generally misunderstood to indicate the prior agency of the Holy Spirit in the Theotokos’ conception of our Lord, which is to say, in his Incarnation. However, Jesus’ immanence in history by Mary’s conception of him is the precondition of the historical Mission, efficacy, and salvific work of the Holy Spirit. It is then evident that the Holy Spirit cannot be thought to have been the economically prior cause of the historical immanence of the Christ. Rather, the order of the Trinitarian perichōresis is revealed by the order (τάξις) of the Missions; the Father sends the Son, the primordial Jesus, to give the Holy Spirit. This incongruity cannot arise when “conceived of Holy Spirit,” without the article, is properly understood to refer to the ‘epiphany’ of Jesus the Christ, the primordial second Adam who is joined primordially in One Flesh with the primordial second Eve. His obedience to his Mission, his Kenōsis, his becoming flesh, is the event of the entry of the One Flesh of the primordial second Adam and the primordial second Eve into our historical fallenness, into our mortality, our solidarity with the first Adam in all things but sin: thus the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception. The historicity of Jesus, the eternal Son, requires historical credentials: he must have a human mother, the primordial Bride whose conception of him, his becoming flesh, is achieved by the primordial Bridegroom who, as primordial, is Holy Spirit, as Lk. 1:35 teaches. She would not otherwise be the Theotokos, the mother of her Lord, Jesus the Christ, the eternal Son of the eternal Father
Jesus’ Kenōsis further requires and presupposes the nuptial order, the covenantal freedom, of his fleshly immanence in our history. Jesus does not impose himself upon his bride, his mother, rather, rather he is welcomed by the immaculate Theotokos, whose free conception of her Lord is the full expression in our fallen history of the unfallen integrity by which primordially she is One Flesh with him. Thus the Virgin’s free consent to her conception os Jesus, her “Fiat,” can only be the historical expression of her primordially free union as the second Eve with Jesus the second Adam “in the Beginning.” It is thus that her conception of her Lord, her union with him in One Flesh, is the historical prolepsis, the inception of his One Sacrifice, his institution at the Last Supper of the sacramental One Flesh of the New Covenant, the full outpouring upon the bridal Church of the Spirit he was sent to give.
It is all too easy to misunderstand this early exegesis as have Evans and Kelly, in the anachronistic, dehistoricizing context suggested by the Stoic terminology used by the Apologists. The focus of Justin, Athenagoras and Theophilus upon the Trinity rested upon their conversion from paganism to Christianity. This moved Justin to drop his study of the pagan wisdom literature, devoting himself to the study of the Scriptures; the same is true of Theophilus, who boldly rejected the monadic henotheism of the pagan pantheon by his assertion of the triadic God revealed by Jesus the Lord; it is true of Athenagoras of Athens, who was the first to recognize in the baptismal formula recited in Mt. 28:20 a permanent liturgical order (τάξις) of Naming the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, consistently repeated in the introductory “sign of the Cross,” in the “our Father,” in the Apostles Creed, in the doxologies concluding the collects and the other public prayers of the Church’s liturgical worship of her Lord. the great apologists, Justin, Theophilus and Athenagoras, while proclaiming the Trinity, did not prescind from its revelation by the Christ.
The Spirit Christology of the Apostolic Fathers is explicit in Lk. 1:35 (πνεῦμα ἅγιον ἐπελεσεται ἐπι σέ, καὶ δύναμις ὑψίστου ἐπισκιασει ἐπι σοι. διο καὶ τὸ γεννώμενον ἅγιον κληθήσεται υἱὸς θεοῦ), in I Peter 3:18 (ἵνα ὑμᾶς προσαγάγῃ τῷ θεῷ, θανατωθεὶς μὲν σαρκὶ ζωοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεὺμαtι), in I Cor. 15:45 (ὁ εσχατος Ἀδὰμ εἰς πνεῦμα ζωοποιοῦν) , and in II Cor. 3:18 (ἀπὸ κυρίον πνεύματος – all without the article, as in Lk. 1:35). This exegesis was familiar to Justin Martyr in the second century, as Ernest Evans has shown in Tertullian’s Treatise Againt Praxeas, 66, quoting the passage where, in a stroke of genius, Justin recognizes the Eucharistic import of the Lucan text:
Justin Martyr evidently interprets Luke in the light of John, and it was probably from him tht Tertullian copied this exegesis, as he copied so much else. Having quoted the angelic message―as his custom is, in a free paraphrase―he comments:
Apol. 1. 33: τό πνεῦμα οὔν καὶ τὴν δύναμιν τὴν παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ οὐδεν ἄλλο νοῆσαι θέμις ᾔ τὸν λόγου . . . καὶ τοῦτο ἐλθόν ἐπι τὴν παρθένον καὶ ἐπισκιάσαν οὐ διὰ συνουσὶας ἄλλὰ διὰ δυνάμεως ἐγκύμονα κατέστησε.
In his discussion of the Eucharist he draws a parallel between the Incarnation, and the consecration of the sacrament, apparently meaning that as the Word of God was the agent of the Incarnation, so the word of Christ is the effective means of th e consecration of the Eucharist:
ibid. 66: . . .διὰ λόγος θεοῦ σαρκοποιηθεἰς Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ὁ σοτὴρ ἡμῶν καὶ σάρκα καὶ αἱμα ὑπερ σοτερίας ἡμῶν ἔσχεν.
He refers again to the subject:
Dial. 100: parθέnos γὰρ οὑσα Εἔα καὶ ἄφθορος, τὸν λόγον τὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ ὄφεως συλλαβοῦσα, παρακοὴν καὶ θάνατον ἔτεκε πίστιν δὲ καὶ χαρὰν λαβοῦσα Μαρία ἡ παρθέος, εὐαγελιζομένου αὑτῇ Γσβριὴλ ἀγγέλου ὅτι Πνεῦμα κυρίον κτἑ . . . ἀπεκρίνατο Γένοτό μοι κατὰ τὸ ῥημα σου. Καὶ διὰ ταύτης γεγέννηυται οὑτος.
Ernest Evans, Against Praxean, at 66.
The Greek of the three excerpts above are translated as follows:
Apology 1. 33: It is wrong, therefore, to understand the Spirit and the power of God as anything else than the Word . . . when it came upon the Virgin and overshadowed her, causing her to conceive.
Apology I. 66: but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation
Dialogue with Trypho. 100: For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived by the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death,. But the Virgin Mary received faith and joy, when the angel Gabriel announced that the Spirit of the Lord would come upon her, and the power of the Highest would overshadow her, wherefore also the Holy Thing begotten of her is the Son of God, and she replied, ‘Be it unto me according to your word. And by her He has been born.
Thus informed by the apostolic tradition, “Spirit,” like “Word,” has the Lord Jesus as its concretely historical referent: his Incarnation is his ensarkosis, his becoming flesh, not his becoming man, as Kelly supposes (Doctrines, 142). Jesus’ pre-existence is therefore primordial, not ab aeterno. The Prologue affirms that he is “in the Beginning;” the ascription is twice stated in I Jn., i.e., at 1:1, and 1:2. Paul says the same: he identifies Jesus, the primordial subject of the Kenōsis in Phil. 2:6-7, with “the beginning” in Col. 1:17: Jesus’ primordial pre-existence, that of the head, is again sressed in Eph. 1:1-10, whose “recapitulation of all things” is an event, not an abstraction; it is the work of the Bridegroom, the Head, as taught in I Cor. 11:3, Eph. 1:10 and 5:21-23.
The Christological title of “the Beginning” is so strictly linked to Gen. 1.1 as to be inseparable from the biblical order of creation. To understand the Incarnation, the enfleshment, of the Christ as Spirit in this historical and apostolic context is to see in it, not his “becoming man,” but his Kenōsis, his becoming “flesh,” his entry into fallenness, as Paul has taught in Phil. 2, and has John taught in the “logos sarx egeneto” of the Prologue. Jesus, the second Adam, primordial Head of all creation, of all humanity, of the Church, “who, though he was in the form of God,” assumed “the form of a slave” or, in the language of the Prologue, “became flesh.”
It is in this context that the Virgin’s conception of her Son is the antetype of his sacrificial institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve: see pp. 149ff, supra, and Vol. II, Ch. 5 (1996), at 436. The association of Incarnation and Eucharistic transubstantiation is ancient: we find it in Justin Martyr, as Ernest Evans has noted in his Against Praxeas, at 66.
It must be kept in mind that the Second Eve’s integrity is hers by her primordial procession from and nuptial union with the Bridegroom, her Head, the source of her free unity, her integrity, her sinless freedom, apart from which she would not be fully free to consent to the nuptial union by which they are inseparably One Flesh and by which her Lord is freely immanent, with her and by her, in our fallen history. This primordial nuptial union of the second Adam and the second Eve “in the Beginning” is irrevocable, not undone or interrupted by its kenotic immersion in fallen history. Consequently in the Virgin Mary, the second Eve, the plurality of the offices of fallen femininity are at one. Mary, the second Eve, is at once the daughter, the bride, the virgin and the Theotokos, the mother of the human Son, who is God, the “one and the same Son’ of the Father.
Were Mary’s conception of her Lord not identically her integral nuptial union with him in One Flesh, she would be, as is too often said, the mother of his humanity, which is to say, of an abstraction. But Jesus’ humanity is concrete only as Personal. Otherwise, the Virgin Mary would then not be what the Council of Ephesus has proclaimed her to be, the Theotokos. We see Tertullian, in Adversus Praxean 27, 8, the “moment of reason” already mentioned, musing on the antecedent possibility of the Incarnation, the foundational Event upon which his Apologeticus turns, whose reality and truth he never doubted, and whose incongruities he had celebrated in the De Carne Christi;. Similarly we find Origen, in Peri Archon 3, 6, 2, musing on the abstract conditions of possibility of the Incarnation, the primordial Event, “in the Beginning,” of the Henŏsis of the Christ and the eternal Son, which he, like Tertullian, knew full well to have none.
An excerpt from an article in a recent Festchrift for Cardinal Kasper, p. 102, reads as follows:
2. The Historical Jesus of the Gospels
In Jesus the Christ Kasper construes the entire life and ministry, death and resurrection, history and mystery of Jesus as the fruit of the Spirit working to abring about the redeeming, eschatological fulfillment of the whole world. Given this book’s publication in German in 1974. this date makes Kasper one of the very first to develop a Spirit Christology in Catholic theology. To do so he first corrals a multitude of gospel texts that connect Jesus with the Spirit, and rthen uses them to construe Jesus’ life and destiny as a phenomenon wrought by the Spirit. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and sent into mission by the Spirit at his baptism. In an early scene in Luke’s gospel, he interpreted his ministry in the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (4:18)−and this Spirit anointed him to proclaim Good news to the poor, release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind (Luke 4:16, Is. 61:1-2. Jesus preached and healed the sick by the power of the Spirit. After his tortured death on the Cross he was raised from the dead by the power of the Spirit. Early Christians gave him the title of Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed, beliving that he is the one whom the Spirit anointed to bring about the reign of God.
Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ: “Pneumatology and Beyond: “Wherever, Speaking Truth in Love: The Theology of Cardinal Walter Kasper, p. 102; emphasis added.
The underlined clause displays an ignorance of “Spirit Christology” that bars any further attention to the Sr. Elizabeth’s treatment of that topic. Suffice it to say that no other Christology than the Spirit Christology found expression before the close of the fourth century. Sr. Johnson’s ignorance cannot be attributed directly to Cardinal Kasper; however, her reading of his works, which she cites sixteen times, aroused no misgiving which might have prompted her to reconsider the central topic of her article, which is finally the apostolic tradition, of which she has learned nothing from Cardinal Kasper.
[74] The author of the Letter of Barnabas affirms the pre-existence of Christ who is with the Father at creation of man, adding as the explanation of the Incarnation, that his becoming flesh is the means by which he may be seen by fallen humanity, who could not bear the vision of his pre-existent glory: cf. Quasten, Patrology I, at 87. As with the Evangelists, the author of Barnabas makes no distinction between the Christ and the Son; he takes Jesus’ Personal unity for granted. Alois Grillmeier, Christian Tradition, at 198, dealing with “Lactantius and spirit christology,” cites Manlio Simonetti’s dissection of the Spirit Christology of Ignatius Martyr into a usage of “Spirit” as denoting the divine nature of Jesus; in another`r version of that Christology “Spirit” denotes the “person” of the pre-existent or primordial Jesus the Christ. Such analysis is entirely foreign to Ignatius Martyr, who displays not the remotest interest in such a separation of the unity of Christ, which is that of his Name: Simenetti describes Ignatius’ grasp of that unity as “personal” in quotation marks, for obviously enough that term was not available to Ignatius, but “Name” was, and its equivalence with Jesus’ Person needs no discussion.
The Christology of II Clement similarly distinguishes the pre-existent and the economic Jesus the Christ; the analytical question of arranging tor the prior possibility of the Incarnation, which would vex the next three centuries, the author of II Clement simply ignores. Within the full confidence of the Apostolic Fathers in the apostolic tradition, it could not arise. That tradition read “Jesus Christ is Lord” as apodictic, as asserting the unity in his Name of God and of the Son of Mary: “one and the same Son,” as Irenaeus would limpidly encapsulate the faith of the Apostles that Jesus is the Lord..
Hermas, in The Shepherd, Vis. 1-5, identified the “ancient woman” of the pre-existent Church as “spirit;” contrasting her pre-existent condition, as primordially childless, with her historical condition as having children. It is understandable that Origen would think his book canonical, for Hermas’ Christology and ecclesiology are very much his own.
[75] J. N. D. Kelly, to whose scholarship this study’s indebtedness is evident, reads the Spirit Christology’s use of “the Spirit becoming flesh” as the eternally pre-existent Son’s “becoming man;” see Doctrines at 142-43. With all due respect to a great scholar, this entirely anachronistic reading of the Incarnation cannot be maintained. The Spirit Christology reads Jn. 1:14 to affirm that the primordial Christ, the subject of the Mission from the Father, the “Spirit’ of Lk. 1:35, became flesh and not man, other than in that historical sense of “man” as fallen, i.e., as flesh, which we find in the Nicene Creed, whose subject, let it be recalled, is the primordial Jesus Christ, not the eternally pre-existent non-human Son, the Son sensu negante.
[76] Jn. 6:63; Is. 40:6; cf. 1 Pet. 1:24.
[77] See J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 143, citing Eph. 1, 1; 18, 2, and 7, 2; (E.T. in Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 17-18) and Rom. 6, 3 (E.T. by Kirsopp Lake, Apostolic Fathers I, ser. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1975) at 235.
[78] “Manifestation” is equivalently “epiphany.” See the discussion by Larry W. Hurtado, in Lord Jesus Christ, at 516ff., where he finds it used, particularly in the Pastoral Epistles, to underwrite the divinity of Jesus. The term was already familiar in Greek religious usage, whether Jewish or pagan, as referring the appearance and/or beneficient actions of divinities. Its use in the Pastoral Epistles to draw attention to the divinity of Jesus, as “manifest” in history, must raise the issue of Jesus’ pre-existent or pre-manifest state: it is this which the Apostolic Fathers describe as “spirit;” with dependence upon Paul’s reference to the risen Christ as “living Spirit” (I Cor. 15:45; cf. Peter 3:18). This adjective is echoed in the ‘spiritual Church,’ described in II Clement as “spiritual” and as “the living Church:”
And I do not suppose ye are ignorant that the living Church is the body of Christ: for the scripture saith, God made man, male and female. The male is Christ and the female is the Church. And the Books and the Apostles plainly declare that the Church existeth not now for the first time, but hath been from the beginning: for she was spiritual, as our Jesus also was spiritual, but was manifested in the last days that He might save us.
II Clement, 14, 2: Lightfoot’s translation, downloaded from the Ancient Christian Writers website.; cf. Apostolic Fathers 2, at 75. For Kirsopp Lake’s translation, see Loeb Classical Library, Apostolic Fathers I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 151
[79] Quasten, Patrology I, at 92; Jurgens, Early Fathers I, at 32-33.
[80] Kirsopp Lake, Tr., The Shepherd of Hermas, col. Loeb Classical Library: The Apostolic Fathers II (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 19701913), pp. 2-3. J. B. Lightfoot’s translation as edited and revised in Apostiolic Fathers /2 has been used here.
[81] Quasten, Patrology I, at 94.
[82] Hermas’ Shepherd again affirmed the identity of the Holy Spirit and the Son of God in Similitude 9, 1-6:
And let not any one of you say that this flesh is not judged neither riseth again. Understand ye. In what were ye saved? In what did ye recover your sight? if ye were not in this flesh. We ought therefore to guard the flesh as a temple of God: For in like manner as ye were called in the flesh, ye shall come also in the flesh. If Christ the Lord who saved us, being first spirit, then became flesh, and so called us, in like manner also shall we in this flesh receive our reward.
Apostolic Fathers /2, at 262.
[83] Harnack, History of Dogma, v. I, Ch. 3, Ã 6, 4, and Quasten, Patrology I, at 99-100, see here an adoptionism of the ‘flesh” by the Holy Spirit; sed contra, Kelly, Doctrines, at 143, dismisses a strict adoptionism even in Hermas, and points to the incongruity of any such division in Jesus, given the universal acceptance of the communication of idioms by the Christians of the first two centuries.
[84] The most accessible introduction to the primitive Angel Christology is Jean Daniélou’s Histoire des doctrines Chrétiennes avant Nicée, I: Théologie du Judaéo-Christianisme. Col. Bibliothèque du Théologie (Paris,: Desclee et Cie, 1958) [] Ch. V, pp. 169-198: ET A History of Early Christian Doctrines. Vol. I: Theology of Jewish Christianity Tr. & Ed. by John A. Baker (London : Darton, Longman & Todd ; Chicago: The Henry Regnery Co., 1964, [hereafter, Jewish Christianity], Ch. 4, pp. 117-46. Bernard Lonergan, in The Way to Nicaea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology, A Translation by Conn O’Donovan from the first part of De Deo Trino (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), “The Judaeo-Christians,” 17-27, offers a summary exposition of this material. See Earl Muller: “A Distinctive Feature of Early Roman Angelomorphic Christology,” given at the Fifteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies at Oxford, 6–11 August, 2007); and Daniélou’s Message Évangelique, 147-56
[85] This resumé is largely dependent upon James Kleist, S.J., op. cit., Barnabas, and upon Quasten, Patrology I, 85-92. See also Apostolic Fathers /2, 159-188; cf. endnote 69, supra.
[86] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 144-45. Kelly reads Barnabas’ version of “Spirit Christology,” as well as the “Spirit Christology” of Hermas’ Shepherd, to be only naively adoptionist; he dismisses the earlier scholarly persuasion that the primitive Christology is formally adoptioniost, on the grounds that the communication of idioms in Christ was common doctrine in the first two centuries and thus was held by Apostolic Fathers, who commonly affirmed as its corollary the pre-existence of Jesus the Christ. Kelly considers the Spirit Christology of Ignatius to have been its typical expression. In this connection he has cited the early exegesis of Lk. 1:35 as evidence that by “Holy Spirit,“ the primitive Christology understood the pre-existent Christ.
[87] The distinction here made between “cosmological” vs. “soteriological” approaches to theology is another borrowing from J. N. D. Kelly; see Doctrines, at 225, where the quasi-Arian theology of Eusebius of Caesarea is described as driven by a ‘cosmological’ rather than a ‘soteriological’ concern. The same may be said of the Arian heresy generally. Cosmological Christology in this sense is characterized by its rejection of the communication of idioms in favor of a metaphysical flight from the Personal historicity of Jesus Christ the Lord. This flight is from the historicity of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and thus from the worship of the Church.
The current impact of cosmological rationality upon the Church stems from the commonplace theological enlistment in the rationalized monotheism of the late pagan world, in which the divinity is absolute, incapable of relation and thus radically absent from history. Cosmological rationality holds that that the divine and the absolute coincide: this is axiomatic, undiscussable, intuitively clear: the logic of this clarity is pushed to the point of rendering worship ineffable, for of the divinity as absolute nothing can be said, and nothing must be said. This reductionism is of course solipsistic and nihilist . Insofar as this pagan notion of the immunity of the absolute divinity from all historical mediation has influenced Christian theology, it has dehistoricized the Church and her worship, for the dehistoricization of God is also the dehistoricization of man.
[88] This commonplace Thomist rationalization of the natural-supernatural relationship, as e.g., by Jean Daniélou, In the Beginning: Genesis I-III; tr. Julian L. Randolph (Dublin, Baltimore, Helicon, 1965), at 57-61, is a time-honored academic pastime which ignores the lack of any recognition in the apostolic tradition of the Thomist “natural,” i.e., ungraced, creation. For John and Paul, we are created “in the Beginning,” in Christ, and for Christ, who is the Beginning. There is no “natural” alternative to the life that is with him and in him: there is only death. In short, our fallen “flesh” is without intrinsic intelligibility or significance. Its attempted normalization as “natural,” as possessing an ungraced “natural” intrinsic significance and unity, is an impossible project, defeated always by the lack of any intrinsic unity in the historical order other than the free unity of the sacramental “one flesh” instituted by the One Sacrifice. This is precisely the restoration to “flesh” of its lost unity, which, as free, thus as a Gift, gratia Christi, is incapable of analysis. All surrogates for this unity are at once nonhistorical and irrational: the classic instances are the “great chain of being” as systematized by Plotinus and, in modern times, by Hegel, and the assigning of monadic unity to ideas or physical entities: “atoms” which on examination are always open to yet further fragmentation.
[89] The latest English translation of the Dialogue with Trypho is St. Justin Martyr: Dialogue with Trypho. Translated by Thomas B. Falls. Revised amd with a new introduction by Thomas P. Hatton. Edited by Michael Slusser. Ser. Selections from the Fathers of the Church, Volume three (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), [hereafter, Dialogue with Trypho]. It comprises Falls’ introduction to his translation of 1948, the translation itself, and an “Introduction To This Edition” by Thomas P. Hatton, which includes a summary of all that is reliably known of Justin’s life.
[90] Justin, Dialogue with Trypho cxx, 6; at 181.
[91] The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius I, Bks I-IV. Tr. Kirsopp Lake (Cambridge: The Harvard University Press, 20011926), [hereafter, Eccl. Hist]. IV, xi, 10, at 330-31; IV, 16- 18, at 359-373, and IV, 29, at 395-97.
[92] Jules Lebreton, art. cit., notes that the eyewitness report of Justin’s condemnation and martyrdom has been preserved, citing J. C. T. von Otto’s Corpus apologetarum christianorum sæculi secundi, III (3rd ed., Jena, 1879), at 266-78. The report is generally accepted as authentic. The final two paragraphs of an English translation are excerpted here:
The prefect says to Justin, “Hearken, you who are called learned, and think that you know true doctrines; if you are scourged and beheaded, do you believe you will ascend to heaven ? Justin said, “I hope that, if I endure these things, I shall receive his gifts.1 For I know that, for all who have thus lived, there abides the divine favour until the completion of the whole world.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Do you suppose then, that you will ascend into heaven to receive some recompense? Justin said, “I do not suppose it, but I know and am fuilly persuaded of it.” Rusticus the prefect said, "Let us, then, now come to the matter in hand, and which presses. Having come together, offer sacrifice with one accord to the gods." Justin said, "No right-thinking person falls away from piety to impiety." Rusticus the prefect said, "Unless ye obey, ye shall be mercilessly punished." Justin said, "Through prayer we can be saved on account of our Lord Jesus Christ, even when we have been punished,2 because this shall become to us salvation and confidence at the more fearful and universal judgment-seat of our Lord and Savior." Thus also said the other martyrs: "Do what you will, for we are Christians, and do not sacrifice to idols."
1 Another reading is δόγματα, which may be translated “I shall have what He teaches [us to expect].
2 This passage admits of another rendering. Lord Hailes, following the common Latin version, thus translates: “It was our chief wish to endure tortures for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so to be saved.”
Rusticus the prefect pronounced sentence, saying, "Let those who have refused to sacrifice to the gods and to yield to the command of the emperor be scourged,3 and led away to suffer the punishment of decapitation, according to the laws." The holy martyrs having glorified God, and having gone forth to the accusd place, were beheaded, and perfected their testimony in the confession of the Savior. And some of the faithful having secretly removed their bodies, laid them in a suitable place, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ having wrought along with them, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
3 [This wholesale sentence implies a great indifference to the probable Roman citizenshi;p of some of them, if not of our heroic martyr himself, but Acts xxii, 25-29 seems to allow that the condemned were no longer protected by the law.
The Ante-Nicene Fathers ,[hereafter ANF] I, 356. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; reprinted 1989). Translated by the Rev. M. Dods, M.A.; Text edited by Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson and first published by T&T Clark in Edinburgh in 1867. Additional introductionary material and notes provided for the American edition by A. Cleveland Coxe, 1886. .
[93] Frederick Copleston, S.J., has provided an introduction to Middle Platonism in A History of Philosophy. New Revised Edition (Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1957), Volume I: Greece and Rome, 451-56. See also W. K. C. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, whose introductory pages (1-25) offer a most useful preface to Copleston’s volume..
[94] Gal. 4:22-31. “Allegory,” as developed by the patristic tradition, has come to be undersood in a nonhistorical and subjectivizing sense, which is false to Paul’s use of the term in Galatians, and unjust to its patristic development, particularly to Origen’s use of allegory. With ‘allegory’” dehistoricized by Philo’s relegation of it to the dehistoricization of the Jewish Scriptures, and the imputation thereafter of that dehistoricization to Origen’s allegorical exegesis, there is some danger of losing track of the profound influence of Judaism upon Christianity in the second and third centuries. Fortunately Daniélou has pointed out this influence in his Jewish Christianity, describing its adverse impact upon Christianity in North Africa by way of summarizing Tertullian’s Adversus Judaeos, from which the following passage is excerpted:
We have already noted that Tertullian makes use, in the Adversus Judaeos, of many anti-Jewish texts which are not in any sense traditional testimonia. These are in the main taken from the Book of Isaiah. They are not to be found in any of the Greek sources on which Tertullian normally drew, and it is therefore quite reasonable to suppose that he took them from a Latin source. This assumption points to the existence in Africa of collections of anti-Jewish testimonia before the time of Tertullian. Confirmation of this supposition is to be found in the presence of these testimonia in Judaeo-Christian texts written before Tertullian, such as V Esdras and the Adversus Judaeos of Pseudo-Cyprian. The existence of such testimonia further implies that African Christians had to combat Jewish poselytism among the pagans.
All this is quite clear from the great amount of anti-Jewish Christian literature that existed in Africa in the second and third centuries. This literature was directed against the Jewish proselytes. Tertullian himself was opposing a poselyte in his Adversus Judaeos (I, 1), and it is quite likely that the anonymous treatise of Pseudo-Cyprian had the same audience in mind.
Daniélou, Jewish Christianity, 274-75.
[95] Daniélou has discovered the basis of Justin’s theology in the late first-century Jewish-Christian ‘theology of the Name,’ which placed a distinction between the “unnameable” Father, and the “Name” who is Jesus the Son. After tracing Valentinus’ development of theme of the unnameable Absolute, he observes:
An interesting point to notice here is the opposition between the invisible Father and the visible Son. This is characteristic of archaic theology. It is the basis of the teaching of Justin: ‘To the Father of all. . . there is no name given,’ he writes (II Apol. VI).43
43.Cf. also I Apol. LXI : “It is not possible to name the ineffable Name.” Jewish Christianity, at 159, note. 43. The Acts of the Apostles provides an unimpeachable apostolic warrant for baptism in the Name, which is Trinitarian per se. (Acts 2:37).
It is evident that Justin did not understand “Father” to be eternally the Father of the Son, nor the Son to be eternally the Son. Any imputation of subordinationism to this naiveté is anachronistic. The latency was there, but Justin had no interest in it.
[96] The discussion following owes much to J. Tate’s fine article “On the History of Allegorism,” from which the following prefatory summary of the origin of allegorism is excerpted:
The language of myth is the language of intuition and of inspiration: it is that which in all ages is naturally adopted by those thinkers who are not able or willing to attempt a precise statement of truth by the aid of discursive reason, but who at the same time hold, and desire to teach certain insights as beautiful, appealing or illuminating. Hence when Plato insisted on the need for dialectic, and reacted violently against all those alleged short-cuts to the truth which, being non-inferential, could yield merely ‘opinion’ and not scientifically grounded ‘knowledge,’ Homer, Hesiod, and their enemies like Heraclitus were all alike involved in the same condemnation.
But the chief reason was that so much of these speculations had in a manner grown out of the study of Homer and Hesiod. Those philosophers had been students of Homer before they became philosophers. When their own thought developed and they proceeded to revive Homer and Hesiod, they were reacting against what they had already absorbed, and so, rather than forge new terms of their own, it was natural for them to retain the style and vocabulary of the traditions which they merely in part rejected. The more they pondered over Homer and Hesiod, the clearer it seemed to them that these early poets had wielded the myths for the purpose of teaching philosophic doctrines, however inadequate or mistaken those doctrines frequently appeared to them to be. One way of correcting the errors of the poets was by revising their mythology.
Thus Homer and Hesiod were one of the bones on which Greek philosophy cut its infant teeth. Here is, I think, the circumstance in which we should look for the origin of the allegorical interpretation of Homer, which grew up gradually with the gradual growth of the more conscious allegorical use of mythical language to express theories which were at first only partly philosophic. It was the natural outcome of the study and veneration bestowed upon the early poets in the belief that their works constituted in some sense a divine revelation. It was both philosophic insight (which was, no doubt, assisted by that study) that the early expounders of Homer and Hesiod began to see deeper meanings in their verses. And it was because they saw such deeper meanings that they adapted the myths to the needs of their own world view, so as to make them by excision, combination and addition more satisfying symbols of the cosmic process.
Classical Quarterly 28 (1934) 105-114; 106-07.
[97] This indefeasible optimism is dialectically conjoined to a fatalism, the percept of a doom to which even the gods are subject. Its classic expression is in the three Fates of Greek mythology, the Moira, etymologically linked to a cyclic determinism: an older Indian version spoke of this fatality as Lila, the game the gods must play. Perhaps the most radical commitment to this historical pessimism appears in the references in the Norse Eddas, particularly in the Older or Poetic Edda, to Ragnarok, the last battle in which all that exists, gods as well as men, will be consumed in a radical destruction long prophesied and accepted as inevitable by the gods themselves. The collapse entails a resurgence of which nothing is or can be known: the recent proposals of a cyclic returns the “Big Bang” encountered the same dilemma. This is a classic dualism, whose philosophical expressions are commonplace, but whose mythological expressions refuse those simplicities: e.g., the “dream of Brahma” is a mythical expression of the illusion of finitude, of resistance to “maya,’ the supreme divinity, the sole reality; the Brahma's awakening is the annihilation of the universe of which he had dreamed—because distinct from the divine dreamer, it could only be finite.
[98] Werner Jaeger summarized this emphasis in Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers: The Gifford Lectures, 1936; tr. Edward S. Robinson (London: The Clarendon Press of the Oxford University Press, 1948).
[99] I Apol.xlvi, 5, which Daniélou translates as follows:
Par la puissance (δύναμις) du Verbe, selon la volunté (βουλή) de Dieu, par l’intermédiare de la Vierge, le Christ est né homme.
He immediately adds :”
Le plus remarquable est que Justin interprète en ce sens le récit de Luc, 1, 35 :
« La vertu (δύναμις) de Dieu descendant sur la Vierge l’a couverte de son ombre et l’a fait concevoir. Par l’Esprit et la vertu (δύναμις) de Dieu nous ne pouvons entendre que le Verbe. » (I Apol., xxxiii, 6).
Message Évangelique, 153.
The corresponding ANF tramslations :
But who, through the power of the Word, and according to the will of God, the Father and Lord of all, he was born of a virgin as a man …
I Apol. xlvi, 5.(ANF I, 178b).
It is wrong, therefore, to understand the Spirit and the Power of God as anything else than the Word …
I Apol. xxxiii, 6.
[100] Justin Martyr, Apol. I, xxvi. This work was known to and used by Irenaeus, who developed into his own Adversus Haereses
[101] Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons. Ser. The Early Church Fathers (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) at 11, et passim.
[102] This commentary on Justin’s theology is much indebted to Jean Daniélou, Message Évangélique, 147-56. Daniélou understands Justin to have written his works within the context of the traditional apostolic catechesis: he intends no speculative innovation. This is to say that Justin speaks economically of the Logos, as sent by the Father, and only in context of his role in the economy, his Incarnation, does he speak of his generation. In this connection Daniélou observes that when Justin cites “who shall speak of his generation” of Isaiah 53:8, he refers this inscrutability, not to the Son’s generation by the Father before creation, but to his Incarnation, his conception by the Virgin, his entry into the suffering situation of fallen humanity.
Justin understands the Son to have been begotten by the will, i.e., the decision, of the Father, in view of his role in creation: consequently his treatment of the Son is primarily in terms of his Mission, which is to say of the economy, which includes the Old Covenant history. The economy of salvation through the Son culminates in the Incarnation, but it is anticipated by the Son’s Old Testament epiphanies, especially as the “Angel of Jahweh,” and also as the Law. Daniélou introduces his discussion of Justin’s Christology (Message Évangelique, 147) with the citation of G. Andreson’s assertion that Justin’s emphasis upon the Christ’s universal “economy” is the foundation of theology of history. (Nomos und Nomos, Die Polemik des Kelsos wider das Christentum (Berlin, 1955)
The Son’s pre-existence as Son is clearly not understood by Justin as eternal, but as consequent upon the Father’s will. This voluntarism indicates that Justin does not understand the Name of the Father as relative, as constituted by his relation to the Son, but rather as designating the absolute divine Substance, so much the source of the Son as to have given the Son the mediatorial function of which the absolute and therefore immobile Father is incapable. Justin understands the Son to have been immanent in the Father ab aeterno, but impersonally: i.e., only as his Word, his Mind: he is Son only as begotten, for only as begotten is he numerically distinct from the Father, and that only by a decision by the Father, which decision is his “naming” the theretofore immanent Word as Son. This imports the relativization of the Son vis à vis the Father; on the other hand, as generated by the Father he cannot but be divine. The speculative difficulties of this position are evident, but they did not trouble Justin, whose interest was not in speculation but in the Church’s historical tradition: liturgical, catechetical, moral and doctrinal. His theology is finally a handing on of the Apostolic catechesis, focused upon the salvation worked by Jesus, the Son, the Logos, whom he knows to be divine, for he is Jesus the Lord. Philosophy ineluctably entered into his explanations of the tradition, but only peripherally.
This is particularly evident in his treatment of the Incarnation. Warned by Is. 53:8, he does not inquire into its antecedent possibility, he does not suppose the truth mediated by the ecclesial liturgical tradition to be in abeyance until its speculative rationale sub specie aeternitatis shall be at hand. It is enough that Mary is the mother of the Son. Daniélou has provided a most perceptive insight into this central point in Justin’s Christology, observing that:
Un second trait est la façon dont Justin souligne que l’Incarnation est opérée par le Verbe lui-même. Nous avons vu que Justin y voyait aussi l’œvre du Père. Mais c’est le Verbe qui l’opère et qui seul peut l’opère, puisque le Père n’agit pas dans le monde. Le deux aspects sont bien caractérisée dans L’Apol., xlvi, 5: « Par la puissance (δύναμις) du Verbe, selon la volunté (βουλή) de Dieu, par l’intermédiare de la Vierge, le Christ est né homme » Le plus remarquable est que Justin interprète en ce sens le récit de Luc, 1, 35 : « la vertu (δύναμις) de Dieu descendant sur la Vierge l’a couverte de son ombre et l’a fait concevoir . . .Par l’Esprit et la vertu (δύναμις) de Dieu, nous ne pouvons entendre que le Verbe » (I Apol., XXXIII, 6).
Daniélou, Doctrines Chrétiennes avant Nicée. 153.
Here Justin adheres to the ancient exegesis of Lk. 1:35, whereinthe “Holy Spirit” (without the article) who overshadows the Virgin, is the pre-existent Son, sent as the Power of the Most High. Justin has no doubt that the Christ the Son is the subject of the Incarnation, nor that the Virgin Mary is his mother. He has no theology of the Holy Spirit, perhaps because the sending of the Son is so much at one with the creative Mission of the Spirit. The matter raised difficulties for the later Apologists, but of it Justin says nothing: he has no notion of a mission of the Holy Spirit:
Ce que manque entiérement chez Justin, c’est la doctrine d’une mission de l’Ésprit-Saint, bien qu’il le connumère toujours avec le Père et le Fils dans les formules liturgiques.
Daniélou, Doctrines Chrétiennes avant Nicée, 153 ; emphasis added.
Justin’s lack of any concern to account for the unity of divinity and humanity in Jesus the Son is a constant in his work, especially in the Dialogue with Trypho, where his Christology is most fully stated. His faith in the Personal unity of Jesus the Son is at one with his faith in his full divinity and his full humanity. That Jesus is the Lord is never in issue. The profundity of Justin’s Christological insight is evident in the analogy he finds between the Virgin’s conception of Jesus and the Eucharistic transformation of the elements:
We call this food Eucharist; and no one else is permitted to partake of it, except one who believes our teaching to be true and who has been washed in the washing which is for the remission of sins and for regeneration, and is thereby living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by Him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nourished 20, is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus.
20. The change referred to here is the change which takes place when the food we eat is assimilated and becomes a part of our own body.
Tr. Jurgens, Early Fathers I, pp. 55, 128, 66 , see p. 57.
See also I Apol. xxxiii; Justin’s exegesis of Lk. 1:35 is the earliest available; he understands Jesus to be the overshadowing Spirit and Power which caused Mary to conceive her Lord.
Jurgen’s brief note, if cryptic, is explicable. It is clear in the passage quoted supra that (1) the subject in view is the Eucharistic transformation of the elements into the body and blood of the Christ. It is clear that (2) this transformation is entirely distinct from “that which takes place when the food we eat is assimilated and becomes a part of our own body,” whether this latter change be regarded liturgically, as the further aggregation of the recipient into the Body that is the Church, or physiologically, as the organic digestion of food as such. Jurgens appears to have the physiological change in view, which is hardly to the point. Finally it is clear that (3) Justin has placed a parallel between “made incarnate by the word of God” and “made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer.” The parallel is between the Eucharistic immanence of Jesus the Lord in and by the Church’s worship, and the event of the Incarnation, of the “sarkic” or fleshly immanence of the Incarnate Son in our fallen history in and by Mary’s worship, her conception of her Lord. Ernest Evans, in Against Praxeas, at 66, has pointed out this parallel in Justin’s Christology , which takes for granted the ‘Spirit theology’ of the apostolic tradition, in which, following St. Paul and St. Luke, the reference of πνεῦμα ἄγιον to the subject of the Incarnation, the primordial Jesus the Lord, is distinguished by the lack of a definite article, in contrast to its application to the third Person of the Trinity, which always has the definite article. The historical efficacy of the third Person of the Trinity is consequent upon the mission of the Son to give the Spiritus Creator: we recall here Augustine’s maxim: “Although the Holy Spirit does these things, he does not do them apart from the Son.”
In both the Incarnation and the metabolé of the Eucharistic elements, it is our Lord’s transformation, his transubstantiation, of the offering of the second Eve that is in view. In it Justin was the first to recognize Mary’s parallel with first Eve; he did so in the words of Lk. 1:35, here underlined:
We know that He, before all creatures, proceeded from the Father by His power and will, and by means of the Virgin became man, that by what way the disobedience arising from the serpent had its beginning, by that way also it might have an undoing. For Eve, being a virgin and undefiled, conceiving the word that was from the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death; but the Virgin Mary, taking faith and joy, when the Angel told her the good tidings, that the Spirit of the Lord should come upon her and the power of the Highest overshadow her, and therefore the Holy One that was born of her was Son of God, answered, 'Be it to me according to Thy word.'"
Dialogue with Trypho, C; (PG 6, col. 709). Tr. J. H. Newman, The New Eve, 14.
[103] Justin, Apol. I, LXVI.
[104] See endnotes 11 & 13, supra. A particularly fine account of Justin Martyr’s historical significance is provided by Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ., at 641-48. In the first place, Hurtado recognizes and affirms the Johannine understanding of “Logos” as a title of Jesus, not the designation of an “immanent Son (op. cit., at 645, also s.v. “Jesus’ titles: Logos” at 716, in the Index of Subjects). Secondly, Hurtado recognizes the later Platonizing of the Johannine Logos to be entirely foreign to Justin’s“Logos Christology,” which transforms the impersonal and abstract Stoic Logos prophorikos by identifying its office, viz., the cause of the intelligibility of the universe, with Jesus Christ the Lord. The dehistoricized Platonic-Gnostic Logos, the first emnation, creeps into Irenaeus’ Christology, where its dehistoricizing implication competes with his historical stress on the identity of Christ with the Pauline second Adam. The supposition that the Logos, understood nonhistorically, i.e., in terms of Middle Platonism, rather than as the historical Jesus the Christ, is the subject of the Incarnation and the agent of our redemption, was taken for normative by the “Logos Christology” which Hurtado, with many others, mistakenly associates with Clement of Alexandria and with Origen. Hurtado’s attribution of it to Clement of Alexandria ignores Clement’s acceptance of the Spirit Christology, commonplace throughout the third century; Origen held to the Spirit Christology as well, for it underlies his understanding of the primordial Henōsis who is Jesus the Lord; see Crouzel, Origen, at 89-91. Justin’s Christology is historical; as Hurtado recognizes. He simply identifies the Logos with Jesus the Lord as, a few decades later, also did Tertullian, Clement, and Origen.
In the fourth century, Athanasius understood the Logos to be the Christ, not the immanent Son, as Annick Martin has shown. Apart from him, Marcellus, and the surviving Eustath;ian followers of Paulinus in Antioch, the fourth century theology in the Orient was dominated by the Logos-sarx Christological analysis in opposition to the school of Antioch where, by the end of the fourth century, Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia and John Chrysostom had developed the diophysite Logos-anthrōpos Christology. The doctrinal tradition, reaffirmed at Chalcedon, stressed always the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, thereby rejecting the dehistoricization of the New Testament Logos, Jesus Christ.the Lord, which was common to the Logos-sarx and the Logos-anthrōpos Christologies in the fifth century. This Conciliar confidence in the indefeasible historicity of the Curch’s tradition continues to baffle the “modern mind.”.
[105] The most recent critical edition of Justin’s Apologies, Charles Mounier’s Justin: Apologie pour les chrétiennes: Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction et Notes: ser. Sources chrétiennes No. 507 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2006), renders the Greek of II Apol., x, 1 as follows:
Μεγαλειότερα μὲν oὗν πάσης ανθρωπείου διδασκαλίας φαίνεται τὰ ἡμέτερ διὰ τοῦ τὸ λογικὸν τὸ ὅλον τὸν φανένta δι᾽ ἡμᾶς Χρισtὸν γεγονέναι, καὶ σῶμα καὶ λόγον καὶ ψσυχήν.
A century earkier Lebreton had translated this passage:
Our doctrine surpasses all human doctrine because the real Word became Christ who manifested himself for us, body, word and soul.
Jules Lebreton, “Justin Martyr,” Catholic Encyclopedia v. 8 (New York: The Gilmary Society, 1913), 580-586, at 583b. Transcribed by Stephen William Hackelford.
Meunier’s translation of II Apol. x, 1, agrees fully with the English translation, ut supra, of Lebreton’s article, as published in the Catholic Encyclopedia: Meunier renders it as follows:
Or donc il est evident que notre doctrine surpasse toute doctrine humaine, du fait que le principe rationnel intégral est devenu le Christ 3, qui a paru pour nous, corps, raison et âme.4
3 Pour Justin, « le Christ est le Logos tout entier devenu homme ; il est aussi tout le rationnel, le principe raisonnable de l’univers, qui est apparu pour nous, à la fois corps, logos (raison) et âme » écrit Wartelle, p. 309 (souligné dans le texte). Cf. II, 7(8), 3 ; 10, 3 ; 13, 5-6.
4 Les spécialistes sont loin de s’entendre sur l’anthropologie de Justin : comme concilier, en effet, I, 8, 4 ; II, 10, 1 ; Dial. 105, 3-4, avec Dial. 6, 1-2? Voir Ph. Bobichon, commentant Dial. 6, 2, note 5.
Meunier, op. cit., at 349; see also his Introduction, at 37. His reference to Wartelle is to A. Wartelle’s Saint Justin. Apologies, Introduction, texte Critique, traduction, commentaire, et index, Paris, 1987. The reference to Bobichon is to Ph. Bobichon’s Justin Martyr, Dialogue avec Tryphon. Édition critique, traduction, commentaire, 2 vol., Fribourg/Suisse, 2003.
Lebreton, Meunier and Wartelle read this text as Justin’s affirmation of the superiority of the Christian faith (“our doctrine”) over all merely human wisdom, by reason of the Christ’s having become the “real Word,” the actual Logos, because the universe has its integrating principle in Jesus the Christ, who has manifested himself to us in his full humanity. The identification of Jesus as Logos is the doctrine of Jn. 1:14. It is integral with the catechesis Justin expounded. Meunier’s “est devenu” (γεγονέναι) has “le Christ” as its subject, and “le Logos” as its object: Christ ‘becomes’ the Logos, in the evident sense of being recognized by Christians as the source of the intelligibility of the universe. Justin’s sentence to this effect reverses the subject-object relation of Jn. 1:14 and so cannot be read as though it were his anticipation of the dehistoricized Logos-sarx Christology.
Thus II Apology x, 1 does not present a quasi-Logos-sarx analysis of the conditions of possibility of the Incarnation. Rather, it is an assertion that, contra the cosmological wisdom of the pagan addressees of his Apology, « le Christ est le Logos tout entier devenu homme ; il est aussi tout le rationnel, le principe raisonnable de l’univers, qui est apparu pour nous, à la fois corps, logos (raison) et âme ». The Logos’ “becoming man” or the Christ’s “becoming the Logos” refers to the Christian convert’s recognition that the intelligibility of the universe is grounded in the Lord Jesus, as over against the Stoicism of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, who thought of the Logos as the immanent intelligibility of the universe, but as an immanently necessary, therefore implacable and impersonal rationality, invoking a morality of passivity before an inexorable fate, in such wise that the Christian distinction between the intrinsically moral good and intrinsiclly moral evil is without meaning.
Justin’s Second Apology is then an invitation to conversion from the finally pessimistic pagan cosmological wisdom of Stoicism to the Christian Logos, the Christ, the sole source of the free intelligibility of the universe that is created in Christ, and of which he is theMaster, the Lord. It is an assertion that the faith of the Church which finds in Christ the new Logos far transcends the Stoic wisdom relied upon by Marcus Aurelius, the adopted son of the Antoninus Pius, whom Justin has included among the addressees of his First Apology and to whom it may have been particularly addressed. Robert Grant, in “Justin Martyr,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 3, at 1133, has observed that the Second Apology, which he regards as an addendum to the First Apology, may have been written in the hope of interesting particularly Marcus Aurelius, the adopted son of Emperor Antoninus Pius, who would succeed to the imperial throne in 161. At the time of Justin’s writing (ca. 156) Marcus Aurelius was the also the trusted advisor of the Emperor.
Marcus Aurelius was for all his adult life fascinated by the Stoic philosophy taught him in his youth. Only a brave man would invite his conversion to a wisdom transcending it. If Justin had some hope of this, it came to nothing. He was martyred in the early years of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, during a period in which the turmoil consequent upon the supreme struggle of the Roman Empire against the onslaught of pagan peoples from the orient had fragmented its orderly administration, and given room to outbreaks of near-anarchy in Italy. Marcus Aurelius was then leading his armies in the east and would die while doing so; there is no reason to suppose that he had any personal interest in Justin’s death.
Justin does not refer to Jn. 1:14 in this passage; in fact, Ernest Evans, Against Praxeas, at 33, has observed that Justin never refers to the Prologue. In this instance at least, Justin had no reason to cite it, for the Joannine “Logos sarx egeneto” is a recital of the event of the Incarnation of Jesus, and has nothing to do with Justin’s “διδασκαλίας φαίνεται τὰ ἡμέτερ διὰ τοῦ τὸ λογικὸν τὸ ὅλον”. The former clause recites the Kenōsis of our Lord, while the latter asserts the moral importance of personal conversion to the Truth who is Christ. The distinction between the two is to an extent masked by Meunier’s translation of “γεγονέναι” as “est devenu,” and by Lebreton’s equivalent translation as “became”: language evocative of Jn. 1:14. But there the Christ’s “becoming flesh” is of an entirely different order of meaning from Justin’s assertion of the factual transcendence of the cosmological pagan wisdom by the historical faith of the Church in the risen Lord Jesus, whose salvific Truth pervades and governs the universe and who thereby, “becomes,” for those who recognize his Lordship, what he is as the Lord of History, the immanent free and therefore Personal rationality of the universe, the actuality, the concrete historical fulfillment of what the philosohical Logos had purported to be, but could not be, the Alpha and the Omega of history as such.
In II Apology x, 1, Justin offers no account of the Incarnation; for that we may look to I Apol. xxxiii, 6, and Dial., C , He simply and concisely asserts as factual the revelation of the utter transcendence of the pagan wisdom by the historical faith of the Church in the Lordship of the risen Jesus Christ, whose Lordshi;p we have elsewhere shown to be Eucharistic.
If we seek the source of Justin’s use of “logos” here and elsewhere in his work, we will find it not in philosophy whether Stoic or Middle Platonic, although by way of Philo it had become something of a byword in the second century. However, Philo’s use of philosophy had been abstract while Justin’s is concrete: he found the term where Tertullian would later find the source of his equivalent use of ‘Sermo,” i.e., in the Old Covenant references to the “dabar,” the historically effective Word of God. On this point, see Ernest Evans, Against Praxeas, at 33, and R. M. Price, “”Hellenization” and Logos Doctrine in Justin Martyr,”Vigiliae Christianae 42 (1988), 18-23.
The phrase “τὸν φανένta δι᾽ ἡμᾶς” which Lebreton translated as “manifested himself for us” and Meunier as “a paru pro nous,” invokes the early Christian sense of “manifestation” which Larry W. Hurtado has explored in his Lord Jesus Christ at 516 ff. Jean Daniélou offers a detailed examination of Ps. 117 which concludes as follows:
Il est clair que dans ce contexte l’expression « Le Seigneur est Dieu et il s’est manifeste à nous » devait être appliqué à la venue du Seigneur. Ceci peut être un des sources de sa designation ἐπιφάνεια.
Nous avons d’ailleurs la confirmation par la tradition liturgique ultérieure que Ps. 117, 27 a été mis en relation avec la venue du Christ. C’est le cas d’abord d’un passage des Const. Apost., déjà utilisé par Dom Botte pour le Maranatha (VII, 26, 5). Il s’agit d’une amplification de Didach., x, 6. Le texte complet se présente ainsi:
Μαραναθά·ὡsαννἀ τῷ υἱῷ Δαωἱδ· εὑλογημένος ὁ ἐρχόμενος ἑν ὁνόματι Κυρίου· θeὸs Κυρίος ὁ ἐπιφανεὶς ἠμῖν ἐν σαρξί (voir aussi VIII, 13, 13). Comme on le voit cette formule comprend trois citations du Ps 117 : le « hosanna », avec l’amplification qu’il a dans Mt., 21, 9 ; le « benedictus qui venit », qui suit d’ailleurs l’hosanna dans Mt., 21, 9 ; enfin, notre verset 117, 27, avec la tres intéressent addition ἐν σαρχί, qui souligne qu’il s’agit bien de l’incarnation. Aussi bien l’expression ἡ ἐνσαρκος τοῦ σωτῆρος ἐπιφάνεια apparaît chez Eusèbe (HE, I, 11 ; GGS 503). L’addition peut être ancienne.1
1 Voir Eusèbe (DE, 9 ; PG, 22, 714 A-D) où le verset est appliqué à la venue du Christ et où l’ensemble du contexte est également commenté. Voir aussi DE, 6 ; 424 D-425 B. 424 B.
Jean Daniélou, « Les origines de l’épiphanie et le psaume 117, » Études d’exégèse Judaeo-chrétienne (Les testimonia); col. Théologie historique, 5 (Paris: Beauchesne et ses Fils, 1966), at 17.
When applied to the Christ, as here,“epiphany” invokes the non-manifest, primordially pre-existent or “spiritual” Christ of the Apostolic Fathers: the Christ who is “manifest” as incarnate. In using “manifest” Justin identifies the “Logos” with the primordial or pre-manifest Jesus: this is the apostolic tradition, and involves no Greek cosmology whatever, although as has been remarked, this is hardly the usual reading of Justin on this topic: e.g. Robert Grant concludes his article on Justin with a supposition that Justin’s Christology is concerned for the Incarnation of Philo’s Logos:
Justin’s theology also deserves attention, for in regard to Christ he has taken the Logos doctrine developed in Hellenistic Judaism after Philo and combined it with a picture of prophecy fulfilled as set forth in his testimony book(s). What holds the two together is insistence upon the incarnation of the logos, even though he never cites John 1:14.
Robert M. Grant, art. cit., at 1134. (emphasis added)
Hurtado points to comparable associations of Justin with the Logos-sarx Christology which were generally accepted in Christian theology until the middle of the fifth century: he considers that in identifying the fullness of the Logos with Jesus, Justin -
asserts that Jesus is in fact the direct, full manifestation of the divine Word, who shows thereby that the Logos is most adequately understood as a real person whom Christians engage in devotion and love, and not merely an abstraact principle or a body of truth. “Next to God, we worship and love the Word who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since also He became man for our sakes, that becoming a partaker of our sufferings, He might also bring us healing”254. This notion has no precedent in the philosophical traditions about the Logos. Instead Justin here reflects the early Christian view that the eschatological time of redemption and full revelation of God’s purposes had come throught Jesus.
Justin is, however, apparently to be credited with this daring and imaginative conception, which proved programmatic in the subsequent efforts of early Christian thinkers to engage intellectual history and the wider culture (particularly in the tradition of “Logos Christology” represented by Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus and Origen.255
254 2 Apol. 13.4; Bettenson, Early Christian Fathers 1:193 (emphasis added).
255 Daniélou, Gospel Message, 345-86; Osborn, The Emergence of Christian Theology; Grillmeier, Christ in the Christian Tradition, 85-149, Hurtado, op. cit., at 645; emphasis added.
It should be renenbered here that insofar as the Christological reading of “Logos sarx egeneto” after Origen became a dehistoricization of the Logos, as in its exposition by Grillmeier (Christian Doctrines II, Part Two, passim, but esp. at 273). This dehistoriciaation finds no basis whether in Justin, in Irenaeus, or in Origen, whose common affirmation of the communication of idioms in Christ precludes precisely that rationalization. Further, while Justin’s familiarity with Hellenistic Judaism is evident; there is no evocation of Philo in his work, whether by name or by evident reference, nor is he engaged in historicizing a non-historical Logos. Ernest Evans has observed that
Justin Martyr uses the term (logos), but sits loosely to it: it is no fundamental element of his thought. That he was acquainted with the Gospel according to St. John is evident from many reminiscences of its language (for which see Otto’s Index); but he does not refer to the Prologue.
Evans, Against Praxeas (London: S.P.C.K., 1948) at 33.
We have seen that there was no need for Justin to “refer to the Prologue;” his account of the Incarnation is complete in the many references to Jesus’ birth of the Virgin Mary, which appear over and again in the Dialogue with Trypho.
Justin’s use of “Logos” in II Apol. x, 1 is therefore entirely inconsistent with its interpretation as the introduction into Christian speculation of a Christological analysis in which the non-historical, non-human divine Logos is the “subject of the Incarnation;” particularly, it is inconsistent with the argument of the II Apol. x, i.e., that Christianity is superior to the cosmological wisdom represented by the Stoic doctrine of the Logos. The dehistoricization of the Johannine Logos now current in Christology is the product of the cosmological imagination, which however finds no significant expression whether in Justin’s Apologies or in his Dialogue with Trypho; rather, and particularly in the latter work, Justin continually ascribes the divinity of the Son to Jesus, for Jesus is the Son. Justin’s Christology concerns neither a nonhistorical “immanent Son” nor an equivalently nonhistorical Logos. His concern for the historicity of Jesus the Son is a constant theme. It is not for nothing that Justin wrote an Adversus Haereses. His stress on the historicity of the Son, of Jesus the Lord, carries with it the implicit communication of idioms inseparable from the affirmation of the Lordship of Jesus, which pervades the thought of the Apostolic Fathers. While the communication of idioms would become dogmatically explicit only in the fifth century, Pelikan has noted Athanasius’ stress upon it, well before Cyril. In this Athanasius only reflects the early attribution by his predecessor, Alexander of Alexandria, of the title of Theotokos” to the mother of Jesus: see endnote 957, infra.
Justin is the first and greatest of the Apologists; he may also be regarded as the last of the Apostolic Fathers and, after Ignatius, the greatest, in that, like them, he does not cosmologize the faith. He affirms its truth without attempting to submit its freedom, its mystery, to the categories available to the cosmological wisdom of the Middle Platonism of his time. Instead he begins to supply his own categories: Hurtado, op .cit., at 696, notes that Justin anticipatesTertullian’s use of πρόσωπον (persona) and ὑπόστασις (substantia) to distinguish what is one in Christ from the duality of his natures. While Justin asserts the co-eternity of the Logos with the Father (II Apol 13:4), who is never without his Reason, Justin makes no attempt to penetrate the mystery of the plurality of Names in the One God; similarly he follows the rule of faith in asserting the divinity, humanity, and unity of Jesus, and his numerical distinction from the Father, but invokes Is. 53:8 to underwrite the impenetrability of the mystery of Jesus the Christ whom the faith of the Church’s faith asserts to be the Lord. His statements upon Jesus’ Incarnation make it clear that Jesus is the subject of the Incarnation. It is Jesus the Lord, the Savior, who is conceived by Mary and born of her: she would not otherwise be the mother of Jesus, as he names her over and again (cf. endnote 413, supra)
Justin Martyr’s theology is of course influenced by his study of Greek philosophy, particularly the Platonism and Stoicism which, with Aristotelianism and tinctures of Epicureanism and Pythagoreanism, combine to form the eclectic Middle Platonism characteristic of the Greek culture in the latter half of the second century, the age of the Apologists.
In a famous passage (II Apol. x, 1) Justin did not identify Jesus as the subject of the Incarnation, as had the apostolic tradition, as had the Apostolic Fathers, as he himself would throughout his own major Christological work, the Dialogue with Trypho, and as would Irenaeus at the end of the second century. This left open the possibility that Justin understood the Logos of Jn. 1:14 as the immanent divine Son. Although elsewhere Justin understood “Logos” to be a title of Jesus even as pre-existing, this passage can be read, in fact has been read, as Justin’s attempt to establish the prior possibility of the Incarnation of a non-human divine Son whose pre-existence could only be eternal: see the commentary by J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines; rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harpers, 1978) [henceforth Doctrines], 146-47; see also Robert M. Grant, “Justin Martyr,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 3, at 1133.
Were this interpretation of the II Apol. x, 1 accurate, Justin would been the first to undertake the impossible task of seeking out the intrinsic, antecedent possibility of the Incarnation of an abstract, nonhistorical, disincarnate Logos. Such reading of II Apol. x, 1 is entirely alien to Justin’s Christological project, which rests upon his identification of the Logos with the Christ. The exegesis of this passage is discussed further in endnote 450, supra. In brief, there is no justification for seeing in Justin the precursor of the dehistoricization of the Logos deployed in the Logos-sarx and Logos-anthrōpos Christologies. This passage is discussed at length in endnote 1, supra. At the same time, his identification of Jesus the Christ as the Logos, the immanent Personal rationality of the universe, was all too easy to return to the Middle Platonic ambience of Arianism, wherein the Logos is understood to be a nonhistorical emanation or utterance subordinate to the monadic divinity; Justin’s Logos is also Spiritus dei: see Evans, Against Praxeas, 80.
[106] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 146-47.
[107] Robert M. Grant, “Justin Martyr,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 3, at 1133.
[108] J. L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, at 941.
455This discussion of Athenagoras' theology relies primarily upon Legatio and De Resurrectione; edited and translated by William R. Schoedel. Col. Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1972, upon Athenagoras Supplique au sujet des Chrétiens. Introduction, Texte et Traduction par Gustave Brady. Col. Sources Chrétiennes 3 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf; Lyon: Éditions de Labielle, 1943), upon Athenagore: Supplique au sujet des chrétiens et Sur la Résurrection des Morts. Introduction, Texte et Traduction par Bermard Pouderon. Col. Sources Chrétiennes 379 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1992) [hereafter, Supplique], and upon Athenagoras: Legatio pro Christianis, edited by Miroslav Marcovich. Col. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, ISSN 0920-623X, v. 53. (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1990) [Hereafter, Legatio]. See also Jurgens, Early Fathers I, pp.69-72, and Quasten, Patrology I, pp.229-236.
Schoedel’s fine introduction to the Plea is primarily interested in the philosophical and literary background of Athenagoras’ major work. These details are not of immediate theological interest. Nonetheless Schoedel provides a prefatory description of the impact of the dissociation of Christians from the Roman empire, a stance obviously erosive of the religio-political unity of the empire and consequently intolerable to those charged with its preservation. The indispensable expression of the imperial unity was participation in the public worship of the emperor, which was not negotiable whether for the Christians or the pagans in the empire. Pliny the Younger was the proconsul. i.e., the Roman governor, of Bithynia and Pontus, for two years (111-113 a.d.) during the reign of the emperor Trajan. Significant among the responsibilities of Pliny’s office was the systematic extirpation of the Christians found openly worshiping there. While Pliny had no hesitation in meeting that responsibility, some of the decisions it entailed prompted him to consult Trajan, with whom he was on friendly terms, His letter seeking Trjan's advice described his encounter with the Christians whom he had discovered to be worshiping Christ as God. Some of those thus discovered to be Christians recanted under pressure, and some did not. Trajan's response (rescript) informed Pliny that he had no obligation to search out the Christians; Trajan also refused to countenance the anonymous denunciations of Christians which Pliny had mentioned, but Trajan could not ignore his proconsul's report of the Bithynian Christians’ public refusal to offer the requisite sacrifices when challenged to do so. The protests of Christian advocates such as Athenagoras that the Christians’ love of and loyalty to the empire should be recognized, and justice accordingly done them were entirely beside the point. From the first century, Christianity had been condemned by the Roman legal system as a criminal atheism, a religio illicita, for its inherent proselytism threatened the unity of the far-flung empire, a unity at once political and religious, inseparably. At the same time, as the Apologists since Justin Martyr had made clear, Christians condemned the requisite worship of the Roman emperor as an idolatry with which there could be no compromise. Their hope of salvation required them to refuse any involvement in the worship of the Emperor, at whatever cost. The ordinary ordinary penalty was death by whatever means the judge prescribed: beheading, burning at the stake, delivery to the games of the ampitheater, whether as gladiators or as victims of the wild animals or, were he merciful, sentencing them to exile.
For 'loyal' as men like Athenagoras no doubt were (1.3). their 'philosophy' was interpenetrated by ideas that had already led to a withdrawal of Christians from full participation in the life of the 'cities'. This withdrawal seemed to be antisocial.
Most important of these ideas was the emphasis on the untrammelled power of the Creator and his care for the world (13.2). Here was a monotheism that was more radical and therefore more exclusive than any philosophical theism of the time. Only this God was to be worshiped (16.1, 3); and Christians were willing to give up their lives for his sake. The Christian ethic was equally uncompromising. Popular pleasures like the gladiatorial and animal fights were rejected (35. 4-5). The requirements for purity of life were severe (11. 2-4; 12.1; 12.3; 32.2-34 .3 The emphasis upon requital in another world (31. 4; 36.1-3) turned Christians from things below and contributed to tht stubbornness which outraged Roman officials (Pliny, Ep. 10. 96) .The very clarity of the ethical imperative, based as it was on the prophetic voice of Scripture and the words of Jesus (11.1, 32.4) brought a certainty which must have looked more like naïveté than integrity to many. The Christians were fully conscious that it was the all-knowing God, not some shadowy mythological personages, before whom men will ultimately stand for judgment. (12.2) The uncluttered distinction between good and evil appears in another form in Athenagoras’ demonology (chaps. 24-5) which echoes traditional Christian25 and Jewish26 themes rather than the less dualistic doctrines of the Greeks. Athanagoras is confident that God’s providence guides the righteous through all difficulties27. And his belief in the rsurrection of the body (31. 4 ; 36. 1-3) illustrates the completeness of his reliance on God’s power. And his belief in the resurrection of the body (31 4; 36. 1-3) illustrates the completeness of his reliance on God's power.
Athenagorus' doctrine of God culminates in Trinitarian theology. (10,.:2-5; cf. 4. 2; 6. 22; 12. 3; 18-2). For apologetic reasons. i.e., its affront to the pagan rationality of its addressees, the Plea barely mentions its most controversial feature—the doctrine of the Incarnation (cf. 21. 4).
25 Justin, Ap. 2. 5. 3 (cf. Enoch 6); 2. 7. 5 (cf Tatian 7)
26 Cf. Freidrick Andres, Die Engellehre der griechischen Apologeten des zweiten Jahrhunderts und ihr Verhältnis zur griechische-römischen Dämonologie (Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 1914).
27 Similar ideas about providence may be found in Plato (Tim. 41 a) and, in greater detail, in Ps.-Plutarch (De Fato 9). But Athenaboras' view of particular providence and his explanation of disorder are Christian rather than pagan. Cf. Salvatore Pappalardo, 'La teoria degli angeli e dei demoni e la dottrina della providenza in Atenagora', Didascalion, N.S. 2/3 (1924), 67-130. The following scheme may be suggested: (1) there is a general providence of God connected with the "law of reason', extending (a) over the whole material world, and (b) over men and physical organisms. (2) There is a restricted providence delegated to angels who have been set over aspects of creation; some of these angels, including the prince over matter, exercised their freedom and violated their office; the angels, with their offspring the demons, move men in folly; the prince over matter creates disorder in human affairs. (3) There is a particular providence of God 'over the worthy'. This is not the middle Platonic hierarchy with particular providence in the hands of the demons.
Schoedel, Athenagoras: Legatio et De Resurrectione, "Introduction," xvi-xviii
This long quotation concludes with the statement that “Athenagoras’ doctrine of God culminates in Trinitarian theology” is true in the same sense that "all roads lead to Rome" is true; his Trinitarian doctrine is the heart of his theology as such. However, it is not a product of a prior theological stance. His “doctrine of God” was mediated, as it could only have been mediated, then as now, by the Church’s Eucharistic liturgy, admission to which requires the purification which only baptism provides: (10. 2-5; cf. 4. 2 ; 6. 2 ; 12 3 ; 18. 2). Such liturgical commonplaces as the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer (to Father), the repetition of the doxologies, making the sign of the Cross, and above all, participation in the celebration of the Eucharist, especially at the solemnities of the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and Pentecost, bespeak the Father’s Mission of the Son, and his Gift of the Spirit through the Son, in short, they presuppose the revelation of the Trinity. Athenagoras, like all Christians, had no other access to his faith in the Trinity than the Church's liturgy, which comprises the bishops' preaching of the faith.
[110] Bernard Pouderon, Supplique, 23-30, has presented a comparably learned and more detailed description of the legal and cultural plight of Christians in the late second century, in which he thus summarizes the tenor of the local persecution of Christians:
Il est généralement admis que l'initiative des poursuites revenait aux magistrats de province, qu'il n'existait pas de politique centrale de persécutions, et que l'empereur prônait une certain modération, s'en tenant à l'esprit des rescrits de Trajan et de Hadrien.1 Il n'empêche que le règne de Marc-Aurèle fut, après celui de Néron, le plus funeste aux chrétiens—du moins jusqu'à l'avènement des Sévères et la promulgation de l'édit de Dèce ordonnant a tous les habitants de l'Empire de sacrificier 2—et que l'aversion marqué de Marc-Aurèle pour les chrétiens3 y était sans doute pour quelque chose!
1. This endnote, too long for inclusion here, cites those scholars who believe that Marcus Aurelius increased the severity of the persecution which Trajan's rescript had moderated.
2. This endnote. also too long for inclusion; presents opinions of contemporary historians regarding the edict of Septimus Severus banning the proselytizing activity of the Jews and the Christians, suggesting that the enforcement of the edict was rather local than universal.
3. Cf. Marc-Aurèle, Pensées XI, 3. Voire encore A. Birley, op. cit. [at 24, n. 3: A. Birley, Marcus Aurelius, Londres, 1966].p. 328-331 et passim; M. Sordi, op. cit., [Il cristianesimo e Roma, Bologne, 1965], p. 172-174.
Pouderon, Supplique, 24-25.
[111] Daniélou, Message Évangelique, 12ff, agrees that the angry contempt for Christianity which Marcus Aurelius expressed in his Pensées did not form imperial policy. Robert Grant, "The Chronology of the Greek Apologists," Vigiliae Christianae 9 (1955), 30-33, has proposed that the imperial bureaucracy routinely trashed the Christian apologiae as unworthy of imperial attention, a not unlikely explanation, which may account for Athenagoras' impunity, for he appears in no list of martyrs, But this is only negative evidence. Bernard Pouderon, Supplique, 9, introduces Athanagoras as "a writer snatched from oblivion" (un écrivain arraché à l'oubli). He was ignored by his contemporaries, by Eusebius, by Jerome, and the Byzantine historians. Methodius of Olympus (d. ca. 311) quotes a passage drawn from the Plea whose author he identifies as Athenagoras, to support his own attack on Origen, and the fifth century historian, Philip of Side, provides details of Athenagoras' life otherwise unknown and generally discounted by historians, although Pouderon, no mean historian, treats Philip’s account with respect.
[112] Pouderon, Supplice, (1992), 33-34; Marcovich, Athanagorae Qui Fertur de Resurrectione Mortuorum (2000), 1-3, following Robert Grant, "Athenagoras or Pseudo-Athenagoras," Harvard Theological Review 47 (1954) 121-29; nonetheless, Maracovich's "Select Bibliography" lists eleven works by Pouderon, more than by any other author. Finally, William Schoedel, Athenagoras: Legatio and De Resurrectione (1972), xxvi, citing Robert Grant, also thinks Athenagoras' authorship unlikely. Of these authors only Schoedel has provided English translations of the Legatio and the De Resurrectione. These have been indispensable to this study.
[113] We shall see Tertullian confused in Adversus Praxean 27 on this latter point by an unreflective dehistoricization of the Logos sarx egeneto, an error which did not touch his early and unchanged insight into the substantial duality and the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord.
[114] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 142.
[115] Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyon; col. The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge: simultaneously published in the United States and Canada, 1997). Pages 1-11 of this work provide much of the biographical information here relied upon.
[116] Eric Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), at xi. At 4, Osborn observes that Irenaeus may have already been the bishop of Vienne: the two dioceses were closely associated.
Osborn’s study of Irenaeus’s theology makes no reference to Irenaeus’ reliance upon the critically decisive text of I Cor. 11:3. This brief passage is foundational for the meaning of the anakephalaiōsasthai (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι) of Eph. 1:10 and of Jesus’ headship of the Church taught in Eph. 5:23 and Col. 1:17, which affirms the husband’s headship of his wife, first taught in I Cor. 11:3.
The same must be said of W. A. Jurgens’ three-volume survey of the patristic tradition, The Faith of the Early Fathers, and of Quasten’s comparable Patrology, in three volumes. In neither work is I Cor. 11:3 indexed. Had not Jean Daniélou found evident references, both by Clement of Alexandria and by Irenaeus, not only to I Cor. 11:3, but to its association with Eph. 5:23, this general academic inadvertence would have left Irenaeus’ development of recapitulation as salvific without linkage to its concrete foundation in the Father’s headship of the Trinity, the Son’s headship of the Church, and Paul’s applicationof Gen. 2:24 to the nuptial union of Christ and the Church in Eph. 5:21-33:
La tiare signifie « l’autorité souveraine du Seigneur, s’il est vrai que le Christ est le chef (κεφαλή) de l’Église. De toutes manières elle désigne l’autorité la plus absolue. On peut l’entendre aussi également du fait que Dieu est la tête du Christ » (37, 5,-28, 1). Clément rapproche ici le deux textes de Paul, I Cor. 11, 3 et Eph. 5 :23. Il est intérressant de noter que ce rapprochement est dans Irénée : « Au-dessus de tout, il y a le Père; et il est le chef du Christ ; à travers tout il y a le Verbe; et il est le chef de l’Église » (Adv. Hær., V, 18, 2).
Daniélou, Message Evangelique, 223.
[117] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 104.
[118] Ibid., 119.
[119] Juan Ochagavía, S.J., a Chilean Jesuit, published in 1964 a work entitled Visibile Patris Filius. A study of Irenaeus’ Teaching on Revelation and Tradition. Col. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 171 (Roma: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1964. Ochavía’s critique of Irenaeus is entirely arbitrary, resting upon his supposition of a Monarchian dismissal of the Trinity by Irenaeus. It has achieved no critical recognition.
[120] Kelly melds Irenaeus’ two Christologies―the supposedly Johannine Logos-Christology and the Christology of the second Adam:
As he read the Gospels and the rule of faith, it was the eternal Word himself who became incarnate; and he never tires of applying the formula3- ‘one and the same’ to the Lord Jesus Christ. His motive here was frankly soteriological; only if the divine Word entered fully into human life could the redemption have been accomplished.
3 E.g., Haer. I, 9, 2; 3, 16, 2 f.; 3, 16, 8; 3, 17, 4.
Kelly, Doctrines, at 147.
It is of course true that for Irenaeus, as for any Christian, “it was the eternal Word himself who became incarnate.” Insofar as “incarnate” is understood to mean “enfleshed,” (ἔνσαρκος), this is said of Jesus Christ in the Roman tradition which Irenaeus helped to form. Those who speak for it hold to the communication of idioms inseparable from the affirmation of the faith that it is Jesus, the Christ, the Lord, who is “the eternal Word himself.” For Irenaeus, this is the tradition of the apostolic Churches, whose bishops can be traced, name by name, back to the Apostle who founded them. As Paul and John have taught, it is Christ the Lord who underwent the Kenōsis, who “in the beginning” “became flesh” (sarx, caro) and, in that historical sense, “it was the eternal Word himself who became incarnate.”
Upon this basis, the Church’s liturgical and scriptural mediation of the apostolic rule of faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, Irenaeus’ constructed his Christology. His concern for Jesus as the second Adam who is at once the eternal Son of the Father and the historical Son of Mary, and his concern for the historical recapitulation of all things in the second Adam, Jesus the Lord, effects that the melding of Christologies to which Kelly refers. It does not entail any dehistoricization of the eternal Word who is Jesus the Christ into the “immanent Word” for, so conceived, i.e, as dehistoricized, as absolute, the divine Word, the divine Son, would be unable by definition to enter “fully into human life;” as has long since been pointed out, a Christology fashioned on that error can only be Monarchian. For Irenaeus, the problem of arranging for the prior possibility of the Incarnation does not arise, simply because he maintains the strict identity of the Eternal Word, the Son of the Father from eternity, and Jesus the Lord, the Son of Mary from the moment of the Incarnation. For Irenaeus, famously, Jesus the Word is one and the same Son, the Mystery of Faith, beyond all explanation.
While Irenaeus certainly melds his Christological themes, his reading “of the Gospels and the rule of faith” excludes a dehistoricized understanding of the Johannine “logos sarx egeneto” for it is only of the Christ, the second Adam, that “one and the same” can be said. If we take seriously the evident Christianity of Theophilus and Athenagoras, we cannot suppose their rejection of the pagan postulate of a monadic divinity, a Monas, in favor of the Christian Trias (τρíας, τρíαδος) to entail a dehistoricized concept of the Trinity, particularly when its intrinsic ordo, the invariant sequential liturgical order of the Naming of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to which Athenagoras referred as a τάξις (taxis), had nothing in common with the Stoic or Platonic emanationism.
[121] Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 115, introduces his “two-stage” Christology in a discussion of Hippolytus; the term describes a Christology that is dehistoricized from the outset, in contrast to that of Irenaeus. For an exposition of Irenaeus’ two Christologies, see Lucien Regnaux, “Irénée de Lyon,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité, t. vii, deuxième partie (Paris: Beauchesne, 1971) 1938-69, at 1949-51. Regnaux distinguishes these as the Christology of the Incarnate Word, and the Christology of the New Adam. He notes that Irenaeus understands these Christologies to be strictly linked by the recapitulation theme common to both: (i.e., “Le Verbe incarné résume en lui l’humanité.” “Le Christ nouvel Adam repand et reparé l’oeuvre du premier” There can be no doubt of the unity of these different approaches to the Lord Jesus in the thought of Irenaeus: nonetheless, there is a clear tension between them. In a smaller font at the end of c. 1950, Regnaux’s article notes that Irenaeus understands Christ’s historical life―infant, adolescent, mature―and old age, had he lived so long―to entail the recapitulation of humanity in its totality, but as pre-existing: “Ainsi le Christ a-t-il tenu la priorité et la primauté en tout, mais aussi vis à vis de tous, « prior omnium et praecedens omnes ».“ Irenaeus has linked the recapitulative work of Jesus to his creation, his “plasmatio,” (from πλάσις: shaping, forming), his fashioning by God from earth (limus, i.e., mud), an emphasis specifically and expressly contradicting the distinction placed by the docetic dualism―and by the dualist “two-stage” Christology―between the human Jesus and the divine Word.
Irenaeus often uses plasmatio always with reference to the humanity of the first Adam as taken by the second Adam friom the Virgin Mary. In Regnaux’s excerpt of this passage from the Latin of the Adversus Haereses II, 22, 4, it is to this historical Word, as the Man-God and God-Man, the second Adam, that Irenaeus assigns pre-existence, a pre-existence that can only be the primordial pre-existence of the Johannine Alpha and Omega, of the Pauline-Johannine “Beginning,” which cannot be assigned to an “immanent Son” who, as eternal simply, can know no “Beginning.”
For the same reason, the pre-existence of the Christ, which Irenaeus refers to his recapitulation of all things, his transcendence of history, cannot be that of a non-human Logos, for it is a specifically human pre-existence. This understanding of Jesus’ pre-existence as historical and therefore primordial is simply that of the St. John and St. Paul. The Church’s tradition, the tradition of the Apostles, concerns the Lord Jesus, “the one and the same Son,” whose pre-existence is that of the primordial second Adam who “ecame flesh,” subject to our fallenness, accepting the form of a slave, who on the Cross and the Altar offers as our head the One Sacrifice by which the New Covenant, the New Creation, is instituted, in which all things are made new. That Jesus is the eternal Son of the eternal Father is never in question, for he is one and the same Son.
As with Justin, Irenaeus felt no need to distinguish these readings of the Logos: as focused upon the Christ as the second Adam, from the Stoic or Platonic Logos; he had no reflective awareness of their incongruity, of the impossibility of a dehistoricized divinity becoming flesh, and thus no fear of a recrudescent Gnosticism traveling in the guise of the later “Logos-sarx” Christology. Irenaeus’ Christology is at one with that of his contemporaries, Tertullian and Hippolytus, the Spirit Christology of the late second and early third century theologians, which finds its adequate theological expression in Origen’s Peri Archon, and its final dogmatic expression in the Symbol of Chalcedon.
[122] Regnaux, op,. cit., 1952-57, at 1953.
[124] Jean Daniélou, A History of Early Christian Doctrine Before the Ciouncil of Nicaea; Volume Three: The Origins of Latin Christology (London, Philadelphia: Darton Longman & Todd; The Westminster Press, 1977), [hereafter, Latin Christology], 404; Timothy D. Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (New York: The Oxford University Press; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 19851971), [hereafter, Tertullian], 11.
The present treatment of Tertullian’s Christology and Trinitarian theology relies upon Ernest Evans’extended “Introduction” to his commentary upon and translation of Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean, i.e., Evan’s Tertullian’s Treatise Against Praxeas (London: SPCK, 1948), [hereafter, Against Praxeas], upon the “Introduction” to Evans’ edition, translation of and commentary upon Tertullian’s De Carne Christi: i.e., Tertullian’s Treatise on the Incarnation (London: SPCK, 1956), [hereafter, On the Incarnation] and upon the “Introduction” to its sequel, Evans’ edition, translation of and commentary upon the De resurrectione carnis, i.e., Tertullian’s Treatise on the Resurrection (London: SPCK, 1960), [hereafter, On the Resurrection]; upon Tertullian’s Apologia, with an English translation by T. R. Glover; col. The Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann Ltd.; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931), ix—xxvii, 1-227; upon Pierre de Labriolle, History and Literature of Christianity from Tertullian to Boethius Translated from the French by Herbert Wilson, with introductory foreword by His Eminence Cardinal Gasquet (London, Kegan Paul; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1924) [hereafter, From Tertullian to Boethius]., 56-105, upon Labriolle’s Histoire de la littérature latine chrétienne, 2 vols, 3ième édition, revue et augmentée par Gustave Bardy (Paris, Sociéte édition, Les Belles Lettres, 1947), Tome I, 84-159, Tome II, 573; upon Jean Daniélou’s extended discussion of Tertullian’s theology in Latin Christianity, 341-404, upon Aloys Grillmeier’s Christ in Christian Tradition, I, 117-131, and upon Timothy D. Barnes’ Tertullian, passim; cf. also Louis Sébastian le Nain de Tillemont, Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire ecclésiastique (Venice, 1732), vol. ii, art. “Tertullien, I.”
[125] Msgr. Jurgens, Ancient Writers I, 138, note 2, recognizes Carthage as Tertullian’s native city , but reports that he returned to it in 195 after an extended residence in Rome. Msgr. Ronald Knox, in Enthusiasm: A Chapter on the History of Religion (New York: Oxford University :Press, 1963), [hereafter, Enthusiasm], at 33, agrees that Tertullian was in Rome prior to 195: Quasten, Patrology II (1953), 317, observing that all of Tertullian’s Greek works have been lost, notes also that three of them have Latin counterparts written before his semi-Montanist period, two of them in the last years of the second century. A probable a fourth lost Greek work, referred to by Jerome (De viris illust., 40). is a late addition to a six-volume work of Tertullian’s Montanist period whose title Jerome gives as περὶ ἕκστάσεως (On ecstasy); it is otherwise unknown. A product of Tertullian’s Montanist period, it is irrelevant to the question of Tertullian’s residence in Rome prior to 195.
It is not unlikely that Tertullian’s conversion to Christianity occurred in Rome during his residence in that city some time prior to. 195 at about the age of thirty-five. Sed contra: T. D. Barnes, Tertullian, 243-45, having examined the grounds for the residence in Rome accepted by the older scholarship from Harnack to Quasten, finds no basis for thinking Tertullian ever to have lived in Rome. Specifially, he rejects the identification of Tertullian with a contemporary Roman jurispruent of that name, which Quasten has thought probable. However, the likelihood of Tertullian’s early Roman residence may be upheld on other grounds, namely the association of his lost Greek works, (which Barnes dismisses as devoid of historical interest) with his conversion to Christianity in that city, and the need to account for his evident association with Hippolytus. Such a conversion to Christianity could have prompted Tertullian’s writing of his lost Greek works, which met the same fate in Rome as did the better known writings of Hippolytus, only three of which, the Commentary on the Beginning of the Canticle of Canticles (before 200), the Commentary on Daniel (ca. 204), and its prologue, Christ and the Anti-Christ (ca. 200), survived intact the third-century Latinization of the Roman world.
Supposing for the moment that he did reside in Rome prior to 195, the possibility that Tertullian, fluent in Greek as in Latin, became acquainted with Hippolytus during a Roman residence approaches likelihood. Marcel Richard thinks it probable that Hippolytus was ordained in Rome during the reign of Pope Victor (189-198), perhaps as much as a decade prior to the turn of the third century. The earliest work we have from Hippolytus, the Commentary on the Beginning of the Canticle of Canticles, was published prior to his On Christ and the Antichrist, which M. Richard dates “vers 200” (Hippolyte, 536): i.e., before the edict of Emperor Septimus Severus in 200 proscribing Jewish and Christian proselytism. In his Commentary on Daniel, a work dated ca. 204, Hippolytus mentions that his scholarly prominence, presumeably as an exegete, has aroused jealousy (M. Richard, ibid., 534). While Hippolytus’ prominence would have been much less a decade earlier, Tertullian may have been drawn to him, as later would be Origen, by his preaching, that of a priest whose passion for truth of Christ would have resonated with Tertullian’s own quest for wisdom, veritas, and so Tertullian could have been converted by Hippolytus' preaching.
Otherwise, Tertullian’s conversion to Christianity, whether upon his return to Carthage, or without his ever having been absent from Carthage, must be explained by his admiration of the courage shown by the Christian martyrs, and perhaps also by exorcisms he witnessed. He was certainly impressed by the martyrs, as Quasten’s examination, Patrology, II, 290-292, finds amply demonstrated in one of Tertullian’s earliest works, the Ad Martyres. However, there remains to be explained the close association of Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine with that of Hippolytus. The nearly four hundred miles of the Mediterranean Sea between Carthage and Rome would have made correspondence between them difficult, and there is no record of any having taken place.
[126] Pierre C. de Labrioelle, History and Literature of Christianitty from Tertullian to Boethius, [hereafter, From Tertullian to Boethius, Translated from the French by Herbert Wilson, with introductory foreword by His Eminence Cardinal Gasquet (London, Kegan Paul; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), 60.
The French text:
Esprit positif et pratique en son fond, talent d’une trempe supérieure, qui sut resserrer en de vigoureux systèmes la théologie, la morale, la discipline, sans parler de la langue latine elle-même qu’il plia si doctement à de nouveaux usages, cette personnalité originale et puissante inaugure de la façon la plus brillante les lettres latines chrétiennes en Occident.
P. de Labriolle, Histoire de la littérature latine chrétienne, 2 Tomes, 3ième édition, revue et augmentée par Gustave Bardy (Paris, Sociéte édition, Les Belles Lettres, 1947), Tome I, 101.
[127] Ronald A. Knox’s Enthusiasm devotes a half-dozen pages, 44-49, to Tertullian out of the more than two dozen on “The Montanist Challenge,” the prototypal enthusiasm with which Tertullian became identified after 212.
[128] The chronology of Tertullian’s writings remains an open question. The evidence relied upon by the so-called standard chronology (CCL II:1627-28) has been challenged by T. D. Barnes: Tertullian, 30-56. His revision is of course discussable, but only an equivalently informed and comprehensive study can challenge it. None has appeared since its publication in 1971.
[129] Against Praxeas, at 59, citing Apologeticus 17 and 21.
[130] Evans, ibid., 69, 206. It is difficult to understand Evan’s reliance upon what he thinks to have been the tacit doctrinal influence of Eusebius of Caesarea’s supposedy insightful critique of Marcellus’ Spirit Christology. While Eusebius was the first Church historian; he was also a consummate politician and an Arian sympathizer. Even during his lifetime, no one mistook him for a theologian. Fifty years after his death the First Council of Constantinople reaffirmed the Nicene Creed which Eusebius had opposed ab initio and throughout his life. Less than a century after his death, the Spirit Christology, which he had found so offensive in Marcellus, and which Evans supposes his opposition to have vanquished, was explicitly defined by the Formula of Union in its proclamation that the Virgin Mary is Theotokos, a direct implication of the Spirit Christology. Given this doctrinal standing by the Council of Ephesus, the apostolicity of the Spirit Christology was reaffirmed con brio by the Council of Chalcedon in referring it to Irenaeus and quoting Tertullian. Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History is invaluable; it is odd that a man so intent upon recording the hard facts of the history of the early Church should be so intent upon her dehistoricizaion.
[131] Evans has twice stated his personal conviction that the Incarnation was the assumption of a human nature:
The subject of the present treatise is not the Body of Christ in either the natural or the mystical or the sacramental meaning of that phrase, but his Flesh; that is, the substance, nature, attributes and origin of that human nature which the divine Word assumed at the Incarnation.
Evans, On the Incarnation, 82.
Again, to the same effect:
‘Flesh’ in fact, signifies the material, tangible, visible element of that human nature which Christ redeemed not in part but wholly;
Evans, On the Resurrection, 188.
Evans defends at some length his interpretation of the Incarnation as the assumption by the Logos of a human nature; he has summarized this inference:
The term conversum is thus used in a specialized sense to mean the assumption of something else without the destruction of what already was.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 71-73.
The obvious response to this interpretation of the Incarnation is that it cannot provide for the communication of idioms in the Christ, upon which Tertullian is inflexible. Evans here presupposes what he knows Tertullian to have denied, that the Sermo, the subject of the Incarnation, is the eternal Son, sensu negante, whose relation to anything at all is at best problematic. Both J. N. D. Kelly and John A. McGuckin regard the solution of this problem as the basic task of Christology. Were this the case, confronted with the dehistoricization of the “subject of the Incarnation,” theology would cease to exist.
[132] Evans, Against Praxeas, 61-65. No other translation of “Logos” than “Sermo” seems to have been considered by Tertullian. On the continuing “conversation” over the proper Latin translation of “Logos” in the Johannine Prologue, see Majorie O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method In Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); “Sermo: Reopening the Conversation on Translating Jn. 1:1,” Vigiliae Christianae 31, No. 3 (September, 1977), 161-168, and “A Conversational Opener: The Rhetorical Paradigm of Jn. 1:1,” in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, by Wade Jost and Wendy Olmsted (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 58-79.
[133] Irenaeus’ maxim, that Jesus is “one and the same Son,” is found several times in Adversus Haereses I; Tertullian affirms its equivalent in De Carne Christi 18.
[134] Evans, Against Praxeas 69-70.
[135] Evans, ibid., 42, appeared untroubled by Tertullian’s assertion (Adv. Prax. 2 and 7) that the divine substance, which is the Person of the Logos (i.e., the Sermo) is numerically identical to the substance that is the Father. But Tertullian does not consider the indivisible unity of the divine substance, which is at once the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, to be an obstacle to the concrete Trinitarian distinctions between the Person of the Son from the Person of the Father and of the Holy Spirit. However, Evans, ibid., 58, does notice a latent Sabellianism in the “unus deus … ex quo deputantur” clause at the end of Adversus Praxean 2. In the Adversus Praxean, in order to grant Praxeas his own Monarchian postulates, and so to refute them without invoking the Trinty, Tertullian concedes, for the purposes of argument, the Monarchian identification of the divine Person with the divine Substance, simply to demonstrate its absurdity to Praxeas. Throughout that work, Against Praxeas, he rails against his monarchist denial of a concrete distinction between the Father and the Son, while in the Apologeticus he affirmed the Trinitarian unity of God as “una substantia in tribus cohaerentibus,” later refined to “Una substantia, tres Personae.” Tertullian had no Sabellian temptations, even in Adversus Praxean 5; see endnote 495, infra.
[136] Evans, Against Praxeas, 55.
[137] Ibid, 63.
[138] Ibid., 73.
[139] Praxeas’s concern for the Incarnation is compatible with the Monarchianism of the early third century, but not with its later Sabellian development. His error is too close to a Judaeo-Christian archaism to be deemed a heresy, although opinions on that matter are divided; see Danielou, Latin Christianity, 362-63. The Sabellianism of the mid-third century Libyan bishops had barred the divinity of the Christ. As Athanasius has shown, this Christological heresy was the subject of the letter of rebuke sent them ca. 260 by Dionysius the Great; it is also the subject of the Refutatio by which Dionysius of Alexandria replied to the rebuke received from Dionysius of Rome; see Charles Feltoe, Letters of Dionysius of Alexandria], 170-77. In what follows, Praxeas is regarded rather as a Monarchian than a Sabellian modalist; this also accords with his anti-Montanism, which further provoked Tertullian.
[140] Evans, ibid., 203-04, notes that Tertullian seems to have been the first to speak of the “double procession” of the Holy Spirit, i.e., his procession from the Father through the Son: “Spiritum non aliundo puto quam a patre filio traditam,”(Adv. Prax. 4, 21-22) also citing Tixeront, Histoire des dogmes II, 89-93, and III, 198-202. Evans opines that Greek theologians even now would accept Tertullian’s view of the double procession of the Holy Spirit, “apart from reserves due to later controversy,” i.e., over the Filioque. This may be so, but the “later controversy” has its roots in Basil of Ancyra’s restriction of his notion of “homoiousios” to the Son; the point d’appui of the pneumatomachian heresy of Eustathius of Sebaste and of Basil of Caesarea’s unwillingness to affirm the homoousion of the Holy Spirit, whom he was unable adequately to distinguish from the divine substance, given the restriction of the homoios kat’ousian to the Son.
[141] Tertullian affirmed Mary’s motherhood of the Son of God at nearly the same time at which Irenaeus formulated his Christology of “One and the same Son:”
Ceterum dei filius nullam de impudicitia habet matrem; etiam quam videtur habere, non nupserat.
Apologeticus 21, 9, at 105.
But the Son of God has a mother touched by no impurity; even she, whom he seems to have, had never been a bride.”.
[142] This assurance dates from 1948, when Evans published Tertullian’s Treatise Against Praxeas. His “Introduction” to On the Incarnation, viii, published eight years later, distinguishes the works of Tertullian’s Montanist period, the Adversus Praxean and De Anima, from the orderly sequential development of his earlier dogmatic works, in which however he certainly found nothing to diminish his confidence in Tertullian’s apostolic orthodoxy.
[143] Aristotle had made substance the radical category which includes all the qualified entities; St. Thomas, as has been seen, assigned substantiality to every person, and in doing so made the association of persons impossible.
[144] Daniélou maintains that Tertullian, in his polemical treatment of the subject in the De Carne Christi, identifies the Person of Christ with the unity of his ensouled humanity, i.e., with that which Daniélou designates “the concrete reality of Christ which is his divine substance”:
Tertullian spends little time discussing Alexander’s syllogisms, but at the end of his treatise deals with an important question raised by this disciple of Valentinus. Alexander disputed the reality of Christ’s flesh on the ground of the virgin birth, and Tertullian seeks to prove that it is, on the contrary, precisely the virginal conception of Christ which is the supreme evidence for the reality both of his manhood and of his divine nature. This brings him to the climax of his treatment. He has already placed the flesh of Christ at the level of the flesh, and the soul of Christ at the level of the rational breath. He now confronts these two aspects of the substance of man with the third element constituting Christ’s persona, namely the individual concrete reality of Christ which is his divine substance.
The virginal conception is in fact the nova nativitas, the ‘new birth by which man is born in God by the fact that God is born in man’ (xvii, 3). The gesture of God’s coming to man is, in other words, the necessary condition of man’s becoming deified. ‘The flesh born of the old seed is taken up without the old seed in order to be remade by a new spiritual seed, free from the old status’(XVII, 3). .
Daniélou, Latin Christianity, at 389 (emphasis added).
Daniélou’s identification of the “concrete reality of Christ,” his ”persona,” with “his divine substance” may reflect a sympathy with Moingt’s reluctance to accept the economic relevance of Tertullian’s use of “Person, i.e., its application to the historical Jesus the Christ as a member of the Trinity. On the other hand, it accurately conveys Tertullian’s view of the Resurrection of Jesus as that of a Person at once human and divine.
This error would be of no great consequence were the interest in Tertullian’s attribution of “Person” to Jesus simply that he is Named, justifying Tertullian’s attribution of “Person” to the other Trinitarian Names. However, even in the Apologeticus, Tertullian affirmed the divinity of Jesus “substance,” which he there identifies with his Name, his Person, i.e., with the Christ. Later, in the Adversus Praxean, his whole argument with Praxeas is over the substantial, i.e., Personal divinity of the Son, Jesus, vis à vis the Father, given the Monarchian insistence upon absolute unity of the divine substance, which Tertullian is intent upon proving incompatible with Church’s liturgical Naming of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in an order which never changes, and which, in denying their interchangeability within that order, asserts their distinction.
Evans is convinced that Tertullian never questioned the Personal divinity, Personal humanity, or Personal unity of Jesus the Lord: he notes that Tertullian simply accepted the apostolic tradition that Jesus is at once human and divine, one and the same Son. This is the Spirit Christology, for whose rejection Tertullian attacks the Monarchian Praxeas. In conformity with the Spirit Christology, Tertullian identified the primordial Sermo (who, as primodial and unfallen, is also Spiritus) as the subject of the Father’s mission, thus identified at once with the infant Jesus, and with the risen Christ. In dealing with Praxeas, pressing the identification of the divine and the human substances of Jesus with the unity of his Person would have been pointless, given the Monarchian interpretation of Personal distinctions between the Father, Son and Spirit as tritheist; Tertullian had to finesse this antipathy by insisting that, even regarded as the clothing of the Logos with flesh, indutus carne, this clothing could not be attributed to the Father, hence his clear distinction from the Son.
[145] Evans is uncomfortable with Tertullian’s literal personalizing of Jesus’ humanity in such expressions as “his man,” (eius hominem); Against Praxeas, 330; On the Incarnation, 98, 19; 149, 34. Marcel Richard is similarly ill at ease with Hippolytus’ reference to the concrete “homme” of Jesus rather than his abstract “humanité” (Hippolyte, 531). Origen agrees with Tertullian in affirming the full, i.e., the Personal humanity of Jesus; see endnotes 692 and 693, infra. Both were anticipated by Irenaeus’ “one and the same Son” which, confirmed by the “Creed of Ephesus,” i.e., the Formula of Union, became the leitmotif of the Symbol of Chalcedon.
[146] Evans, Against Praxeas, 90-91; ET: 131-32.
[147] Barnes, Tertullian, 210. Jurgens, Early Fathers I, at 157, note 3, disagrees; thinking to have found an ample evidence of subordinationism in Tertullian’s Christology and Trinitarian theology, to the point of a proto-Arianism. Evans of course rejects this reading of Tertullian. In Against Praxeas, 38-58, he presents a detailed examination and defense of the apostolic orthodoxy of Tertullian’s terminology, which begins with his accepting “Una substantia in tribus personis” as representative of Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine. At 54-55, he points out what Jurgens has missed or ignored, that while Tertullian supposes substantia to be a reality which, as actual, is always corporeal, describable then as corpus sui generis, he also holds that this corporeality is nonetheless immaterial in the sense of indivisible. Inasmuch as subordinationism connotes divisibility in God, Tertullian’s “una substantia in tribus personis” cannot be accused of it. The assumption of the substantiality and the indivisibility of the τρíας is proper to its original use by Theophilus of Antioch as also to the use of τάξις by Athenagoras to denote the order intrinsic to the indivisible unity of the τρíας (trias), which term Tertulian’s Trinitas translates, and whose order is of the first importance in his Trinitarian doctrine. Evans goes on to devote five pages to Tertullian’ use of substantia, and nearly six to his use of persona. He then undertakes the more subtle analyses of the terms Tertullian uses to refine his use of substantia and persona. The remaining ten pages deal with Tertullian’s use of status, gradus, potestas, forma, species. There Evans does not mention census; however he discusses it in detail in his “Commentary and Notes” to which Daniélou gives special attention; see endnote 421.
[148] Evans, Against Praxeas, 48-49.
[149] Daniélou, Latin Christianity, at 364,
[150] Ibid., 343-60, Daniélou provides a succinct summary of Tertullian’s theological vocabulary, descriptive rather than technical, whose use is original with Tertullian. Daniélou’s summary relies upon René Braun, Deus Christianorum. Recherches sur le vocabulaire doctrinal de Tertullien. Ser. Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciènces Humaines d’Alger 41 (Paris, Presse univérsitaire de France, 1962), at 167-199, and Joseph Moingt, Théologie trinitaire de Tertullien; 4 vols. Col. Théologie 68-70, 75 (Paris: Aubier, 1966-69), II: Personalité et Individualité : Étude du vocabulaire philosophique. Col. Théologie 69 (Paris: Aubier, 1966), at 297-430; IV, Réportoire Lexicographique et tables. Col. Theologie 75 (Paris, Aubier, 1969), at 230-234.
[151] Daniélou, Latin Christianity, 365. Sed contra, on this precise point, see G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: S.P.C.K, 1964), 110-111. Prestige proceeds to look for corroboration in Hippolytus, but relies for it upon the Contra Noetum, while P. Nautin and M. Richard both reject the attribution of the Contra Noetum to Hippolytus; see Marcel Richard, Hippolyte, 533.
[152] It is worthy of note that Moingt’s dissociation of the Trinity from the economy agrees the Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulas; it underlies his rejection of the Filioque.
Orthodox Christians have no problem with the Filioque in the economic sense, but they cannot and will not accept the projection of the Filioque into the existential origin of the Trinity.
John Zizioulas, “Commentary” in “The Vatican Clarification on the Filioque, and Commentary,” and his “One Single Source.” Both articles are available from the “Filioque Page” of the T. R. Valentine website, http://www.geocities.com/trvalentine/index.html.
[153] Evans, Against Praxeas, at 38.
[154] See endnotes 220 and 221 infra, citing Adversus Praxean 5, where Tertullian posits, as had Justin Martyr, an absolute deus otiosus who, as absolute, clearly cannot become historical. Justin has no Trinitarian doctrine; thus he is not troubled by the incapacity of his unnameable deus otiosus to be the immanent Head of the Trinity. Tertullian on the other hand ignores his own incongruous postulate of the deus otiosus and identified the Godhead with the Trinity, requiring that the Father, as the source of the Son, be a member of the Trinity. His refusal of the problem may testify to the influence of Justin. Commenting on this passage in Adversus Praxean 5, Evans remarks that:
Tertullian does not really think that the Father ever existed without the Son; as he says almost immediately, ceterum ne tunc quidem solus. But he is unable to rid himself of the idea of a priority of the Father, at least in thought, or to dissociate it from some sort of time sequence.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 211,
[155] Daniélou, Latin Christianity, 359.
[156] Evans, Against Praxeas, 150, where Tertullian concludes Adversus Praxean 14 with a succinct affirmation of the Father’s headship of the Christ: “caput enim Christi deus,” a direct quotation of the concluding clause of I Cor 11:3. Evans comments upon this passage in Against Praxeas. at 168-70, but with no mention of I Cor 11:3, nor does that text appear in the Index of Scripture Texts at the end of his Against Praxeas.
Tertullian forgoes this simplicity in De virginibus velandis, where he relies not upon the doctrine of headship in I Cor. 11:3, but upon Paul’s attempt to exploit it in the verses following, vv. 4-16, to support his argument for the universal application, i.e., to unmarried women as well as the married, of the liturgical veiling of women worshipping in church, but finally resting his case upon the custom of the churches. See Jurgens, Ancient Fathers I, 137, § 329 [2 1-3]; § 330 [6, 1-7]; 138, note 7; cf. Quasten, Patrology II, §10, 306-07. Paul’s brilliant exposition of the refusal of headship by the first Adam and its reinstitution by the second Adam in his Letter to the Romans, depends entirely upon I Cor 11:3; it is indispensable alike to Tertullian and to Origen. Caput enim Christi deus is the foundation of Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine, as omnis viri caput Christus est is of his Christology.
[157] Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, at 119.
[158] Evans, Against Praxeas, at 41, with accompanying illustrations.
[159] Evans, Against Praxeas, at 44, observes that Tertullian “admits a certain minoration of the Son (not only in the Incarnation) but in his divine being.” The passage to which Evans refers reads: “pater enim tota substantia est, filius vero derivatio et portio, sicut ipse profitetur”; Evans omits the immediately following explanatory clause: “quia pater major me est;” (Jn. 14:28), which requires that the context upon which Evans relies be economic rather than abstracted from the economy, as his reference to the Son’s divine being supposes, although he includes in his quotation “sicut ipse profitetur” which must refer to Jesus, not his “divine being.”. An economic “minoration” cannot support a charge of subordinationism. This language is consistent with Tertullian’s Trinitarian use of gradus and, as is clear fom Daniélou’s analysis of this usage (Latin Christianity, at 348-51 and 356-61). Tertullian used gradus to designate the manner of the differentiation of the Son and Spirit: the term refers to the sequential order of their relation to the Father, their source (census). By distinguishing them according to their unique Personal gradus in contrast to their common divine status, Tertullian stressed that their differentiation from the Father and each other is not at the level of their Personal standing, for the status of each is that of spiritus, i.e., Personal divinity, which can only be consubstantial, given Tertullian’s summary Trinitarian axiom: una substantia, tres personae. This is the liturgical and apostolic tradition, the faith from which Tertullian did not depart, and to which his substantia-persona paradigm is loyal, whether in its Christological or Trinitarian application, but concerning which he felt no need to speculate.
The necessary intellectual tools for such speculation did not exist prior to Origen’s anticipation of the definition by the Council of Nicaea of the Son’s Personal consubstantiality with the Father rather than with the divine Substance. This was clearly implicit in Tertullian’s Trinitarian paradigm of una substantia, tres personae, but only with Origen’s Peri Archon was the cosmological theology’s monadic notion of the divinity transcended by the apostolic tradition of the communication of idioms in Jesus Christ the Lord. Origen’s clear exposition of the Personal divinity and the Personal humanity of the Henōsis who is Jesus Christ the Lord not only anticipates the Nicene Creed, but also underwrites the Ephesian Formula of Union and the Symbol of Chalcedon. The decisive affirmation of the Nicene Creed is that the Lord Jesus is homoousios, i.c., is of the same substance, as the Father, not merely the “one substance” by which the Nicene ascription to the Son of Personal homoousios with the Father is too often translated. “One substance,” (viz., the Nicene mia ousia, mia hypostasis) can be understood to designate the Trinity only because the Son and by implication the Spirit are defined to be of the same substance as the Father. Without that precision, the Eusebian indictment of the Nicene Creed as Sabellian would have merit for, were the Persons of the Trinity understood to be one substance as the alternative to the Trinitarian subordintionism of the Eusebians, they would coincide. The Eusebian cosmology could not but find the Nicene assertion of the homoousios of the Son with the Father to be absurd, as its post-Nicene contestation by the “two Eusebii” and their affines amply demonstrates.
The Nicene rejection of the Eusebian cosmology was not theological, but doctrinal. No theological synthesis underlies the Council’s doctrinal, liturgically grounded, affirmation of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father. No such synthesis could exist, whether then or now. Theological inquiries, insofar as theological. which were proposed thereafter explore the Nicene homoousion; they do not justify it, for the mysterium fidei which it proclaims has no prior possibility. The Nicene Creed is the product of an ecumenical exercise of the bishops’ liturgical responsibility for the Church’s worship in truth, whose criterion then and now is the communication of idioms in Jesus Christ the Lord. Conciliar doctrine is always credal, never theological, for it is the foundation of theological inquiry, not its product. The development of the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousion of the Christ with the Father continued through the Council of Chalcedon, in whose symbol it attained its full and final expression. It has since then awaited that further theological development which arises out of and requires personal commitment to the doctrinal tradition. Only then is it theological, a fides quaerens intellectum. . .
[160] Evans has noted that
Tertullian, having first applied this designation (Person) to the Word, goes on afterwards to use it of the Father and the Spirit: and this is correct Christian procedure, for (since he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father) as it is a matter of apostolic experience that the Son is a Person, it follows of necessity that the Father also is a Person, and so is the Holy Spirit.
Against Praxeas. 45.
[161] The Stoic notion of κρᾶσις (krasis) is the corollary of the Stoic ὑποκείμενον (hypokeimenon), whose etymology corresponds to that of the Latin substantia and whose abstract meaning corresponds at once to the Aristotelian- second substance (δεύτερος οὐσία). Krasis denotes the mixture of such material entities. Liddell-Scott, eighth edition, 841A, distinguishes κρᾶσις from μῖξις:
Κρᾶσις (is) a mixing of two things, so that they are blended and form a compound, as in wine and water, whereas μῖξις implies a mixing without such composition, as in two sorts of grain, (or, as we might say, κρᾶσις is a chemical, μῖξις (a) mechanical mixture). . .
The Stoic hypekeimenon i.e., the universal category, corresponds to the Thomist materia in commune, the abstract substratum of material substance. The hypokeimenon is concrete only by its realization in a distinct material entity, a substance, either a κρᾶσις or a μῖξις (mixus) the former denoting a quasi-chemical or irreversible blending of otherwise distinct substances into a third reality, the latter denoting a quasi-mechanical mixing of substances which retain their distinction and do not compose a third thing. The reality of these distinctions is nominal at best, for both are within the diacosmetic ordering of the universe by the Logos in in such wise as to establish its substantial intelligibility, an ordering that is cyclically annulled by the ekpyrōsis. Tertullian’s use of “mixtio, mixtus” is read by Grillmeier and Cantalamessa as intending krasis, supposing Jesus’ divine and human substances to have compounded to form a third reality, his Person. Those substances would then be the prior causes or conditions of possibility of his Person, the Mysterium fidei which has no prior possibility. Were such blending conceded, a monophysite Christology would be inescapable.
[162] Boethius’ Latin text :
Transeundum quippe est ad Eutychen qui cum a ueterum orbitis esset euagatus, in contrarium cucurrit errorem asserens tantum abesse, ut in Christo gemina persona credatur, ut ne naturam quidem in eo duplicem oporteat confitcri; ita quippe esse adsumptum hominem, ut ea sit adunatio facta cum deo, ut natura humana non manserit. Huius error ex eodem quo Nestorii fonte prolabitur. Nam sicut Nestorius arbitratur non posse esse naturam duplicem quin persona fieret duplex, atque ideo, cum in Christo naturarm duplicem confiteretur, duplicem credidit esse personam, ita quoque Eutyches non putauit naturam duplicem esse sinc duplicatione personae et cum non confiteretur duplicem esse personam, arbitratus est consequens, ut una uideretur esse natura. Itaque Nestorius recte tenens duplicem in Christo esse naturam sacrilege confitetur duas esse personas; Eutyches uero recte credens unam esse personam impie credit unam quoque esse naturam. Qui conuictus euidentia rerum, quandoquidem manifestum est aliam naturam esse hominis aliam dei, ait duas se confiteri in Christo naturas ante adunationem, unam uero post adunationem. Quae sententia non aperte quod uult eloquitur,
Boethius, Contra Sermonem Eutychii et Nestorii, § 5.
[163] Evans, De Carne Christi, Ch. 22-28.
[164] The ecumenical recourse to a putatively neutral ‘common ground” has had many advocates, the currently best-known being the fautores of the “Common Ground Initiative” inaugurated by the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, whose ‘seamless garment” hermeneutic proved able to assimilate anything to anything else: i.e., it has found opposition to abortion inconsistent a priori with the advocacy of capital punishment, with any “just war” doctrine, with ‘over-population,’ with the depletion of natural resources, and with the other bêtes noires of liberal politics. Twenty years earlier, David Tracy’s fundamental theology as set out in Blessed Rage for Order: The new pluralism in theology (New York:Seabury Press, 1975) had provided its theoretical ground; see Avery Dulles’ review in Theological Studies 37 (1976) 304 ff. For further commentary, see Covenantal Theology, Vol. I, (1996) Introduction, at p. 99.
[165] In asking “Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?” (De Prescriptione haereticorum 7, 9) Tertullian posed the permanent question of what the deterministic philosophical expressions of the pagan despair of history have in common with the freedom and the historical optimism of the Christian faith. His own answer is definitive: nothing at all: the two are mutually exclusive. The immanent necessities which drive cosmological rationality must be converted to free historical rationality of the Christian faith if they are to serve Christian theology, for there is no neutral, i.e., “natural” ground upon which to stand. The conversion from cosmological determinism to historical freedom finally requires the recognition of the sacramental foundation of historical truth for, apart from this conversion, truth cannot be understood to be historical; consequently, as with Plato and his disciples, its quest is per se a flight from history. The Christian conversion to historical truth from the wisdom of the pagan philosophies is latent in their very early assimilation, as by Clement of Alexandria, of the “spoils of the Egyptians.”
[166] Evans is incisive: Tertullian, against the Monarchian heresy, identifies Jesus Christ, the Son of God, with the Logos:
The Logos is Jesus Christ the Son of God, and so cannot by any means be impersonal: that, though unexpressed, is at the back of his mind as a postulate, and the Gospel text is to be expounded in accordance with it. In this respect he has left the Apologists behind him: the apologetic value of the term (Sermo) is forgotten: it is to him, as to the evangelist, a positive contribution to Christian theology.
Evans, ibid., at 37-38; (emphasis added). .
We have seen Evans quotes texts in which Tertullian quite clearly affirmed the identification of the Logos with Jesus:
(Adv. Prax. 27) Certe enim de spiritu sancto virgo concepit, et quod concepit id peperit. Id ergo nasci habebat quod erat conceptum et pariundum, id est spiritus, cuius et vocabitur nomen Emmanuel, etc.
(Adv. Jud. 13) Cum virgo Mariaverbo dei praegnans inveniretur
(Adv. Prax. 2) Hunc (sermonem) missum a patre in virginem et ex ea natum.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 64-65.
Evans cites other passages from Adversus Praxean in which Tertullian affirms the Personal unity of God and man in the Person of Jesus: e.g.:
Vidimus duplicem statum, non confusum sed conjunctum, in una persona deum et hominem Jesus . . . et adeo salva est utriusque proprietas substantiae ut et spiritus res suas egeret in illo . . . et caro passiones suas functas sit.
Evans, Against Praxeas, 71.
In these texts, written more than two centuries before the Council of Ephesus, Tertullian clearly affirms Mary’s motherhood of Jesus, thereupon refusing the false and insoluble cosmological problem of the Personal unity of full humanity and full divinity in Jesus the Lord. Any attempt to resolve his unity cosmologically must choose between the alternates exemplified on the one hand by Apollinarius and on the other by Nestorius. Tertullian’s identification of the Logos (Sermo) with the primordial Jesus is common to the Gospel of John, to the Pauline doctrine of the Christ, and to the Apostolic Fathers, whose interest is radically soteriological, whether in the primitive Judaeo-Christian Angel Christology of The Shepherd of Hermas, or the early Spirit Christology whose identification of “Holy Spirit” with the Christ both J. N. D. Kelly (Doctrines, at 144) and Evans (Against Praxeas, at 68-69) affirm to have provided the accepted interpretation of Lk. 1:35 well into the fourth century. This spontaneous application of the communication of idioms to the Incarnation is apparent in the Letters of Ignatius, in II Clement, in The Shepherd of Hermas, and in the Letter of Barnabas. Tertullian’s stress on “Person” as that which is one in Jesus the Lord is alone consistent with that tradition: his Person is Him whom the angel Named Jesus and Named Jesus and Lord.
[167] See endnote 93, supra; cf. Frederick Copleston, op. cit., at 388-89, W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy I, (Cambridge, UK, at the University Press, 1962), s.v. ecpyrosis.
[168] Speaking in his Monarchian format here; Tertullian must speak of the subject of the Incarnation as the impersonal Sermo, the divine substance, spiritus, nominally the Son, who was conceived by the Virgin and by that conception became flesh only as indutus carne.
Thus, since he was himself by the Spirit of God (for the Spirit is God) he was also of human flesh and as man conceived and born in the flesh.”
Evans, On The Incarnation, 63, translating De Carne Christi 18.
[169] Tertullian’s disinterest in speculation does not imply a lack of acquaintance with it. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, frequently notes, as at 78, Tertullian' familiarity with the Greek language and with Greek philosophy. He stresses, at 97, 110-111, 159 and 221, Tertullian's close association with and even dependence upon Hippolytus, suggesting that Hippolytus' use of "prosōpon" prompted Tertullian's use of "persona." He concludes that it may be appropriate to dealt with Tertullian's theology as a Greek as well as Latin project. However, much of this judgment rests upon his supposition that Hippolytus is the author of the Contra Noetum. Marcel Richard and Pierre Nautin agree in denying this, if in not much else: see Marcel Richard, Hippolyte, 533. Meanwhile, the personal association of Tertullian and Hippolytus remains an inference from a text having little to support its attribution to Hippolytus.
[170] In Adversus Praxean 27, Tertullian opposes “transfiguratus” and “indutus” as mutually exclusive terms denoting the Incarnation between which Praxeas must choose. A begging of the question is implicit in this reduction of the options offered Praxeas to (1) an intrinsic transfiguratio of the divine substance, which is taken to be impossible, over against (2) a consequently externally predicated indutus carne, for in either case the option ignores the historical Event-reality of the Incarnation, i.e., the intrinsic Personal transformation of the Sermo, the primordial Jesus, that is his becoming flesh. There are many reasons for rejecting this reading of Adversus Praxean 27, the chiefest of which is that it in either case it entails a rejection of the communication of idioms in the Sermo, which can only be Personal, and this is unavailable inasmuch as Praxeas the Monarchian does not admit a higher metaphysical unity than substantia.
Within the polemic anti-Monarchian context of Tertullian’s presentation of these alternate options, the divine substance clothed with the human substance in Jesus. His Name, whether denoting the unique divine substance or, in view of the Incarnation, a joinder of substances, must be either the predication of a category, i.e., a ‘second substance,’ or the label of a pragmatic object lacking categorial, i.e., substantial, objectivity and therefore lacking also any intrinsic intelligibility. “Indutus carne” is consequently an implicitly diophysite expression of an irrational but nonetheless concrete the union of divine and human substances that is the Incarnation.
Commentiing upon the contrast Tertullian draws between the “accidental” transfiguration of angels with the “substantial” “indutus carne” that is the Incarnation, Daniélou looks to the De Carne Christi for enlightenment:
Tertullian does not deny that the angels took on bodies of flesh, but insists that they did so in an accidental way: In carnem humanum transfigurabile ad tempus, ut videre et congredi cum hominibus possint; ‘capable of being transfigured into human flesh on occasion so that they can see and consort with men’ (De carne VI, 9)20 This also applies, he claims, to the body assumed by the Son in the Old Testament theophanies (Ad. Marc. III, 9, 6).
The text is also important for the light it throws on Tertullian’s theological system. The angel has a spiritual nature, that is, of a substance which is analogous to the soul. It therefore has a certain corporeity, but it is not flesh. It can be transfigured into flesh, but, for the angel, this flesh is a form which clothes its substance. It should be noted in this context that transfigurari is the word which Tertullian uses for the soul which becomes Spirit; and this too is a form which clothes the original substance. In man, on the other hand, there is both substantia carnis and substantia animae. He belongs by his very nature to both orders. For Christ to be truly man, therefore, his flesh had to form a part, not accidentally, but substantially of the being that is clothed.
20 Tertullian also adds here that if the body of Christ had been made of heavenly matter, it would not have been of the same nature as ours (De carne IX, 2). He also believes that it is nonetheless more pure than ours, although it is of the same substantia and forma (De res. LI, 1).
Daniélou, Latin Christianity, 384-85. .
[171] Evans devotes a paragraph to the “flesh” (caro) of Christ in the title of the treatise, De carne Christi. He contrasts “body” (soma, corpus) with “flesh” (sarx, caro) as carrying or permitting the connotation of dead as opposed to living, of inanimate as opposed to animate, while ”flesh” can easily refer to what is alive or potentially so: it designates the material of which the animate body consists and, in the case of living bodies “involves” the soul, however that be understood. He concludes:
The subject of the present treatise (De Carne Christi) is not the Body of Christ in either the natural or the mystical or the sacramental sense of that phrase, but his Flesh: that is, the substance, nature, attributes and origin of the whole of that human nature which the divine Word assumed at the Incarnation. The question under discussion is one of substance, even of material: not of body as the organized vehicle and instrument of humn life, but of the verity of the human nature of Christ as involved in the statement that his flesh is truly flesh and his soul is truly soul, both the one and the other derived by natural descent from the progenitors of all mankind. (emphasis added)
Evans, On the Incarnation, at 82,
This analysis is hardly clear. Its first sentence identifies the ‘Flesh’ of Christ with his concrete humanity, which Evans describes, in a petitio principii, as “the whole of that human nature which the divine Word assumed at the Incarnation.” This makes a Thomist out of Tertullian, in whose una persona, duae substantiae Christology there is no dissociation of Jesus’ divine substance from his human substance; they are unified in the Person of the Sermo, the fully human, fully divine Jesus the Lord, whether regarded as the primordial subject of the Incarnation, or historically, as conceived and born by the Virgin, Insofar as Evans here intends a statement of the Christology of Tertullian’s De Carne Christi, it is manifestly in error, for its imputes to him Evans’ nonhistorical reading of the logos sarx egeneto whose Incarnation must also be nonhistorical, the assumption of an impersonal “human nature” remote from the historical significance of “Flesh.”(see Evans, On the Resurrection, 188) For Tertullian’s Spirit Christology, the Flesh of Jesus the Christ, i.e., of the primordial Sermo who “became flesh,” is the fallen human Person, Jesus the Lord: it could not otherwise be said of Jesus, the primordial Sermo, that he “became flesh.” In the moment of the Incarnation, the primordial Sermo freely accepted the loss of his Personal integrity to enter into our fallenness, our submission to death, and our fear of death. Named “Jesus” by Gabriel, the angel of the Annunciation, conceived by the Virgin, Jesus became Flesh. Once again, Tertullian’s Christology is apostolic, and the long-since defined doctrine of the Church. Implicit in the Nicene Creed, it was settled at Ephesus, and confirmed at Chalcedon, that Christ’s human flesh is Personal: he has a human Name, and is Personally consubstantial with those for whom he died.
Evans’ second sentence, underlined in the excerpt supra, insists that:
the question under discussion” (concerning the Flesh of Christ) is of the verity of the human nature of Christ as involved in the statement that his flesh is truly flesh and his soul is truly soul, both the one and the other derived by natural descent from the progenitors of all mankind.”
Ibid.
This statement presupposes the flesh-soul distinction which Tertullian affirms in De Carne Christi, but as unified in the fallen Personal humanity which, by his Incarnation, Jesus derived through Theotokos from our fallen progenitors. We have seen Tertullian take for granted that the creation accounts in Gen. 1 and 2 entail a single human substance, embracing all mankind as descendents of the first Adam and first Eve. Evans accepts the historical derivation of Jesus’ “human nature, and consequently accepts the historicity of Jesus’ “human nature” which, as historical. can only be Personal: i.e., Jesus himself. Consequently Evan’s reference to the “substantial unity“ of Jesus’ humanity is a regression from Tertullian’s Christology to that of St. Thomas. for whom Jesus’ humanity, as “assumed” by the dehistoricized Son, becomes a dehistoricized and therefore abstract“substance.” Evans’ personal commitment to this notion of the Incarnation as the eternal Word’s assumption of a human nature cannot associate the “flesh” thus assumed with the fallenness and mortality that word denotes in the Old Covenant as well as the New. Paul’s Letter to the Romans links our fleshly fallenness, viz., our solidarity with the fallen Adam, to our solidarity with the risen second Adam, viz., our solidarity with Jesus’ victory over death by his institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, on the Altar as on the Cross. Tertullian’s anthropology rests upon the Pauline pneuma-sarx polarity. In the De Carne Christi he rejoices in the paradox of Jesus’ submission to the indignities of his conception and infancy, which are so only in view of his Personal divinity. Once Jesus the Lord is dehistoricized, the Revelation is undone, and with it the bed-rock of our faith and hope in the personal resurrection of the dead.
If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.
I Cor. 15:17.
The liturgically mediated tradition of theChurch’s faith in the risen Lord is the Sitz im Leben of Tertullian’s theology of the “Flesh” of Christ. It is by faith in the full Personal humanity, the full Personal divinity and the full Personal unity of Jesus the Lord that the Light of the world continually illumines the quest for Truth, driving toward a continually deeper insight into its mystery. The same faith in the Light of the World, the same fides quaerens intellectum, inspired and sustained the patristic tradition. The concrete liturgical recognition and mediation of the communication of idioms underlying the assertion of the Lordship of Jesus could not rest short of the Chalcedonian proclamation of double homoousion inseparable from Lordship of Jesus Christ because integral to it. Notwithstanding this proclamation, the sub-theological resistance to the historical Lordship of Jesus the Christ continues, in the East as in the West, traveling under gnostic auspices long outworn.
[172] I Tim. 2:5. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (RSV).
[173] Marcel Richard observes :
Saint Hippolyte a été, en son temps, un personnalite aussi remarquable qu’un Clement d »Alexandrie ou un Origène, et d’une égale notorieté. Ses nombreux écrits ont été lus pendant longemps et ont exercé une durable influence.
S. Hippolyte de Rome, » Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, t. vii, première partie, cc, 531-71 (Paris : Beauchesne, 1969),[hereafter, Hippolyte], 531 : .
Marcel.Richard’s densely-written article informs the present account of Hippolytus’ Christological and Trinitarian doctrine.
[174] On the other hand, M. Richard finds the textual evidence of his doctrine to be in so fragmented a state that its reconstitution is hazardous:
Or; il n’existe aucune édition satisfaisante des fragments de cet auteur, aucun index valable de son vocabulaire, aucune étude d’ensemble sur son style et sa doctrine. Il n’est pas surprenant, dans ces conditions, de constater une véritable anarchie dans le jugements portés soit sur l’heritage littéraire soit sur la personnalité de celui-ci.
Ibid., 534.
[175] The most recent is a work by Allen Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century. Communities in Tension before the Emergence of a Monarch-Bishop. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 31 (Leiden: E. Brill, 1995. Brent’s interest in Hippolytus is socio-political, and the web he weaves vividly exemplifies that academic anarchy observed by M. Richard, whose own theory, criticized in the pages following, nonetheless does recognize in Hippolytus a theologian rather than a character in a puppet show.
[176] Photius, Bibliothèque, Collection des Universités de France, Tome II, Codices 84-185. Texte établi et traduit par René Henry (Paris: Societé des éditions Les Belles Lettres, 1991) [hereafter, Bibliothèque] Codex 121, p. 95, 1. 24
[177] Louis Bouyer has proven the apostolicity of the Spirit Christology beyond question. He has shown that it is simply that Christology which recognizes in Jesus Christ the Lord the primordial subject of the Father’s mission of the Son, and thus the primordial subject of the Incarnation and the Kenōsis. See endnote 365, supra.
[178] Marcel. Richard, Hippolyte, 531. While Pope Zachary was an exemplary Pope, there is no reason apart from his office to suppose him to have been a theologian of mark. If simply as Pope he may be regarded as a theologian, so also may Pope Dionysius, who wrote in Greek to the See of Alexandria in the middle of the third century, challenging the orthodoxy of his namesake, Dionysius the Great, its Metropolitan. His martyred predecessor, Sixtus II, had also been in correspondence with Dionysius the Great, whose Letters, as edited by Charles Feltoe, were all in Greek, including the one sent to Sixtus II: so also was the Refutatio, Dionysius of Alexandria’s extended response to the imputations of Dionysius of Rome. Cf. Quasten, Patrology II, 233-42.
[179] Richard considers Hippolytus’ authorship of the Apostolic Tradition “très discutable:” Hippolyte, 534, 545. In the latter column, Richard chooses not to comment upon B. Botte’s recently-published critical edition of the Apostolic Tradition; Ser. Sources chrétiennes 1l bis (Paris, 1968), then under critical discussion. Instead he refers the reader to the article then in preparation by Aimé-Georges Martimort and published as « Tradition Apostolique », Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, t. xv (Paris: Beauchesne, 1991), cc. 1133-35. Martimort there cites M. Richard among those who contest the customary attribution of the Apostolic Tradition to Hippolytus. Richard’s objection to the attribution to Hippolytus of the Apostolic Tradition rests upon the evident Alexandrine flavor of its Greek, of which no trace can be found in Hippolytus’ authentic works, and also upon the insoluble historical problems that are raised by that attribution; cf. Hippolyte, c. 534.
[180] Hippolyte, c. 539-40. The statue honoring Hippolytus, now in the Vatican Museum, on which this material was inscribed, is referred to hereafter simply as “the statue”.
[181] Bibliothèque I, 33. Photius refers to this work, not as the Treatise on the Universe, but as “περὶ τοῦς παντός,” equivalently, De Universo.
[182] Evans, Adversus Praxeas, 23-25. Here Evans relies entirely upon the Contra Noetum, whose attribution to Hippolytus M. Richard has definitively rejected. See Hippolyte, 533.
[184] “The reference in Lk. 1:35 to “πνεῦμα ἅγιον”) is to the pre-existent Christ, the primordial subject of the Father’s Mission: In establishing that fact, this endnote also indicates the need for a thorough revision of the 2011 edition of the Roman Missal .
Lk. 1:24: Μετὰ δὲ ταύτας τὰς ἡμέρας συνέλαβεν Ἐλισάβετ ἡ γυνὴ αὐτοῦ καὶ ἡμριέκρυβεν ἐαυτὴν μῆνας πέντε λέγουέσα
24. After these days his wife Elizabeth conceived and for five monts she hid herself, saying
Lk. 1:25: ὅτι οὕτως μοι πεποίηκεν t κύριος ἐν ἡμέραις αἷς ἐπεῖδεν ἀφεlεῖν τ ὄνειδός μου ἐν ἀνθρώποις.
25 “Thus the Lord has done to me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men.”
Lk. 1:26: Ἐν δὲ τῷ μηνὶ τῷ ἕκτῳ ἀπεστλη ὁ ἄγγελος Γαβριήλ ἀπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ εἰς πόλιν τῆς Γαλιλαὶας □ᾗ ὄνομα Ναζαρέθ‛
26: In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth,
Lk. 1:27: πρὸς παρθένον ἐμνηστεθμἐνην ἀνδρὶ ᾧ ὄνομα Ἰωσὴφ ἐζ οἴκου τ Δαυιδ καἱ τὸ ὄνομα τῆς παρθένου Μαριὰς.
27: to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.
Lk. 1:28: καἱ εἰσελθὼν πρὸς αὐτὴν εἲπεν. χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη, ὁ κύριος μετὰ σοῦ τ
28: and he came to her and said, “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”
Lk. 1:29: ἡ ἐπὶ τῷ λογῳ διεταρἁχθη καἱ διε λογἱσζετο ποταμός εἴν ὁ ἀσπασμός οὗτος.
29: But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be
Lk. 1:30: Καἱ εἲπεν ὁ ἄγγελος αὐτῇ. ΄μή φοβοῦ, Μαριάμ, εὗρες γὰρ χὰριν παρὰ τῷ θεῷ.
30: And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.
Lk. 1:31: καἱ ἰδοὺ συλλήμψῇ ἑν γαστρὶ καὶ τέζῃ υιὸν καἱ καλέσεις τέ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦν.
And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.
Lk. 1:32: oὗtos ἔstai μέγας καἱ υιὸς ὑψἱστου κληθήσεται καἱ δώσει αὐτῷ κύριος ὁ θεὸς τὸν θρόνον Δαωιδ τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ,
He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to hims the throne of his father David,
Lk. 1:33: και βασιλεύσει ἐπί τὸν οἴκον Ἰακὼβ εις τούς αἰῶνας και βασιλείας αὐτοῦ οὐκ ἒσταιν τλος.
and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
Lk. 1:34: εἶπεν dέ Mαριὰμ πρὸς τὸν ἄγγελον πῶς ἔσται τοῦτο, ἐπει ἄνδρα οὐ γινώσκω;
And Mary said to the angel, “How shall this be, since I have no husband?”
Lk. 1:35: Καί ἀποκριθείς ὁ ἄγγελος εἶπεν αὐτεῇ. πνεῦμα ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπὶ σέ, καὶ δύναμις ὑψίστου ἐπισκιάσει σοι. διὸ καὶ τὸ γεννώμενον ἅγιον κληθήσεται υἱὸς θεοῦ.ἐν γήρει
And the angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.
Lk. 1:36: καί idoὺ Ἐλισάβετ ἡ συγγενίς σου καί αὐτὴ συνείληθεν υιὸν αὐτῆς καί αὐτος μὴν ἕκτος ἐστιν αὐτῇ τῇ καλουμἑνῃ στείρᾳ.
And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceeived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who sas called barren.
Nestle, 28 Auflage, 2012) 179-80.
Lk. 1:36: And the Angel said to her: the1 Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the1 power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God (RSV)
1.The RSV translation here supplies definite articles, “The Holy Spirit,” “the power of the Most High” which the Greek does not support. Inasmuch as the objective Personal distinction between the divine Names, e.g., ὁ υἱός and ὁ πατήρ, is conveyed by the prefix of the definite article, the RSV’s insertions of the definite article to preface each of the elements of the Lucan parallelism is an obvious mistranslation of the passage, whose grammatical form, that of a Hebraic parallelism, is made unmistakable by the absence of the definite articles. The RSV reading of Lk. 1:35 simply rejects the balanced connotation of the parallelism. Further the use of the definite article to convey the Church’s faith in the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is clear in the last phrase of the Nicene Creed: “καὶ εἰς τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμα.” The Greek text of the reference to “holy Spirit” in Lk. 1:35 (πνεῦμα ἅγιον) has no definite artcle, and therefore refers, not to the distinct Trinitarian subsistence of the Holy Spirit, but to spiritus Dei, the primordial Christ, So Lk. 1:24-35 was understood until well into the fourth century. Eusebius of Caesarea’ rejection of this, the Spirit Christology, reveals his ignorance, not his insight: see endnote 625, infra.
The same mistranslation occurs in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in 2011 edition of the Roman Missal:
And by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man (The Roman Missal (2011), at 379. This ignorance pervades the new Roman Missal.
The Greek article does not occur in the Greek text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, as Kelly has shown:
καὶ σαρκοθέντα ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου καὶ Μαρίας τῆς παρθενον καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσαντα
J. N. D. Kelly, Early Creeds, at 297.
In the second and third centuries, with practical unanimity (see endnote 513, supra, citing Ernest Evans, Against Praxeas, 64, 65, 71) πνεύματος ἁγίου, “holy spirit, without the article in Lk. 1:35 and in the Constantinopolitan Creed, was understood to refer to Jesus the Christ. The Hebraic parallelism comprising the first sentence of Lk.1:35 emphasizes the single divine agency of the Incarnation. The second sentence states the effect of this divine agency, our Lady’s conception of her Son, the eternal Son of the Father, by conceiving whom she became the Mother of God.
The Greek text places no distinction between “Holy Spirit will come upon you,” and “power of Most High will overshadow you.” “Holy Spirit” and “power of Most High” are the same subject of the Mission from the Father, the primordial Jesus Christ who “emptied himself,”and “became flesh” in Mary’s conception of her Lord.
Evans acknowledges that in the second and third centuries “spiritus dei” was understood to refer to Jesus the Christ: see endnote 511, supra. We repeat his statement here:
The identification of the spiritus dei with the Word who was incarnate was regarded by Tertullian as part of the received tradition. It can be referred to in controversy with the Jews:
Adv. Jud. 13: cum virgo Mariaverbo dei praegnans inveniretur;
and it finds a place in the regula veritatis :
Adv. Prax. 2 : hunc (sc. Sermonem) missum a patre in virginem et ex ea natum.
It is in fact found in a large number of writers, both before and after Tertullian, and probably until the fourth century was the accepted view . . .
Evans, Adversus Praxean, 65.
[185]. Official translation of the Preparatory Document for the Synod on the Eucharist, 2005:
Christ is the “catholicus Patris sacerdos.” Through His human nature the Holy Spirit communicates divine life to creation and humanity, bringing it to perfection. The human nature of Christ is the source of salvation; He is the high priest and prime celebrator of liturgy.
The Eucharist: Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church: Conclusion, Ch. IV, The Liturgy of the Eucharist. Adoremus Bulletin, Vol. XI, No. 5, July-August 2005, p. 4.
The unexceptional opening sentence of this excerpt is contradicted by each of the three sentencs which follow it. In the first place, as the Symbol of Chalcedon eight times affirmed, the author of our salvation is the “one and the same Son,” Jesus Christ the Lord. In the second place, Jesus Christ the Lord is not the “human nature of Christ,” nor is the “human nature of Christ” his Person, simply as a matter of definition. Finally, the Holy Spirit’s subsistence in the Trinity is by his Personal relation, i.e., his consubstantiality, with the Father, his sole Source, and with the Second Person of the Trinity, the “one and the same Son,” Jesus Christ the Lord. The relation of the Spirit to the Son is Personal and constitutive.
There are other doctrinal vagaries in the Roman Missal of 2011; Collects offering prayer to God the Father address him as though plural, suggesting an indecision as to whether he is the Trinity or God the Father: e.g.,”O God, who have made the blood of martyrs the seed of Christians . . .” (June 3, St. Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs, Memorial, Collect.
The Christology of St. Thomas does not trump the Council of Chalcedon, even when quoted in the Catechism as though it were authoritative. This confusion has reached a point of troubling an episcopal synod’s discussion of the Eucharist. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith should provide a needed clarification, emphasizing, as did John Paul II in Veritatis splendor, that the Church neither teaches nor relies upon theology.
[186] Bibliothèque 2, Codex 121, 95-96.
[187] Evans, Against Praxeas, 66.
[188] Hippolyte, 548.
[189] Quasten, Patrology II, 163; Crouzel, Origen, 14, is less convinced.
[190] Hippolyte, 538, §4).
[191] Ibid., 535.
[192] The indictment of Hippolytus in “St. Hippolytus of Rome,” The Catholic Encyclopedia VII (1910), as the first antipope relies largely upon the inscription placed on his tomb by Pope Damasus. Maximilian Ihm has recorded it:
Hippolytvs fertvr, premettent cvm ivssa tyranni, presbyter in scisma semper mansisse novati. Tempore qvo gladivs secvit pia viscera matris, devotvs Christo peteret cvm reona piquvm, qvaesisset popvlvs vbinam procedere posset, catholicam dixisse fidem seqverentvr vt omnes. Sic noster jervit confessvs martyr vt esset. Haec avdita refert damasvs probat omnia Christvs.
Hippolytus is said, while the commands of the tyrant pressed hard upon us, to have ever remained as a presbyter in the schism of Novatus. At the time when the sword severed the holy bowels of our mother, when, devoted to Christ, he was seeking the kingdoms of the just.
Commenting on this report, Ihm has written:
According to the inscription over the grave of Hippolytus composed by Pope Damasus, he was a follower of the Novatian schism while a presbyter, but before his death exhorted his followers to become reconciled with the Catholic Church.
M. Ihm, "Damasi epigrammata", Leipzig, 1895, 42, n.37.
Pope Damasus’ anachronistic description of the martyred Hippolytus as an adherent of the Novation schism witnesses to the absence in the latter fourth century of reliable Roman records from the third century, a lack which Maurice Richard.has confirmed However the Pope’s report was taken sufficiently seriously to support thereafter the association of Hippolytus with schism. It is here in point to record the weaknesses in that indictment, which M. Richard has noted.
M. Richard denies that Hippolytus was ever a rival with any of the popes under whom he served, arguing from the failure of his Refutation of all Heresies to pay any attention to the group of supporters whom Callistus had left upon his death. He certainly had no use for Callistus, but between Callistus death in 222 and 235, he wrote the Refutatio, and also became a religious adviser to the Empress Mammaea, the mother of the youthful emperor Severus Alexander. Although not a Christian, she was curious concerning Christianity. At one point he wrote her a letter expounding a point of doctrine which had interested her. He was also in cordial relations with Popes Urban and Pontian, who succeeded Urban in 230. In 235 the youthful Emperor Severus Alexander was murdered by his troops. His successor Maximin resumed the persecution which had lapsed with the death of Septimus Severus, and sentenced Pope Pontian, who had succeeded Urban in the papacy five years earlier, to labor in the mines of Sardinia, effectively a death sentence. Maximin evidently regarded Hippolytus as closely associated with Pontian, for he also was sentenced to the mines, where both soon died. Nothing in Hippolytus’ career suggests any rivalry with the four popes under whom he had served and was still serving when he died. Pope Fabian brought the bodies of Pope Pontian and Hippolytus to Rome for burial. Pontian’s tomb has been found there.. He and Hippolytus wereboth were honored as martyrs.
[193] Hippolyte. 542, 44.
[194] Ibid., 551-52 :
La firme croyance d’Hippolyte à la génération du Verbe avant toute chose lui a permis une Christologie tres saine. En fait, celle-ci part de l’origine du monde et s’étend jusqu’à la Parousie glorieuse du Christ. C’est, sans doute, à la fin des temps que Dieu a envoyé le Verbe, son Fils, son enfant bien-aimé, prendre chair dans le sein de la Vierge pour sauver l’humanité pécheresse. Mais cet événement central de l’économie divine et de l’histoire du monde était déjà prévu au sixième jour de la création. (voir § 6°).
[195] Hippolyte, 548.
[196] Ibid., 548: « Le texte le plus clair est, peut-être, In Dan. IV, II, 5, inspiré par Col. I, 15-18 »:
« Le Père, ayant donc tout soumis à son propre Fils, ce qui est dans les cieux et ce qui est sur terre et ce qui est sous terre, a montré partout quil il était premier né en tout ; premier né de Dieu, afin qu’il soit évident qu’il est second après le Père, Fils de Dieu, premier né avant les anges, afin qu’il apparaissé seigneur des anges, prèmier né d’une vierge, afin qu’il soit vu recréant en lui-même le prèmier creé Adam, prèmier né des morts, afin qu’il devienne prèmisse de notre resurrection. »
[197] Ibid., 551-52
[198] Ibid., 552
[199] Ibid., 545.
[200] Hippolyte, 546-47, § 3.citing the Refutatio:
On comprend, cependant, qu’Hippolyte ait voulu affirmer en premier lieu, contre le gnose et le marcionisme, sa foi en un seul Dieu createur. Il a donc choisi procéder par tableaux successifs : ch. 32, Dieu seul createur ; ch. 33 le Père createur par le Verbe en un seul (acte) « τó κατᾲ ἕν ». Cette disposition montre que, dans la pensée de l’auteur, la génération du Verbe était liée de quelque façon à la création. Il faut cependant noter que le texte ne dit pas cela explicitement. Il nous apprend seulement que cette génération était anterieur à toutε chose créée.
[201] Hippolyte, 552 :
« Le Verbe s’est incarné et est devenu homme et fils d’homme en prenant chair de la Vierge Marie et du Saint Êsprit. Le plus souvent, Hippolyte se content de mentionner la conception virginale. Mais quelques textes très nets montrent qu’il attribuait un grande rôle à l’Êsprit Saint dans cette conception. Il précise trois temps que le Christ a été conçu par la Vierge « non d’un semence , mais du Saint Êsprit. » (De Ant. viii ; In Ben., p. 151 et 270), et emploie quelquefois l’expression « de la Vierge et du Saint Êsprit » (De Ant. xliv ; In ben., p. 76, 5-6; 169, 2-3; In. Psalm. § 22; In Prov., frag. 55) Dans sa typologie du métier à tisser (De Ant. IV) la trame est la « saint chair tissuée dans l’Êsprit » ; dans celle de l’arche d’alliance, le corps du Christ est « doré d’or pur à l’intérieur par le Verbe, à l’extérieur par l’Êsprit Saint. » (In Dan. IV, 24, 3), ou « orné à l’intérieur par le Verbe et protegé à l’extérieur par l’Esprit. » (In Eleanam, Pseudo-Irenée, fg. VIII).
Cette génération du Verbe κατᾲ σὰρκα est quelquefois opposée a sa première génération avant toute chose, dite, dans ce cas, κατᾲ πνεῦμα. (In ben., p. 76, 7-9; 110, 1-2). Σαρξ est de beaucoup le mot le plus souvent employé par Hippolyte pour désigner l’humanité du Christ. Celui-ci utilise aussi quelquefois τὸ σῶμα.
A une ou deux exceptions près (In Dan. iv, 37, 2 ; In Balaam, fg. 37), il réserve ce mot, d’une part à sa typologie de l’arche d’alliance, (In Dan. iv, 24, 3 et 5 ; In Eleanum, pseudo-Irénée, fg. viii ; Ad reginam, Symbolae osloenses, t. 38, p. 79), d’autre part au corps du Christ après sa mort (In duos latrones i-iii ; In magnam Odam iii ; In Samsonem I, vi-vii ; In Prov. fg. 52). Quand ces mots ne suffisent pas, il emploie ἄνθρωπος (In Dan. ii, 27, 6 ; iv, 39, 5 ; In Cant. ii, 23 ; In ben., p. 38, 2 , etc.) La reste du vocabulaire utilisé par Hippolyte pour décrire l’incarnation du Verbe est très varié, mais aussi simple et concrete. Les seuls termes « techniques » que l’on rencontre dans ses commentaires sont le participe σαρκοθείς (In ben. p. 36 1, et 76, 6) et le substantif, ἐνανθρςῴπεσις (In Dan. iv, 39, 4 ; De distrib. talent.)
[202] Hippolyte, 537, citing S. D. F. Salmond’s English translation of the treatise On Christ and the Antichrist in ANF 5, ANCL 9 and, in Hippolyte 538, citing Salmond’s translation of the Commentary on Daniel, which appears in the same volume.
[203] Hippolyte, 548:
Il est exact que’Hippolyte emploie plus souvent l’expression néotestamentaire παῖς θεοῢ. à propos du Verbe incarné qu’à propos du Verbe ἄσαρκος. Νéanmoins, cette expression était pour lui un titre divin du Christ, synonym de « Fils de Dieu. »
[204] Ibid. M. Richard regards this passage as a clear instance of the application of παῖς θεοῢ to the pre-incarnate «Verbe ἄσαρκος »:
Τíς δè ἦν Ỉακώβ καί Ỉσρήλ, ἀλλ’ ἤ ὁ ἅγιος τοῦ θεοῦ προτότοκος παῖς (Ιn ben. p. 66-67) [emphasis added].
It may be pointed out that Hippolytus would not have assimilated Jacob and Israel to a nonhistorical Son of God.
[205] Hippolyte, 550
Le livre de la Genèse contient deux récits de la création d’Adam. Le premier (Gen. 1, 26-27) présent l’homme créé à l’image et à la ressemblance de Dieu. Le second (Gen. 2, 7) present cette création d’une manière plus concrète, Pour Hippolyte, le premier récit était prophétique. Il concernait en premier lieu l’humanité du Christ et annonçait l’adoption des saints comme frères par le Christ, comme fils par Dieu le Père, Seul le second rapportait le fait historique de la création du premier homme Adam. Il a certainement développe largement ce schéma dans son Commentaire sur l’Hexaéméron. Dans ce qui a survéçu de son œuvre, il ne reste que quelques traces, suffisante cependant pour définir les grandes lignes de son exégèse.
[206] Ibid., 551 :
Les commentaires d’Hippolyte sont très sobres sur la création de l’homme et In Dan. ii, 7,8, est, sans doute, le texte le plus explicite. Sa Refutatio ne s’attarde pas beaucoup plus sur ce sujet. Elle dit seulement que Dieu a créé l’homme ἐκ πασῶν σύνθετον οὐσιῶν (x, 33, 7), c'est-à-dire en combinant les quatre éléments (x, 32, 2), et que cet homme n’était ni un dieu raté, ni un ange raté, mais un homme exactement tel que Dieu avait voulu le créé. Photius (Bibli., cod. 48) cite une texte plus précise du De universo.
[207] For Photius’ “texte plus précise” in codex 48, see Bibliothèque 1, Codex 48, 33-35, at 34.
[208] Hippolyte, 550:
Le fg. iii du Commentaire sur l’Hexaéméron commente Gen. 2, 7 : « Dieu modela l’homme (avec) le poussière de la terre. Que signifie cela ? Dirons-nous, selon la supposition de certains, que trois hommes ont été produits, un pneumatique, un psychique et un terrestre ? Ce n’est pas possible, car tout le récit est sur un seul homme, En effet le (verbe) « nous ferons » concerne l’avenir ». La dernièr phrase écarte résolument Gen. 1, 26 de la discussion sur la création d’Adam et nous donne la raison : ce verset concerne l’avenir.
[209] Hippolyte, 551:
Chez St. Paul, si l’on excepte I Cor 11, 7, la formation de l’homme à l’image du Christ, Verbe et Fils de Dieu, est une thème sotériologique et eschatologique (Eltester, op. cit., p. 156-166).
La conclusion de la Refut. (x, 34,5) exploite ce thème in corrélation avec Gen. 1, 26-27. « Car le Christ est Dieu au-dessus de toutes choses, lui qui a prescrit de purifier les hommes du péché pour transformer en nouveau le vieil homme, lui qui a appelé celui-ci « image » dès le principe, manifestant sa figure διᾲ τúπου son affection pour toi. Si tu écoute ses saints commandements et si, en imitant celui qui est bon, bon tu deviens, tu serais semblable ᾲ lui, comblé d’honneures par lui. En effet, Dieu n’est pas pauvre, et il te fera dieu pour sa gloire. » Ceci nous apprend comment Hippolyte concevait la réalisation finale de la prophetie de Gen. 1, 26-27.
[210] Hippolyte, 546-47, § 3.
[211] Ibid., 553:
Par son incarnation, le Verbe a recréé, rémodelé le premier homme Adam. Ce thème est particulièrement bien développé dans le fg. 1 In Magnam Odam. Il est mentionné plusieurs fois allieurs. Le Verbe « est roi et juge de choses terrestres car il a été engendré homme parmi les hommes, remodelant (ἀναπλᾴσσων) par lui-même Adam » (De Ant. xxvi). Il devait naître « premier-né de la Vierge, afin d’apparaître remodelant en lui-même le premier-homme Adam ». (In Dan. iv, 11, 5). « Il a traversé le sein de la Vierge, réalisant un nouveau remodelage (καινην ἀνᾴπλασιν) d’Adam. » (In Prov. fg. 22).
[212] Ibid., 550-51 :
Pour y voir plus clair, il faut considérer la doctrine d’Hippolyte sur la théologie de l’image. Il expose celle-ci (In Dan. ii, 27, 6-8) à propos de la statue d’or élevée par Nabuchodonosor in la dix-huitième année de son règne et dont les dimensions étaient soixante coudées de hauteur et six de larguer.
Ces chiffres lui ont inspiré le commentaire suivante : « 6. Par les dix-huit ans, il a imité Jésus, le Fils de Dieu, qui, pendans son séjour dans le monde, a ressucité sa propre image, homme, et l’a montrée pure et immaculée comme l’or aux disciples.―7. Par la hauteur de soixante coudées (il a imité) les soixante patriarches par lesquels, selon la chair, l’image de Dieu, le Verbe, a été préfigurée et prémodelée, puis élevée audessus de tous les patriarches.―8. Par la largeur de six coudées il a indiqué l’Hexaéméron. C’est en effet le sixième jour que l’homme, modelé avec la poussière, est apparu. »
[213] Ibid., 551 :
La théologie de l’image qui se dégage de ce texte est manifestement inspirée de saint Paul. C’est evident pour l’expression « l’image de Dieu, le Verbe » du § 7 (voir II Cor. 4, 4 ; Col. 1,15 ; Fr. W, Eltester, Εἰκών im Neuen Testament , Berlin, 1968, p. 130-152). Le thème du § 6 selon lequel l’homme (l’humanité) du Christ est « la propre image » du Fils de Dieu confirme ce que a été dit plus haut sur l’exégèse typologique de Gen. 1, 26-27, et évoque Rom. 8, 29. Enfin, il est très remarquable que le § 8, qui mentionne la création du prremier homme, évite le mot εἰκών et renvoie nettement à Gen. 2, 7.
[214] Hippolyte, 6:
6° La creation de l’homme. Le livre de la Genèse contient deux récits de la création de l’homme. Le premier (Gen.1, 26-27) présente l’homme crée ᾲ l’image et ᾲ la ressemblance de Dieu. Le second (Gen. 2, 7) présent cette création d’une manière plus concrete. Pour Hippolyte, le premier récit était prophetique. Il concernait en premier lieu l’humanité de Christ et annonçait l’adoption des saints comme frères par le Christ, comme fils par Dieu le Père. Seul le second rapportait le fait historique de la création du premier homme Adam. Il a certainement développé largement ce schéma dans son Commentaire sur l’Hexaéméron, Dans ce qui a surveçu de son œuvre, il ne reste que quelques traces, suffisantes cependant ; pour définir les grandes lignes de son exégèse.
[215] Hippolyte, 552-53, § 7.
Le Verbe s’est incarné pour sauver l’humanite pécheresse. Hippolyte présente cette œuvre de la miséricorde divine comme une reprise de la création de l’homme. Ses principales étapes sont l’incarnation, la mort sur la croix, la descente aux infers, la résurrection, l’Église, et la Parousie glorieuse.
[216] Hippolyte, e.g., 547-48:
Il estimait certainement qu’avant la creation le Verbe ne pouvait que demeurer dans le cœur de son Père.
[217] M. Richard’s text :
Il est donc « sortie » du coeur de Dieu avant cette creation, et cette « sortie » est sa première génération. Celle-ci n’a apporté aucun changement en Dieu, car Dieu est absolument immuable (In Dan. ii, 27, 4). Cependant, le Père et le Fils sont deux personnes (In ben., p. 26, 2) ; le Fils est deuxième après le Père.
Ibid.
[218] A signal instance of this exegesis has been provided by Joseph Fitzmyer, S.J.: According to Paul. Studies in theology of the Apostle (New York, Mahwah, N.J.: The Paulist Press, 1992). In Chapter 6, entitled “The meaning of Kephalē in I Cor. 11:3,” Fitzmyer provides an elaborate philological examination of the provenance of the term, which he supposes to control Paul’s use of “Kephalē” in I Cor. 11:3. This empties it of theological significance. Fitzmyer thereafter treats “Kephalē” as a metaphor of no intrinsic interest. So much for ‘theology of the Apostle,’ who proceeded further to establish further the meaning of “Kephalē” in Col. 1:18, Eph. 1:10 and 5:21-33. Paul’s assertion in Romans 5 of our solidarity at once with the fallen first Adam and with the risen second Adam is flatly incomprehensible apart from I Cor. 11:3, as also is the dialectical tension in us between Spirit and flesh that is the consequence of our twin solidarities.
The same exegetical method controls Chapter 7, “The Christological Hymn in Phil. 2: 6-11.” After another learned philological survey of the putative sources of vv. 6-11, Fitzmyer dismisses the Name of historical subject of the hymn, whom the text asserts, by Name, to be the pre-existent Jesus, the subject of the Kenōsis, whose pre-existence can only be primordial. Instead, Fitzmyer substitutes for the primordial Jesus the nonhistorical eternal Logos, sensu negante, whose pre-existence can only be ab aeterno :
Have this in mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a Cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed upon him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Phil. 2: 5-11 (RSV)
Fitzmyer’s substitution of an abstraction for the concrete historicity of Jesus the Lord imposes upon Paul’s recital of the event of the Kenōsis the radically nonhistorical Thomist Christology. He does so as though its hallmark, the dehistoricization of all that it touches, were normative for exegesis as such. The Thomist dehisoricization of the subject of the Incarnation, and thus the subject of the Kenōsis of Phil. 2:6-7, entails the radical suppression of Paul’s Spirit Christology and, thereby, the suppression of the apostolic tradition of the first four ecumenical councils whose subject is Jesus, not the nonhistorical Logos. The Fourth ecumenical council asserted eight times the doctrine of Irenaeus, that Jesus, the one and the same Son, is the subject of the Church’s faith. The apostolic tradition which it defined knows nothing of a nonhistorical subject of the Incarnation.
Under Fitzmyer’s exegetical criteria, the pre-existence of Jesus the Christ, as affirmed in Phil. 2;6, ceases to be primordial, and so ceases to be historical. The subject of the Kenōsis, equivalently the subject of the Incarnation, becomes the eternal Son, which is to say, Jesus the Christ has been abstracted from history, removed from the economy of salvation. The Kenōsis, the self-abasement, of the abstract Word then becomes the Platonically-inspired incongruity of God’s abstract immanence in the relativities of the created world. But the apostolic tradition is the celebration of the Event-immanence in our fallen history of the historical Jesus the Christ, sent by the Father to pour out the Holy Spirit upon the universe shattered by the fall of the first Adam, restored to its free nuptial unity by the second Adam, .
Fitzmyer’s close associate, the late Raymond Brown, imposed the same Thomist constriction upon Jn. 1:14:
-became flesh. “Flesh”stands for the whole man. It is interesting that even in the unsophisticated christological terminology of the 1st century it is not said that the Word became a man, but equivalently that the Word became man.
The Gospel according to John, i-xii), 13; see also Brown's The Critical Meaning of the Bible (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), ch. 1, passim
In the first place, the assertion of Jn. 1:14 that the Word “became flesh” is not “equivalently” an assertion that the Word “became man.” “Word” in Jn. 1:14 does not refer to the non-historical “Logos” of the Thomist Christology, and “flesh” (i.e., sarx) does not mean “man” in the abstract or generic sense which Brown assumes. In the Old Testament as in the New, “flesh” has always a historical meaning; it is always a reference to our fallen submission to mortality. In Jn. 1:14, “logos sarx egeneto” designates the Event of Jesus’ entry into our human fallenness, his loss of personal integrity, and his consequent subjection to death. In sum, the prerequisite subject of the Incarnation, and of its equivalent, the Kenōsis, is the primordially integral Jesus, as set out in Phil. 2:6-7.
It is of course true that “flesh” stands for the whole man, but only as historical, i.e., as fallen, as deprived of the integrity proper to the original good creation, thus the primordial Jesus of Phil. 2:6-7 whose “becoming flesh” is his Kenōsis, his Personal submission to death in obedience to his Mission from the Father.
Brown chooses to refuse the scriptural meaning of sarx in favor of its Thomist dehistoricization, whereby it is rendered impersonal and consequently categorial, to become generic or abstract human nature. Brown stresses this abstraction; he notes a subtlety “even in the unsophisticated christological terminology of the 1st century” supposedly deployed in Jn. 1:14, in that this text did not assert that the Logos became a human Person: i.e., “not a man:. This observation, while intending only to deny the Personal humanity of Jesus, reveals more than it intends, namely that Brown has missed the actual subtlety of that text. The subject of the historical Incarnation can hardly be non-historical, despite the adamantine Thomist refusal to admit the human historicity of the Johannine Logos, which can only be that of the human Person, Jesus, the Son of Theotokos and of the Father, “one and the same Son,” one and the same Person. It is obvious that the primordial Jesus could not “become” a man, for he is the immanent head of all men, the source of the humanity of those who are created in him.
This is the faith of the Church, twice defined in the fifth century: Jesus is Personally consubstantial “with us” as well as with his Father. He is therefore incapable of “becoming” what he is primordially, the Head, the Bridegroom, of the second Eve, of the primordial Church, of the New Creation. Jn. 1:14 records his Personal entry into our flesh, our fallenness, our degradation, our mortality’ it does not record his becoming “a man.”
Brown, like Fitzmyer, takes for granted the Thomist dehistoricization of Logos of Jn. 1:14; see his earlier denial (The Gospel According to John, 4) that Jn. 1:1 really means “In the beginning was the Word.” He cannot but deny the clear meaning of this passage, for it is obvious that the dehistoricized Word, the Thomist subject of Prologue, the abstractly eternal Word who, per impossibile, “was made flesh,” cannot be referred to a “beginning.” his pre-existence, as abstract, can only be eternal.
In the end, the criterion by which Catholic exegesis exists is the Catholic tradition, radically liturgical, hence Eucharistic, hence doctrinal: “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Abstraction from the historicity of that tradition is abstraction from the Catholic faith, whose historicity is that of the apostolic tradition whose full expression is the Eucharist.
[219] Hippolyte, 548.
L’opinion courante―et c’est un des méfaits du Contra Noetum―est que, selon Hiippolyte, le Verbe n’est devenu Fils, ou, du moins, Fils parfait de Dieu, et Enfant de Dieu, que par l’incarnation. Tout ce qui a survécu de l’œuvre authentique de cet auteur proteste contre cette accusation
[220] Ibid.; see Hippolyte 554, supra, with specific reference to Col. 1:15.
[221] Hippolyte, 548.
« C’était la thème centrale du système theologique d’Hippolyte. »
[222] S. T. Prima Pars, q. 43, aa. 1-8. Cf. the opening paragraph of Volume III.
[223] Jean Daniélou, , Message Évangelique], 231-48.
[224] Hippolyte, 547
Hippolyte ne s’est attardé à scruter la vie intérieure de Dieu avant toute création. Il n’avait, naturellement, aucune hésitation sur l »éternité du Verbe (In magnam Odam, fg. i ; In ben. p. 104, 2). Mieux que la laborieuse explication a l’usage des païens de Réfut. x, 33, 1, la comparaison du Verbe caché dans le cœur du Père *(ἐν καρδίᾳ πατρὸς ὤν gr.) ᾲ une vase de parfum scellé.(In. Cant. II, 5) permet d’entrevoir sa pensée. Avant la création, il n’y avait que Dieu seul et, dans son cœur, le Verbe. Dès le premier instant de la création, le Verbe agit comme exécuteur des volontés de son Père. Il est donc « sorti »du coeur de Dieu » avant cette création et cette « sortie » est sa première génération. Celle-ci n’a apporté aucun changement en Dieu, car Dieu est absolument immuable (In Dan. ii, 27, 4). Cependant, le Père et le Fils sont deux personnes (In ben., p. 26, 2) ; le Filst est deuxième après le Père (In Dan. iv, ii, 5).
[225] Ibid., ut supra :
Avant la création, il n’y avait que le Dieu, seul, et dans son cœur, le Verbe. … Dieu est absolument immuable (In Dan. ii, 27, 4)
[226] Hippolyte, c. :548 :
Il ne dit pourtant nulle part que le Verbe était inferieur au Père et affirme souvent, sans la moindre restriction, la divinité du Christ.
Inasmuch as within this cosmological context, although Hippolytus knows the Father to be the cause of the Trinity, he does not understand him to be the eternal Archē of the Trinity. I.e., he does not recognize the Father precisely as the Head who is, immanent within the Trinitarian substance as a consubstantial member, who is “Father,” not in the sense of being the Creator of all things, but rather as eternally generating the eternal Son. This archaic subordinationism appears in Justin’s notion of the absolute Father’s Naming of the Son, and also in Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean 5. It is an echo of the cosmological notion of the one God from which Justin’s exaltation of the Son is a departure, and Tertullian’s recognition of it, an anomaly. Its monadism underlies the exploitation of cosmological subordinationism by Arius. Condemned at Nicaea, under vigorous and continued protest, the Arian insistence upon the creaturely standing of the Son could find no support in Justin or Tertullian.
[227] Tertullian, Adversus Praxean 5: see Evans’s translation, Against Praxeas., 93-94.
[228] Hippolyte, 548.
. . . il n’est pas moins évident que l’objet de la querelle était la première génération du Verbe antérieure à toute chose, C’était la thèse centrale du système théologique d’Hippolyte et Calliste n’en voulait pas.
[229] Evans, Against Praxeas, 135.
[230] Hippolyte, 549:
Le Saint-Ésprit est un des points le plus mystérieux de la doctrine de Hippolyte. C’est partout dans son œuvre, aussi bien dans ses traités apologétiques que dans ses commentaires. Et, cependant, le seul exposé systématique de sa théologie qui ait survécu, Refut. x, 32-34, l’ignore absolument. Cet exposé nous assure que seul le Verbe a été engendré de Dieu. Seul est il sorti de l’Être, et c’est purquoi il est Dieu et substance de Dieu.(33, 1 et 8). Au Verbe, Hippolyte oppose la création, tout entière sortie du néant, d’abord les quatre éléments, feu et esprit (πνεῦμα), eau et terre; puis les anges (feu), les astres (feu et esprit), les poissons et les oiseaux (eau), les reptiles et les quadrupèdes (terre), enfin l’homme (les quatre éléments) (33, 4-7). D’autre parte, après le traité De universo (Photius, Bibl. Codex 48) Dieu a fait l’âme de l’homme avec la ;partie la plus noble de l’esprit. Où placer le Saint-Êsprit dans ce système ? Et pourtant, dès le début de la Refutatio (Praef. 6) Hippolyte annonce aux lecteurs son intention de leur communiquer généreusement ὃσα παρέχει τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμα.
[231] Hippolyte 549, §5.
[232] Hippolyte, 553 .
Le Verbe s’est incarné pour sauver l’humanite pécheresse. Hippolyte présente cette œuvre de la miséricorde divine comme une reprise de la création de l’homme. Ses principales étapes sont l’incarnation, la mort sur la croix, la descente aux infers, la résurrection, l’Église, et la Parousie glorieuse.
[233] Hippolyte, 552:
Le Verbe s’est incarné et est devenu homme et fils d’homme en prenant chair de la Vierge Marie et du Saint-Esprit. Le plus souvent Hippolyte se content de mentionner la conception virginale. Mais quelques textes très net montrent qu’il attribuait un grande rôle à l’Esprit Saint dans cette conception.
[234] Hippolyte, 553:
Par son incarnation, le Verbe a recréé, rémodelé le premier homme Adam. Ce thème est particulièrement bien développé dans le fg. 1 In magnam Odam. Il est mentionné plusieurs fois alleurs. Le Verbe « est roi et juge de choses terrestres car il a été engendré homme parmi les hommes, remodelant (ἀναπλᾴσσων) par lui-même Adam » (De Ant. xxvi). Il devait naître « premier-né de la Vierge, afin d’apparaître remodelant en lui-même le premier-homme Adam ». (In Dan. iv, 11, 5). « Il a traversé le sein de la Vierge, réalisant un nouveau remodelage (καινὴν ἀνᾴπλασιν) d’Adam. » (In Prov. fg. 22))
[235] Hippolyte, 549:
Seul est il sorti de l’Être, et c’est purquoi il est Dieu et substance de Dieu.(Refut. x, 33, 1 et 8).
[236] Message Évangélique, 152. Daniélou introduces Chapter ii, Book ii, of this work, with a summary statement of Justin’s theology, 147-56, which he develops in detail throughout this invaluable study. That preliminary summary is the source of many of the references to Justin’s theology in what follows.
[237] M. Richard, Hippolyte, 549.
[238] Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, at 135. See also J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines,
[239] Henri Crouzel and Manlio Simonetti, Origène. Traité des principes, Tome I: Traité critique de la version de Rufin, traduction par Henri Crouzel et Manlio Simonetti. Col. Sources chrétiennes 252 (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1978) ; Ibid., Tome II (Livres I & II) : Commentaire et Fragments par Henri Crouzel et Manlio Simonetti : Col. Sources chrétiennes 253 (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1978); Ibid., Tome III (Livres III et IV). Introduction, Texte critique de la Philocalie et de la version de Rufin, Traduction par Henri Crouzel et Manlio Simonetti. Col. Sources chrétienne 268 (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1980) ; Ibid., Tome IV (Livres III et IV): Commentaire et Fragments par Henri Crouzel et Manlio Simonetti. Col. Sources chrétienne 269 (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1980). Ibid.,Tome V : Compléments et Index. Col. Sources chrétiennes 312 (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1984). These volumes are hereafter cited as Traité des principes I, II, III, and IV. Cf. Crouzel, Origen, xiii.
[240] A. S. Worrall’s fine translation of Crouzel’s Origène (Paris: Lethielleux, 1985), was published as Origen (New York: Harper and Row; Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Ltd, 1989). All references in this exposition of Origen’s theology to Crouzel’s classic work refer to Worrall’s translation unless otherwise indicated.
[241] The description of theology as “systematic” need not mean, as apparently it does for Crouzel, (cf. Origen, 168) that it be locked into a network of necessary reasons, with the consequent imposition of that determinism upon the freedom of the Catholic tradition. This rationalization of ‘system’ has been rejected by Henri de Lubac in Surnaturel (ser. Théologie 8 (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1946), and by Hans Urs von Balthasar, definitively, in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Vol. V: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age (1991), which culminates his Herrlichkeit. A “system” of theologoumena certainly implies their intrinsic coherence, but does not thereby bar the freedom of that coherence, a point missed by von Balthasar in his recourse to a theological aesthetics characterized by its rejection of any systematic interest. In describing Origen’s theology as systematic, we do no more than did Rufinus, who recognized that its hypotheses constitute “a connected body of doctrine.” Origen certainly intends his “research (gymnastikos) theology” to be a rationally integrated, i.e., coherent, set of hypotheses, for he wrote it to assist educated Christians in defending their faith against the attacks upon it by the Gnostics, Marcionites and pagans who nearly overwhelmed the Church in the third century.
[242] In two places in the Peri Archon, i.e., II, 6, 2, 51-88, and III, 4, 145-49, Origen affirms the foundation of his theology on the communications of idioms in Jesus the Lord. In the latter place, Origen is explicit that this is a communication in Jesus of his human and divine Names.
Haec vero anima, quae in Iesu fuit, priusquam sciret malum, elegit bonum; et quia dilexit justitium et odiit iniquitatem, propterea unxit eam deus oleo laetitiae prae particicipibus suis. Oleo ergo laetitiae unguitur, cum verbo dei immaculata foederationa conjuncta est et per hoc sola omnium animarum pecccata incapax fuit, quia filii dei bene et plene capax fuit; ideoque et unum eum ipso est atque eius vocabulis nuncupatur et Jesus Christus appellatur, per quam omnia facta esse dicuntur (emphasis added).
Traité des principes III, iv, 410 140-49. . On the facing page 411, the last clause of the excerpt, underlined supra, is translated as follows :
c’est pourquoi 34 elle est un avec lui, on la nomme des mêmes vocables que lui et on l’appelle Jésus-Christ, par qui, dit l’Ècriture, tout a été fait (emphasis added).
34. Traité des principes IV, 182. Read together with the preceding Note 33, Note 34 registers Origen’s departure, in his exegesis of the italicized quotations of the Old Testament in the excerpt supra, from his usual reliance upon the four senses of Scripture; Crouzel points out an exegetical use of three senses of Scripture which de Lubac regards as abstract, finding in Origen the source of the patristic preference for four senses of Scripture explored in his Éxégèse médiévale.
Ibid., 411.
This “unum” (“un;” “Ἥν,” “Ἥνωσις”) is Origen’s theological affirmation of the free unity of the inexhaustible mysterium fidei, the Event of the unity of the fullness of divinity and of humanity in the Person of Jesus the Lord. See also Peri Archon 2, 11, 7; Commentary on John 1, 16, 92-93, and Traité des principes II, 252, Note. 49. Adele Monaci Castagno, Origène: Dizionario; la cultura, il pensiero, le opere (Roma: Città Nuova Editrice, 2000), s.v. Figlio, 1, La nominazione del Figlio, 162, provides a detailed account of Origen’s stress upon communcation of Names in the unique subject who is Christ,
[243] A. S. Worrall, the editor-translator of Crouzel's Origène, has provided, p. 182, note a, and p. 186, note b, the translation of the Preface included in G. W. Butterworth's translation (1936) of Koetschau's edition (1913) of the Peri Archon. Butterworth's translation of the Koetschau edition of Peri Archon was reissued in 1966 as a Harper Torchbook, and has been widely distributed.
[244] These anomalies arise out of Origen’s attempts to accommodate his emphasis upon the communication of idioms to the Middle Platonic notion of the divine as the absolute, as in Peri Archon II, 6, 3. E.g., Crouzel, in Origen, 237, note 9, cites Origen’s Homily XIV on Jeremias in support of his remark that the Origen limits the death of Christ to his humanity, in that the eternal Son cannot die. The same misapprehension informs Origen’s Commentary on John: see Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 202, § 482, citing 28, 4: where we read, “For the Image of the invisible God, the First-Born of all creation, is incapable of death.” Such statements, e.g., Origen’s difficulties with Jesus’ kenōsis, discussed by Crouzel in Origen, 193, and again in 312, are in evident tension with Origen’s repeated assertions of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord. However, in Traité des principes IV, Note 38, pp. 255-57, in an extended review of texts in which Origen distinguishes between those actions of Jesus which he would assign to his humanity, and those which he would assign to his divinity, Crouzel concludes with the assertion that Origen never ceases to insist upon the Personal unity of Christ:
Cela ne mérite pas scandale, car Origène insiste constamment sur l’union inséparable du Verbe et de l’âme.
Traité des principes IV, 257, Note 38, cf. p. 560 supra.
Such cosmological confusion as enters into Origen’s theology does not shake his faith in its foundation, the Personal unity of Christ the Lord, and the substantial unity of the Trinity. However, over against his insistence upon the Personal unity of Jesus, the present writer, intent upon upholding the systematic unity of Origen’s “research theology,” finds that prospect undercut by Origen’s supposition that the Risen Lord is no longer human. De Lubac provides the Greek text and its translation, and corroborating texts from another homily, in which Origen’s reasoning is elaborated. De Lubac’s concluding remark indicates his acceptance of it, confident that it is assimilable to Origen’s exegetical stance, which is intent of the historicity of Scripture.
HJer, hom. 15, 6: Εἰ καὶ ἦν ἄνθρπος, ἀλλὰ νῦν οὐδαμῶς ἐστιν ἄνθωπος [Although he was human, he is now in no way human.] (p. 130). Cf. HLev, hom. I, 4: “What the Savior did in his body, the heavenly fire has carried it away . . . .Some wood was necessary, however to light this fire; for the Passion of Christ in the flesh was up to the point of wood. But from the moment he was suspended on the wood, the economy of the flesh came to an end, and in raising the dead, he ascended to heaven, where the nature of the fire traced the path for him. That is why the Apostle said: ‘If we have known Christ according to the flesh, now we no longer know him in that way.’” (pp. 286-87).
De Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture according to Origen (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2007), p-. 262, note 206.
We will come across this text further on. Here and now, it is well to note that the “flesh” which Jesus transcended in his Ascension, is not his humanity: Seated at the right hand of the Father, he remains “one and the same Son.” By his death and resurrection, Jesus fulfilled his Mission; in returning to the Father, he resumed the integrity which in his Incarnation and kenōsis he had foregone.
Some sixty pages further on, Henri de Lubac describes Origen’s understanding of God the Father, and in so doing clarifies to an extent the preceding passage:
. . . . Out of nothing, he begets sons.244
In himself as in his action, no image depicts him better, perhaps, than the image of Fire. Origen likes to repeat and to comment on the words of Scripture: Our God is a consuming Fire (Deut. 4:24). Now this Fire is that of Love 245 The ardent hearths that are spirits in their original purity are lit by this Fire.246 It is this fire that Jesus, like the Seraph of Isaiah247 has come to bring on earth: a living and intelligent Fire, a Fire that discerns, a Fire that judges, a Fire that burns at the same time as it clarifies,248a salutary Fire249 that consumes the iniquity and all the dross it finds in the creature. A spiritual Fire that consumes all the opacities that our coarse understanding applies to it.250
244 PA 4, 4, 8: “Volens Deus, qui natura bona est habere quibus bene faceret et qui adeptis suis beneficiis laetarentur, fecit dignas creaturas, id est, quae cum digne capere possent quos et genuisse se filios dicit » [
God, who is good by nature, wishing to have recipients of his benevolence who would rejoice in the gifts they had obtained, made creatures who were worthy of him, that is, who would be able to receive him worthily and whom he has begotten as his sons, as he asserts (p. 359). It is by this text and the preceding ones that we must understand, in completing it, the text of the Prologue to the commentary on the Song of Songs: “Hic ergo paracletus, spiritus veritatis, . . circuit quaerens si inveniat dignas et capaces animas, quibus revelat magnitudinem caritatem huius, quae ex Deo est” [Therefore, this Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, . . .goes around seeking for any souls he may find that are worthy and receptive, to whom he might reveal the greatness of this love, which is from God] (p.74).
245 Deut. 4:24.
246 PA 2, 8, 3: Sermo divinus ignem esse Deus dixit. . . Sed et de angeloruim substantia ita ait: ‘Qui facit angelos suos spiritus et ministros suos ignem urentem’, et alibi : Apparuit angelus Domini in flammis ignis in rubro’ Insuper etiam mandatum accepimus, ut simus ‘spiritu ferventes’[The word of God has said that God is a fire. . . But it also says concerning the substance of angels “Who makes his angels spirits and his servants burning fire”, and elsewhere it says, “The angel of the Lord appeared in a fiery flame in the bush.” Furthermore we also have received the command to be “fervent in spirit”] (p. 156). HSong, hom. 2,9: “Creator universitatis, cum vos conderet, inseruit cordibus vestris semina caritatis [The Creator of the universe, when he made you, implanted in your hearts the seeds of charity] (p.55)
247His, hom. 4, 4: “Quis est iste unus de Seraphim? Dominus meus Jesus Christus; iste juxta dispensationem carnis missus est, habens in manu sua carbonem et dicens: Ignem veni mittere super terram et utinam iam ardeat!” [Who is this among the Seraphim? It is my Lord Jesus Christ―he has been sent according to the economy of the flesh, having in his hand the coal and saying, « I have come to cast fire upon the earth and I would that it were already burning! (p. 262)
248 PA 1, 1, 1 (P. 17) CPs 4, 7 (1164AB) CPs 67, 3 (1505B). HJer, hom 20, 8 (pp. 190-91). Compare PA 3, 1, 10-11 (pp. 210, 212)
249 (276B).
De Lubac, History and Spirit, 268-69
Because the concern here is over the dehumanization of Jesus by his Resurrection which we find in some of Origen’s remarks concerning the Resurrection of Jesus, and upon which de Lubac has commented supra, it appears that the “salutary fire” can have no impact on him, for in Jesus the Christ there is neither iniquity nor dross. The “spiritual Fire” is another matter, consuming as it does “all the opacities that our coarse understanding applies to it.” It must be that Jesus’ humanity is just such an opacity as “our coarse understanding his approach to Fire himself, evidently the Father, at the Resurrection burns away all that is not divine. This is problematic:”in burning away all that is not divine in him, Jesus would cease to be other than divine: i.e., to be the Christ, the Anointed. Thereby Jesus must cease to be the human Bridegroom and the Church must cease to be the Bride. Other passages raise the possibility that this dehumanization is a process wherein Jesus suffers until he comes again in glory, thus as the Bridegroom, the Son who is the Glory of the Father, and whose own Glory is the Church, the New Creation. In this case, de Lubac’s confidence in Origen’s exegesis may well be warramted, nor does this surmise exhaust the possibilities.
[245] This exegetical posture has found its best-known expression in two works by J. A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963).and But That I Can't Believe! (New York: New American Library, 1967). While Robinson wrote as a scriptural scholar; he was at one time the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, a suburb of London.
[246] The discussion in Volume III, supra, of the universal patristic inability to accept the free unity and intelligibility of substantial reality, which prevented the Fathers from accepting as substantial the free unity of the nuptial “one flesh,” is a consequence, not of the irrationality of the “one flesh,” but of the cosmological confusion imbuing the common-sense notion of substantial unity inherited from the Greek philosophers by way of Boethius and the Pseudo-Dionysius. Uncritical subscription to that view of substance as governed by immanent necessity simply barred the possibility of free unity and free intelligibility, and crippled the patristic theological inquiry by imposing upon it a multitude of dead ends. The patristic preaching was Catholic; the patristic theology was confused by the Fathers’ retention of scraps of cosmological rationality. If we would appreciate the patristic contributeion to the Church’s tradition, we must extricate it from that confusion.
[247] Origen, p. 167, where A. S. Worrall, the translator and editor of that work, has substituted for Crouzel’s French translation of the preface to Book 1 of the Peri Archon, an excerpt from G. W. Butterworth’s English translation of the Preface, in which the phrase, “a connected body of doctrine” appears, there to be commented upon by Crouzel; see also the commentary in Crouzel-Simonetti, Traité des Principes I, Introduction, 51-52. Marguerite Harl also defends the coherence of Origen’s theology in the two Origeniana articles cited in endnote 325. infra.
[248] The restoration of the freedom of the “one flesh” which the first Adam and Eve refused, was achieved by the One Sacrifice of Christ, his institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant and with it, of the universally distributed grace, the trahi a Deo, i.e., the freedom to be free. The primordial nuptial freedom, i.e., the integrity, of the creation in Christ by his Mission from the Father, affirmed in Gen. 2, requires a free reception, for freedom cannot be imposed. The matter is more fully discussed in Vol. III; 339ff.
[249] An easily available, not overly technical, and most informative summary of this current academic grasp of the physical state of the expanding universe is provided by Charles Lineweaver and Tamara Davis in “Misconceptions about the Big Bang,” Scientific American vol. 292, No. 3 (March, 2005), 36-45. A briefer summary to the same effect was published as an Op Ed in the Sunday Opinion section of the New York Times for January 16th, 2011, p. 11: “Darkness on the Edge Of the Universe,” by Brian Greene. Taking the long view; Greene observes that within a hundred billion years, the continually accelerating expansion of the universe will have emptied the night sky of stars; By this time our own star will have been extinguished for about ninety-five billion years. It is evident that much of the current preoccupation with dark matter and dark energy presupposes a massive universe, which is impossible:”mass” is a relative notion and “universe” is not. However, the postulate of a single universe is now questioned―upon what basis is difficult to state.
[250] The confiscation of Leonides’ property evidently did not include his library, elements of which the youthful Origen sold, perhaps driven to do so by poverty, perhaps also because he considered their possession a distraction from his catechetical duties at the School.
[251] Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VI, ii. The biographical details mentioned here are for the most part taken from the first chapter of Crouzel’s Origen.
[252] Ibid.,VI, xi.
[253] Annick Martin, Athanase, 135, note 73, cites Eusebius (H. E. I, 1 - 4; VI, 2, 1 - 3, 8; 14, 11) as the source of the tradition which identifies Pantaneus as the founder of the Didaskaleion in Alexandria. Prof. Martin reports also upon the criticism of this identification by Gustav Bardy, “Aux origines de l’école d’Alexandrie,” Recherches des sciences religieuses 27, 1937, 65-90, and “Pour l’histoire de l’école d’Alexandrie,” Vivre et penser, 2e série, 1942, 80-109. See also P. Nautin, Pantène, Tome commératif du millénaire de la Bibliothèque patriarcal d’Alexandrie, 1953, 145-152. and L. Alfonsi, “Διδασκαλεῖον cristiano,“ Aegyptus 56 (1976) 100-105.
[254] Crouzel, Origen, 8.
[255] Grammar, as a subject included in the “trivium,” the first level of academic instruction, comprised an introduction to Greek literature, together with and was hardly ‘trivial’ in the current sense.
[256] It is unlikely that Demetrius, in choosing Origen to be the director of the School, would have passed over Heraclas had he then been available. It was only some years later that Heraclas and his brother Plutarch approached Origen for instruction in Christianity by reason of his reputation for an unusual ability to communicate his own faith in Christ. They both became converts and also became his students; Plutarch was one of the six martyrs among them whose execution Origen witnessed (Eusebius, HE VI).
Heraclas was older than Origen and possessed a better formal education, that of a finished scholar. Before meeting Origen, he had spent five years under the tutelage of Ammonius Saccas, and earned from him the privilege of wearing the “philosopher’s gown,” confirming and marking his professional standing: this at a time when Origen had yet to begin his own philosophical studies. He undertook them under Ammonius Saccas as had Heraclas, some years after his appointment by Demetrius to the direction of the Catechetical School, thus resuming an interest which earlier he had considered incompatible with his teaching of religion in the School. Heraclas, some years later, after becoming competent under Origen’s instruction to teach and defend the Christian tradition, become his assistant in the School, Origen handed over to him the task of teaching the less advanced students, the catechumens whose primary instruction was in “grammar.” Demetrius had originally assigned this task to Origen, but finding it in tension with his exclusively religious interests, Origen was glad to delegate it to Heraclas. “Grammar,” concerned for the accurate expression of knowledge to be communicated, had an inescapable philosophical component which, in the Hellenistic Orient of the third century, was an eclectic Middle Platonism incompatible with the Christian faith. It is probable that Origen would have been warned of this by his father before experiencing it personally.
Following Origen’s exile in 231, Heraclas directed the Catechetical School for a brief period before succeeding Demetrius as the Bishop of Alexandria in 233. His long subordination to Origen’s direction of the School and to his superior talent may well have rankled. Heraclas had been ordained to the priesthood well prior to Origen’s contested ordination in Caesarea, besides having earned the “philosopher’s gown” from Ammonius Saccas, a level of professional recognition which he does not appear to have awarded Origen; see Edward Watt, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 157-68. Origen appears to have been unaware of any tension. Crouzel, Origen, 11, cites Eusebius’ excerpt of a letter written by Origen while in Alexandria (HE VI, XIX, 12), praising Heraclas’ scholarship: “he devotes himself unceasingly and enthusiastically to the study of Greek literature.” On the other hand, Photius (Biblio., codex 106) reports an anonymous tradition that, upon succeeding Demetrius as the Bishop of Alexandria, Heraclas, having endorsed Demetrius’ condemnation and exile of Origen, imposed a coadjutor upon a suffragan bishop in the Delta, Ammonius of Thmuis, for having welcomed Origen after his exile from Alexandria, and having asked him to preach (Crouzel, Origen, 23-24).
[257] An Alexandrine scholar and author, Theognostus, is reported by Philip Sides, an erratic early fifth century historian, to have succeeded Pierius as the director of the Catechetical School in Alexandria. Grillmeier, Christian Tradition, I, at 159, has accepted this report, writing that Theognostos became the director of the School of Alexandria after Pierius, from 247 or 248, but has extended his supposed direction of the School to 282, when Bishop Theonas (282-300) succeeded him as its director. This report ignores the school’s direction by Dionysius during Heraclas’ episcopacy, and his continuing to do so from 247 as Heraclas’successo to the See of Alexandria. The directors of the School from Heraclas through Dionysius, Theonas, Peter Martyr, and Akhilas all became bishops of Alexandria; see A. Martin, Athanase, 135, note 73.
Upon succeeding Demetrius as bishop of Alexandria, Heraclas evidently dropped his oversight of the Catechetical School for, upon his death, he was succeded byDionysius, a disciple of Origen, who was already directing the Catechetical School when he succeeded Heraclas to the See of Alexandria in 347. When Dionysius succeeded Heraclas as Bishop of Alexandria he appears to have continued to direct the School. Dionysius died in 265-66, and was succeeded by Theonas, himself succeeded in the direction of the School by Pierius in 282. Philip of Sides’ report of Theognostus ‘s reign as director of the Catechetical School from 233 until 282 excludes Dionysius of Alexandria’s succession to the direction of the School when Heraclas became bishop of Alexandria, as well as Dionysius’ retention of that office until his death ca. 266.
More recent scholarship has noted that, Philip of Sides apart, “no other ancient author gives Theognostus such a position,” See ”Theognostus,” The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) at 1614b-1615a. A possible patristic witness to Theognostus as the director of the Catechetical School in a passage excerpted from Athansius by Crouzel relies rather on an editorial note than upon Athanasius:
Il (Athanase) s’oppose à ceux qui prétendet que l’Esprit est créature, cite Math. 12, 31-32, sur le pèché contre l’Esprit et deux exégètes de ce passage, « le très savat et laborieux Origène » et « l’admirable et zélé Theognoste », chef du didascalée dans la seconde moitié du iii siècle.
The source of Crouzel’s citation, in Traité des principes II, 69, of a reference to Theognostus as « chef du didascalée dans le seconde moitié du iii siècle », i.e., Athanasius’ Letter IV ad Serapion, §§ 9-10., is not the cited text of Athanasius, but Joseph Lebon’s edition of Lettres a Sérapion sur la divinité du Saint-Esprit. Ser. Sources Chrétiennes. (Éditions du Cerf, 1947), 189, footnote 2. The view of Theognostus expressed in Lebon’s footnote is no longer tenable.
[258] Annick Martin, ibid., 133-34, note 70, accepts ”la solide demonstration” by R. Goulet, in “Porphyre, Ammonius, les deux Origène et les autres,” Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses, v. 37. (1977), pp. 471-96, that among the students of Ammonius there is an “Origène le Platonicien – mais sans doute, pas Origène chrétien.” Rather than presume to pass upon the complex questions raised by the “two Origen’s” thesis, we here follow Crouzel (Origen, 10-11, 190) who holds to the tradition that there is one Origen, a Christian genius, who studied Platonism under Ammonius Saccas. Professor Martin provides in this note an ample access to the pertinent literature for those who would further pursue the matter.
[259] Traité des principes I, 11-12.
[260] Ibid., II, Note 19, 176.
[261] Origen affirms in detail the plenary authority of Jesus the Lord as the head of all things here and hereafter, unto the consummation of the world. Its foundation is I Cor 15:20-28, with explicit reference to the historical Jesus the Lord, whose office as head is that of the Last Adam: “for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” Origen understands Jesus’ headship to be in economic subordination to his Head, the Father; when his mission is ended, and all things have been subjected to him, he subjects his office to the Fathers, ‘that all may be one in one.” Origen makes no reference in this account of Christs’s headship to the epinoia of the eternal Logos which Crouzel considers to be foundational for his Christology.
Quia ergo non solum regendi uel regnandi uerum etiam oboediendi, ut diximus, reparare uenerat disciplinam, in semet ipso prius complens quod ab aliis uolebat impleri, idcirco non solum usque ad mortem crucis patri oboediens factus est, uerum etiam in consummatione saeculi in semet ipse complectens omnes, quod subicit patri et qui per eum ueniunt ad salutem, cum ipsis et in ipsis ipse quoque subjectus dicitur patri, dum omnia in ipso constat, et ipse est caput omnium, et in ipso est salutem consequentium plenitudo. Hoc ergo est quod de eo dicit apostolus : Cum autem omnia ei fuerint subjecta, tunc et ipse filius subiectus erit ei, qui sibi subdidit omnia, ut sit deus omnia in omnibus.
Peri Archon 5, 6; Traité des Principes III, 230, 171-83; IV, Notes 37-39, 113-115.
[262] J. N. D. Kelley cites Origen’s Christological use of ἑνωσις:
The Gospel, he points out, 7 speaks of one, not of two; and he defines the relationship of the two natures as an actual union (ἕνωσις) or commingling (ἀνακράσις), resulting in the deification of the humanity, and not as a mere association (κοινονíα).
7 In Joh. i, 28, 96.
8 C. Cels. 3, 41.
Kelly, Doctrines, 156.
Kelly’s close association of the Stoic krasis and its cognates with Origen’s use of Henōsis invokes the Stoic dualism whose cyclic resolution in an ekpyrōsis manifests the a priori incompatibility of its constituents. This has nothing whatever to do with Origen’s use of Henōsis, whose “actual union,” is primordial, permanent, and unconditioned. As the Event of the Father’s Mission of the Son, it is also free, which cannot be said of the parallel Crouzel finds between the Christ and the Neoplatonic World-Soul, which is a necessary emanation from the One.
[263] The Henōsis is from, in, and constitutive of “the Beginning” (ἀπ’ ἀρχῆ), the Septuagint translation of the bereshith of Gen. 1:1; it is repeated in Jn. 1:1. Paul, in Col. 1:18, uses ἀρχῆ to Name the Event and its Subject, Christ the Lord, the head (κεφαλὴ) of the Church and of all things, which he will recapitulate (ἀποκεφαλλάξει) (RSV’s “reconcile” ). Origen’s affirmation of the transcendent primordial Event of the Henōsis governs the whole of his theology and can be separated from none of its affirmations without distorting their meaning: see Traité des principes II, Note 30, 180.
[265] Crouzel, Origen, 55.
[266] Ibid. Crouzel discusses the misunderstandings by Peter of Alexandria and Methodius of Olympia of Origen’s doctrine of the risen body as changed by the resurrection at pp. 209 and 249. He treats briefly at p. 206 the problems raised by Origen’s rather summary dismissal of the existing notions of the origin of the soul. There was at the end of the first third of the third century no settled rule of faith on the question of the origin of the soul, and the notions at hand were of little value. Origen considers the traducianism favored by Tertullian, perhaps as compatible with the Stoic materialism, or the alternative individual creation of each individual soul, to be unworthy of discussion. In these circumstances he felt free to present his own theory of their pre-existence, which he proceeded to integrate with his foundational hypothesis, the Henōsis in Christ of the fullness of divinity and of humanity.
[267] Tim Vivian, St. Peter of Alexandria, Bishop and Martyr, col. Studies in Antiquity and Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988).
[268] Hanson, Search, 144-45.
[270] Traité des principes II, 40, Note 35.
[271] Eusebius, H.E. vi, 39, 5
272 Gregory of Nazianzen rejected Basil’s homoiousian theology well before the First Council of Constantinople (381); see Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light. Ser. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). [hereafter Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity], especially 296-303; John McGuckin, Gregory of Nazianzus, 105, note 64, and pp. 169-227, Frederick W. Norris, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Oraations of Gregory of Nazianzen: Introduction and Commentary by Frederick W. Norris; Translation by Lionel Wickham and Frederick Williams (E. J. Brill: Leiden, New York København, Koln, 1991) [henceforth, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning], and Basil’s diophysite dissociation of the Trinity from the economy is echoed in John Zizioulas’ rejection of the Filioque, and in John McGuckin’s diophysite refusal of the divinity of Jesus the Christ. `See endnotes 153. supra, and 308, infra.
[273] See Joseph W. Trigg’s review of the recent work of a Hungarian scholar, György Heidl, Origen's Influence on the Young Augustine: A Chapter in the History of Origenism. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2003, in Journal of Early Christian Studies 12. 3 (2004) 364-366. It is unfortunate that Gregory of Nazianzen is better known in the West for having introduced Origen’s “moment of reason” as a cosmological mediante anima account of the prior possibility of the Incarnation. Augustine had at first accepted it on Gregory’s authority, but later, in the Libellus emendationis, he affirms without qualification the Personal unity of Jesus, “one and the same;”see Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, at 466.
[275] Peri Archon II, 6, 2:
. . . in unum eodemque ita utriusque natura veritas demonstretur, ut neque aliud indignum et indecens in divina illa et ineffabili substantiae sentiatur, neque rursum quae gesta sunt falsis inlusa imaginabus aestimentur.
Traité des principes I, 312, 74-78.
[276] The unique exception is the Council held at Elvira (Granada) in southern Spain, usually dated ca. 305-06, but more probably convoked before 303, inasmuch as its eighty-one disciplinary canons manifest no concern over the Diocletian persecution, which began in that year. Ossius of Cordoba was one of the bishops attending it. Little is known of the others, for the Church in Spain, and not least in Elvira, was remote from theological controversies engaging Rome at the time. The Council required celibacy of major clerics, apparently as an apostolic tradition, there being no prior legislation on the subject: see Christian Cochini, S.J., The Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy, 158ff. Cochini relies upon the Church’s oral tradition, i.e., her Eucharistic liturgy, to the consternation of his critics; see the commentaryby one of them in endnote xxx infra.
[277] Irenaeus was the first to distinguish the Catholic and the Jewish Sciptures as the New Testament and the Old;, see Joseph T. Lienhard, The Bible, the church, and authority the canon of the Christian Bible in history and theology (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1995). Origen’s contribution to the Canon can hardly be exaggerated.
Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem, together with Justin Martyr’s preliminary work of the same title, are major sources for information on the second and third century Gnosticism; at the same time, they were effective weapons in the hands of the bishops in overcoming that perennial rejection of the Church’s historical faith in Jesus the Lord.
[279] For a discussing of the Naming of the One God, see Covenantal Theology (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1996), II, Appendix, C: Image and Analogy: The Naming of God and Man, 670-76.
[280] See T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, (Cambridge, MA:, 1981), [hereafter, Constantine and Eusebius], 198-202, which offers a succinctly detailed account of Peter Martyr’s criticism of Origen, of Pamphilus’ concern to meet it in his Defense of Origen, of Peter’s succession to the See of Alexandria, his exile from the city under the Diocletian persecution, his governance of the diocese, for the most part in absentia, his excommunication of Melitius and the consequent Melitian schism, and lastly, of his martyrdom under Maximinus in 311. See also endnotes 612, supra, and 628 and 881, infra.
[281] Crouzel, Origen, 155-56.
[282] Ibid., 175, 186, 205, et passim. Cf. Crouzel-Simonetti, IV, “Recapitulation,” Note 9, 242-246, citing in addition the “Introduction” to Traité des principes I, V, 4, 42-43, and II, Note 21, 14-16.
[283] In a footnote, Crouzel observes that:
These Intelligences are generally denoted by the plural noes from nous. This form belongs to the koine and later Greek. But as far as Origen is concerned this plural is only attested by texts written after him, wrongly quoted by P. Koetschau in his edition GCS V of the Peri Archon as representing his thought. We have never found in the Greek works of Origen the word noes in the plural. As he declines this word according to the Attic declension and not the koine, unless he is quoting the New Testament, he would certainly not have used the plural noes but noi.
Origen, 206, n. 7
This relic of Attic Greek, along with Origen’s use of a multitude of Atticisms, whose occurrence in his works Crouzel affirms to “far exceed popular turns of speech” (at 58), suggests that Origen’s father, Leonides, still spoke Attic Greek at home and so taught it to Origen. An early form of Greek, it is highly inflected. Its grammatical complexities gave way to the simpler Koine dialect, the product of the accommodation of the Hellenistic culture to the languages of the nations conquered by Alexander the Great, and a century later, to the influence of the translations by expatriate Jewish scholars in Alexandria of the Hebrew of the Old Testament into the Greek of the Septuagint, in order to enable the large Jewish community in Alexandria, no longer familiar with Hebrew, to worship in Greek. These accommodations had long since made the Attic Greek obsolete in the Hellenistic culture of third century Alexandria. Leonides appears to have been a purist in language as well as in Christianity, a man not given to cultural accommodation.
[284] See Crouzel, Origen, 209, 249, and Traité des principes I, “Introduction,” pp. 33-52 for a comprehensive account of the background of the fourth and fifth-century opposition to Origen. While Pamphilius himself was more interested in Origen’s exegesis than in his theology; his disciple, Eusebius, from 313 the bishop of Caesarea, who had studied under Pamphilius, and on Pamphilius’ death had inherited his expansion of Origen’s library, professed to understand Origen’s theology, but imposed upon it the subordinationist distortion, the Eusebianism, which even the reaffirmation of the Nicene Creed by I Constantinople did not suffice entirely to uproot. E.g., Gregory of Nazianzen, while president of that Council, was unable to persuade its members, led by Gregory of Nyssa and Diodore of Tarsus, to define the homoousion of the Son.
For reasons Crouzel has discussed (Crouzel-Simonett I, Introduction, V, 1, 34-36), withn fifty years of his death Origen was accused of a subordinationism entirely incompatible with the Trinitarian doctrine of the Peri Archon; he was also accused of denying the identity of the risen body with the terrestrial body by having placed an irreducible distinction between them. However, neither neither heresy is found in his basic statement, the Peri Archon, of what now must be regarded as his systematic theology, viz., his personal quaerens intellectum into the free unity of the mystery of the taith, in sum, his hypothetical development of the implications of the faith that Jesus Christ is the Lord.
Both of these accusations are associated with Peter Martyr, who is thought to have directed the Catechetical School in Alexandria before being chosen by his bishop, Theonas, to succeed him: he did so about 302. Soon forced by the Diocletian persecution to flee the city, he led the Church of Alexandria from ca. 303 until his arrest and immediate execution under Maximin, the nephew of Galerius, in 311. Peter’s successor, Achillas, died within a year of his appointment, but not before himself appointing Arius as pastor of a church in the Baucalis district of Alexandria. Achillas was succeeded by Alexander, whose Trinitarian doctrine and Christology, as expressed in his condemnation of Arius, were those of Origen. Peter’s impact upon the Alexandrine tradition was minor; he was honored as a martyr for his witness to the faith, but not as a teacher.
[285] Ronnie J. Rombs, in “A Note on the Status of Origen’s Peri Archon," Vigiliae Christianae 61 (2007), 21-29, discussed past and current assessments of Rufinus’ translation of the Peri Archon, noting a growing appreciation of its accuracy. Rombs hopes to see a new English translation and edition of the Peri Archon replace the Torchbook edition of Butterworth’s translation of the flawed and dated Koetschau edition still in common use, proposing that the new translation be based upon the bilingual edition by Henri Crouzel and Manlio Simonetti , Origène: Traité des principes I-V.
[286] Jerome’s condemnation of Rufinus’ Peri Archon, in his Apologia adversus Rufinus, had been provoked by references to him in the “Prologue” in which Rufinus introduced that translation (see Traité des principes I, Texte et Traduction, Praefatio Rufini, 67-75l; Ibid., II, Commentaire et Fragments; Préface de Rufin, 7-9. Jerome accused Rufinus of underwriting a theology already charged with heresy in the West. Under Jerome’s influence, Theophilus of Alexandria wrote a letter to Pope Anastasius (399-401) expressing his radical if untutored opposition to Origen’s theology. Pope Anastasius called a Roman council in 400 which condemned Origen’s theology. He was unpersuaded by Rufinus who, in a personal meeting with him, had defended Origen’s orthodoxy against Theophilus calumny, but to no avail. Karl Baus describes this imbroglio in”The Origenist Controversy at the Turn of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries,” The History of The Church, Vol. II, The Imperial Church from Constantine to the Early Middle Ages, 121-29, esp. 123ff.
[287] Crouzel, in Origen, 47 and 168-69; Crouzel and Simonetti, Traité des Principes, I, Introduction, 54-55, find Koetschau’s edition (1913) of the Des Principiis unreliable, as containing, inter alia, inserts proper to the rationalized ‘Origenism’ of Evagrius of Pontus rather than to Origen himself. Given the widespread distribution of G. W. Buttterworth's translation of Koetschaus's edition via its republication in the Harper Torchbook edition, cited in endnote 347, supra, Crouzel's criticism of it should be kept in mind. At the time of Msgr Jurgen’s publication (1970) of the first volume of The Faith of the Early Fathers, 190, he regarded Koetschau's edition as still the standard. Henri de Lubac, in his “Introduction” to the Torchbook edition of G. W. Butterworth's translation of Koetschau’s text, defends the reliability of Rufinus’ translation of the Peri Archon;, while Butterworth, in his “Introduction and Notes” in that edition, questions it. Crouzel’s positive assessment of Rufinus’ translation of the Peri Archon agrees with de Lubac’s, which was first set out in the latter’s Histoire et ésprit: L'intelligence de l'Écriture d'après Origène; col. Théologie 16 (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1950), recently republished as History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture according to Origen (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2007); see endnote 590, supra. De Lubac developed the study of Origen’s exegesis in Histoire et Spirit in his Exégèse médiévale.
[288] The resistance is identified with persistence in the assertion of the substantial unity of the Triune God, as by Eustathius of Antioch, Athanasius of Alexandria, and Marcellus of Ancyra, the last remaining allies of Alexander at the Council of Nicaea apart from Ossius, who ceased to be Contantine’s advisor shortly after Nicaea and returned to his Spanish diocese of Cordova. Even thus remote from Gaul, Ossius also was persecuted after the death of Constance in 350, which freed Constantius to crush Western resistance to the homoeanism which he imposed at councils held in Milan in 352, then at Arles, Beziers, and finally at Sirmium in 357. To this last council the aged Ossius was summoned, and there persuaded to sign a homoean confession. He soon recanted, consistent with his refusal at that council to condemn Athanasius, whose unwavering assertion of the absolute authority of the Nicene doctrine of the “mia hypostasis” of the Trinity had made him Constantius’ arch-opponent for, apart from the long since exiled Marcellus, only Athanasus among the Oriental bishops rejected and condemned the Emperor’s homoean Arianism. This resistance sufficed to render primarily defensive the imperial effort to impose homoeanism upon the West, for Constantius understood the assertion of the authority of the Council of Nicaea to undercut his own. In this alone did Constantius and Athanasius agree. Athanasius’ unqualified commitment to the authority of Nicaea was also his inflexible denial of the universal sovereignty claimed by Constantius as the Emperor of Rome
[289] See T. D. Barnes, “The Consecration of Ulfilas,” From Eusebius to Augustine, X.
[290] John Marchand has remarked that:
One of the most important documents is a letter written by Auxentius of Durostorum, foster-son of Wulfila, the man who translated the Gothic Bible.
John Marchand, “Auxentius on Wulfila.”
[291] Peri Archon. II, 6, 1-2 ; Crouzel, op. cit., 57, 174, et passim.
[292] Crouzel, Origen, 169.
[293]Ibid., 198.
[294] Ibid., 167-69.
[295] J. L. McKenzie, Dictionary of Theology, 604A-605B; Xavier Léon Dufour, Dictionary of Biblical Theology, 2nd. ed., 384B-385B.
[296] In the third century, the focus of Mariological attention was upon Mary’s virginity, and her motherhood of Jesus. Crouzel notes that Origen was the first to teach her perpetual virginity (Origen, 141) but as Crouzel also notes, Origen considers her to be sinful (see Traité des principes IV, Note 33, 252, citing HomLe xvii, 1.) Tertullian, Apologeticus xxi, 9, affirms her virginity, i.e., she is “touched by no impurity (impudicitia).” Tertullian’s association of impudicitia, in the weak sense of immodesty, with virginity, is in agreement with Origen’s association of Mary’s virginity with the sinlessness of her Son; see endnote 488, supra.
[297] The integration of Origen’s primitive view of “Original Sin” with the pre-existent fall of the noes is incomplete (Crouzel, op. cit., 209) and poses something of a surd in theology of the Peri Archon. One the one hand, Origen understands original sin and the consequent universal need for baptism to be caused by the impurity of sexual congress, and therefore universally to infect the conception of the persons generated by that intercourse. This implicitly dualist view of original sin is linked to the very early notion that Jesus’ freedom from sin is grounded in his birth of the Virgin. This view of original sin could not easily mesh with the fall of the noes from their contemplation of the Logos, for Origen understands sexuality to have entered into the world only as an effect of the fall, the transformation of their theretofore immaculate corporeality into the concupiscent "flesh" of historical human existence.
Thus persuaded, Origen saw no link between “original sin” and the fall of the pre-existent noes into history who, while unfallen, were immune to the temptations to impurity coincident with fallen sexual existence.
On the other hand, he understood the fall of the noes to be identically the fall and fragmentation of the primordial bridal Church, whose primordial nuptial union with her unfallen Bridegroom is restored only through his Kenōsis, and his sacrificial institution of their One Flesh, i.e., by his death, into which we enter by baptism, and thereby re-enter the bridal Church, the bridal body of the Christ, her head.
Origen could not but be familiar with the Pauline doctrine of original sin, given his extensive Commentary on Romans, however abridged by Rufinus. His primitive doctrine of original sin does not enter into theology of the Kenōsis in the Peri Archon. It was not possible for him so to explain the universal fall of the pre-existent noes, whose unfallen bodies are ethereal rather than carnal, and offer no point d’appui for carnal sin. It is perhaps odd that Origen’s later stress, in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, upon the ecclesial headship of the Bridegroom did not suggest to him that the “cooling” of the contemplative ardor of the noes is simultaneous with the inception of their terrestrial carnality, as cause with its effect. This consideration would permit him to recognize the “carnality” of the primordial sin of the noes.
Finally of course, sin is inexplicable. As the mystery of iniquity it has no antecedent possibility, and certainly none in the ‘ethereal” corporality of the noes. Origen supposes carnality, as opposed to corporeality, to accompanies sin only as its effect, which cannot explain its cause. Origen was familiar with the redemptive headship of the Christ, the “new Adam”; he does not appear to recognize its Pauline parallel with the fallen Adam of Rom. 5, by whom sin entered into the world.
Origen's understanding of the headship of Christ was insufficiently developed to permit him to recognize that Christ's headship of the bridal Church, in whom the noes are comprised, connotes their free community in equality, their free solidarity and, in fact, their consubstantiality with him as their head, their source. This consubstantiality connotes at once their irreducible personal distinction and their equal possession of the primordially unfallen humanity of their head. Origen describes this solidarity in terms of their fervent contemplation of their head, the Christ-Logos, but does not perceive that their falling away from the fervor of this devotion is their rejection of that headship, nor does he link their fallen fragmentation to the loss of their free community, their free solidarity with their head apart from which they have no unity short of their head’s redemptive institution of the One Flesh, his reunion with the bridal Church, achieved by that Gift of the Spirit, the pneuma they have each lost by their primordial sin.
[298] Gal. 2:4: τήν ἐλευθερíαν ἡμῶν ἣν ἔχομεν ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ (our freedom which we have in Christ Jesus); 5:1: Τῇ ἐλευθερíᾳ ἡεμᾶς Χριστὸς ἠλευθέρωσεν (For freedom Christ has set us free).
[299] Origen understands the Church to be fallen, fragmented in the Old Covenant, restored by the Christ’s institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh. Given the undeveloped ecclesiology of the third century, this is not a departure from the Catholic tradition, but it is a mistaken product of his fallible speculation, for the Church, the second Eve, cannot fall from the immaculately free unity of her One Flesh with the second Adam. Her fiat mihi expresses her fidelity to her union in One Flesh with her Lord, her head, which is primordial, in the Beginning. It is the primordial proffer of this primordial nuptial freedom that Adam and Eve refused and from which they fell; it is from their One Flesh which, in solidarity with the first Adam and first Eve, that we are fallen ; as it is to that primordial nuptial freedom that we are restored by the second Adam’s sacrificial institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of the New Creation.
[300] Cf. W. F. Arndt and F. W. Gingrich, Eds., A Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. (Chicago, Cambridge: University of Chicago Press; Cambridge University Press, 1957). For a discussion of this freedom as nuptial, that of the One Flesh, and for its loss by original sin as its reduction to the radically dynamic disunity of sarx, see endnote 328, infra. Origen’s Christology uses nuptial symbolism as Paul did, to denote the union of Christ, as Head and Bridegroom, with the Bridal Church ; unlike Paul, he understands it to apply to a finally dualist union of the Bridegroom with the human soul as though to a church in miniature. He later developed this mistaken interpretation of nuptial symbolism in the Commentary on the Song of Songs; see endnotes 5, 128, 251, 288, supra; infra, endnote 703. Origen also understands the pre-existent Son to image the Father, but it is not clear that he understands this imaging as Jesus’ nuptial headship of the Church, although he recognized the Father’s headship of Jesus: Peri Archon II, 6, 1, “Caput autem Christi Deus,” one of the rare patristic citations, let alone quotations, of I Cor. 11:3; Tertullian had arrived at the same conviction a few years earlier; see Evans, Against Praxeas; 106: pointing out “caput enim Christi deus” in Adversus Praxean, ch. 14, 25.
[301] Crouzel confirms this equivalence:
Subsistentia correspond à ὑπόστασις avec un sens individuel et non plutôt gènèral comme substantia. ὑπόστασις est attribué à la personnalité propre de chaque personne divine en ComJn I, 24 (23), 151; II, 10 (6) 75-76, CCels. VIII, 12. F. Schnitzer (p. 15 note) reconstitue ainsi ce passage: ὑπόστασις ἐστι νοητὴ καὶ ὑπίσταται ἰδίος καὶ ὑπάρχαι; mais subsistit et extat est peut-être un redoublement de Rufin.
Traité des principes II, Note 12, 23.
[302] Marguerite Harl points up the ambivalence of Origen’s Christology, in which his Middle-Platonic imagination leads him on occasion to identify the “self” of Jesus with the eternal Son qua eternal rather than with the Christ. Origen continually affirms the Personal unity of the Henōsis who is Jesus the Lord, but not seldom is found forgetting it in specific applications,
Malgré cette précision, “pour nous”, et la citation de deux versets évangéliques, “nul ne connaît le Père n’est le Fils et celui à qui le Fils veut bien le révèler” et “qui m’a vu a vu le Père” 40 dont nous verrons que ce sont les versets-clés de la fonction révélatrice du Christ, on ne peut affirmer qu’Órigène, dans ce texte, veut parler du Christ révélant Dieu par sa vie d’homme. Il précise en effet: le Fils révèle “en tant qu’il est lui-même compris41”. Il s’agit donc plûtot du Verbe que l’on peut “comprendre”, de la raison illuminatrice des Intelligences, de la raison présente dans toute la création de Dieu.
Mt., 11, 27 et Jn., 14, 9. Voir infra, p. 183. sq.
De princ., 2, 2, 6; p. 36, 15: per hoc quod ipse intellegitur.
M. Harl, Origène et la fonction révélatrice du Verbe Incarné (Paris, Le Seuil, 1958), 113.
Professor Harl’s final sentence in this excerpt is discussable; as reflecting too facile an identification of ‘le Fils” « en tant qu’il est lui-même compris » with the “Verbe” which she understands to be disjunct «du Christ révélant Dieu par sa vie d’homme.” Nonetheles it remains that few are as competent to lead that discussion as Professor Harl, who devoted much of her masterwork to the concessions to Platonism which can blur the focus of Origen’s commitment to the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord which Crouzel has shown to be the leitmotif of his Christology. See endnote 590, supra.
[303] This classic text:
Natus
est Dei Filius, non pudet, quia pudendum est;
et mortuus est Dei Filius, prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est;
et sepultus resurrexit, certum est, quia impossibile.
Tertullian, De Carne Christi V, 4.
In October 26, 2001, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity published "Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East," which, for pastoral reasons, admitted members of the Nestorian Assyrian Church of the East to Communion in the Chaldean Church, which is in union with Rome. The "Guidelines" included the following statement:
With the ´Common Christological Declaration´, signed in 1994 by Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, the main dogmatic problem between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church has been resolved. As a consequence, the ecumenical rapprochement between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East also entered a further phase of development.
On 29 November 1996 Patriarch Mar Raphaël Bidawid and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV signed a list of common proposals with a view to the re-establishment of full ecclesial unity among both historical heirs of the ancient Church of the East. On 15 August 1997 this program was approved by their respective Synods and confirmed in a ´Joint Synodal Decree´. Supported by their respective Synods, both Patriarchs approved a further series of initiatives to foster the progressive restoration of their ecclesial unity. Both the Congregation for the Oriental Churches and the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity support this process.
[305] Alois Grillmeier, Christian Tradition II, Part One, explores this confusion at length.
[307] Crouzel, Origen, 199, notes Origen’s rare use of Trias, discussing it at length in Traité des principes II, Note 10, 58-59.
[308] Zizioulas has argued that the Greek verbs used by the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed to account for the Father’s ‘production’ of the Son and of the Spirit are interchangeable:
The Symbol professes the Son as τὸν ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς γεννηθέντα (begotten of the Father) whilst the Holy Spirit is (sic) τὸ ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον (proceeds from the Father). Both γεννηθέντα and ἐκπορευόμενον can be used to complete the phrase τὸν ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς; they are interchangeable.
From the Conclusion of Zizioulas’ “Commentary” in “The Vatican Clarification on the Filioque, and “Commentary;”” both are available from the “Filioque Page” of the T. R. Valentine website, http://www.geocities.com/trvalentine/index.html. and from "http://www.agrino.org/cyberdesert/zizioulas.htm
Without presuming to discuss the intricacies of Greek semantics, it is enough to reply that Catholic Trinitarian doctrine rests not on philology but upon the apostolic tradition, in which the distinction between the Father’s relation to the Son and his relation to the Spirit, whatever the latter may be, is beyond discussion. Jesus is the only-begotten Son (Jn. 3:16; I Jn. 4:9). Unlike Zizioulas’ Trinititarian theology, which follows that of Basil of Caesarea, Origen’s relies upon Christ’s revelation of his Mission from the Father to give the Holy Spirit. In endnote 499 supra, we have seen Zizioulas dissociate the “economy” from “the existential origin of the Trinity”, a puzzling goal until its reliaance upon Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto is recognized. The grounds for the dissociation of history from eschaton are diophysite and finally Nestorian, the affinity of whose contemporary Calvinist representatives with Byzantine Orthodoxy Cardinal Kasper has noted in the article cited in endnote 708, infra, “The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit.”
[309] Peri Archon. I, 4-9 ; II, pp. 253-54, notes 55-60,
[310] Traité des principes IV, Note 1, 238-39, and Note 3, 240-41. Origen distinguishes the freedom of the Father's begetting of the Son and, through the Son, the Father’s outpouring of the Spirit, from “procession” in the sense of a necessary and therefore subordinationist "prolation," i.e., emanation. His assertion of the substantial unity of the Trinity entails the consubstantiality of the divine Names which the Trinity comprises, which bars any subordination among the Trinitarian Persons in such wise that their order can only be of procession, i.e., of the Son proceeding from the Father as freely begotten by him from eternity, and of the Spirit as freely proceeding from the Father ab aeterno through the Son, although in his Preface Origen finds no clear tradition on the manner of the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father. The nuptial imaging of the Trinity provides an indispensable insight into the Trinitarian ταχίς, the invariant liturgical Naming of the divine Names, which Origen, like Tertullian, accepts as a datum of the faith.
[311] Prestige, op. cit., 163ff., provides a philological explanation of the development of distinctions between passive and active meanings of "hypostasis," pointing out that they arise from distinction between the middle and active voices of ὑπίσtημι, i.e., between 'that which passively underlies,' e.g., sediment, and "that which dynamically supports," e.g., a buttress) The Latin distinction between "substantia" and "persona," although unappreciated by Gregory Nazianzen in his eulogy of Athanasius (Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, 187), had made this subtle Greek distinction unnecessary for Western theology, albeit not without prompting doubts of Latin orthodoxy among Orientals. Origen was perhaps the first to use "hypostasis" in the dynamic sense, which Crouzel has identified with personal subsistence; see endnote 301, supra. In the next century that meaning would be generally assigned to πρόσωπον, i.e., "persona." Hippolytus' translation of Tertullian's use of persona may have prepared the way.
[312] It has earlier been pointed out that the relation of Origen's Trinitarian doctrine to his Christology of the Henōsis, viz., the relation of the first "substantial" or eternal "production" by the Father to His second "production," of the noes, is what later theology will understand as the Father's Mission of the Son to give the Spirit (cf. Crouzel, Origen, 188). St. Paul and St. John both refer to the terminus of the Son’s Mission as creation in Christ: . In short, the relation of the “two creations” is primordial, concrete, and indispensable, at once to the Fall, and to the economy of salvation. In both contexts Origen is concerned with "one and the same Son" for he understands the “Son” as eternal Wisdom, the eternal Logos, to be in association ab aeterno with the ‘second’ or accidental creation, thereby to be the eternal source of its order and intelligibility. However, it is the primordial Jesus the Lord, not the “eternal Logos,” who is the subject of the Father’s Mission of the Son, and the source, as its head, of the free order and intelligibility of the universe, the good creation. Jesus is this through his Kenōsis, by his One Sacrifice, the Redeemer who restores, in sacramento, the free order and unity of that good but fallen creation.
In postulating the nonhistorical or eternal Son of the “substantial” creation to be the source of the intelligible order of creation, Origen lapses into an identification of the eternal Son with the Neoplatonic Logos, the first and necessary emanation from the One. This error is easily corrected by Origen’s identification of the Henōsis with the primordial head, Jesus, and recognizing in his Mission from the Father the source of the free unity of the universe, which Paul recognizes to be its creation in him, but this of course leaves the eternal Son with no function. Origen regards the eternal begetting of the Son as the Father’s eternal, i.e., “substantial” ktisis or “production,” as distinct from the “accidental” ktisis of the temporal and corporeal order, that of the consubstantial noes,
[313] Crouzel understands Origen to refer to the hypostatic (i.e., subsistent or Personal) unity of Jesus the Christ in Peri Archon I, 2, 1; see Traité des principes II, 39-40, Notes 3l, 32, and Tome IV, “Recapitulation,” Note 12, 247.
[314] Crouzel’s misgivings on this point appear in Origen, 174. Seven years earlier, he had corrected a quasi-Nestorian interpretation of Origen’s Christology appearing in the excerpts of a fifth-century florilege:
En fait, l’ensemble de la doctrine, avec la communication des idiomes, montre qu’on ne peut interpréter anachroniquement l’union du Verbe et de l’âme comme celle de deux personnes. Les excerpteurs n’ont pas remarqué que, d’après le fragment lui-même, l’homme n’a jamais été séparé du Fils Unique ; il n’a donc pas obtenu l’union de mérites qui’il aurait acquis avant d’être uni. Voir Notes 20 et 30. Il est difficile de dire si Rufine a paraphrasé ou si les excerpteurs ont simplifié.
Traité des principes II, 178-79, Note 25 ; Note 38 is to the same effect:
La conception origénienne de l’âme du Christ a donc été accusée tantôt de monophysisme comme absorbant la nature humaine dans la divine, tantôt de nestorianisme comme séparant trop les deux entités : représentations arbitraires de sa pensée selon une problématique postérieure, mais surtout, avons-nous dit, accusations contradictoires qui se détruissent l‘une par l’autre (note 33 de ce chapitre). L’accusation nestorienne est ancienne : Pamphile a dû défendre Origène contre le reproche d’avoir professé deux Christs (Apol. VI ; 5 PG 17, 588), alors que justement le but de ce chapitre est de montrer qu’il n’y a pas deux Christs comme le prétendent les gnostiques. Etc. .
Traité des principes II, 183, Note 38.
[315] Inasmuch as, apart from fragments, Origen’s Peri Archon exists only in Rufinus’ Latin translation, the Peri Archon, there can be no evidence of Origen’s use of henōsis in that document, but see endnote 259 supra.
[316] Origen’s affirmation of apostolic succession :
«. . . ἐχομéνοις τοῦ κανόνος τῆς Ἰεσοῦ Χριστοῦ κατὰ διαλοχὴν τῶν ἀποστόλων οὐρανίου ἐκκλησίας » « . . . pour ceux qui tiennent à la règle11 de l’Église céleste de Jésus Christ transmise par la succession des apôtres.12 »
11 Crouzel-Simonetti IV, Note 11, 174-75 ; This Note, too extensive for full quotation here, concludes as follows :
Le sens de κανων chez Origène est assez général : ici il se rapporte plûtot à la norme accessible au chrétien progressant ; en ComJn XIII 16, 98, c’est l’ensemble des croyances elémentaires nécessaires aux plus simples. Dans HomJer. V, 14 et dans SérMath. 46, fragment grec, il est question du « canon écclésiastique » ou du « canon de l’Église »,c'est-à-dire de la règle de foi sans autre précision.
12 The first sentence of Traité des principes IV, Note 12, 175, suffices to state its theme :
Ce qualitatif d’ « Église céleste »´ne doit pas être interprété de l’Église des bienheureux distinguée de la terrestre mais qualifier l’Église terrestre en tant que son origine est céleste, car la règle de foi et la succession apostolique sont des réalités de ce monde.
Traité des principes III, iv 2, (9), 55-56, pp. 300, 301.
[317] Peri Archon II, 6, 3; see Traité des principes II, 14, Note 19, stressing the physical reality of the death of Jesus Christ the Lord; ibid., IV, 257, Note 38, stressing Origen’s insistence upon the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, despite a certain cosmological confusion. It is this physical death of Jesus the Lord which, in the Preface of the Peri Archon, Origen asserts to be for our salvation. Origen accepts the consequence of the communication of divine and human Names in Christ that he, the Son, the Word of God, can die by reason of his ἕνωσις, his Personal humanity. It is then as correct to affirm that God died as that he was conceived by Theotokos. It is as Incarnate, as enfleshed, that Christ could die, for he died as the Christ, as Jesus the Lord, which is to say that he died Personally, not “in his humanity,” as is too often said. This is a point upon which Crouzel is not always clear:
A study that appeared some years ago70 expounds various schemes by which the Alexandrine (i.e., Origen) expresses the work of Redemption accomplished by the Passion and the Resurrection. It concerns directly the humanity of Christ, since it is the latter which undergoes death and rises again, the divine Word not being liable to death.
70 J. A. Alcain, Cautiverio y rendencíon del hombre en Origenes, Bilboa, 1973.
Crouzel, Origen, 194. See also the footnotes on the following page (195).
Whether the assertion of the immunity of the divine Word, sensu negante, to death be proper to Alcain or to Crouzel, Crouzel appears to regard it as the Thomist commonplace that it is. He is oblivious, as was St. Thomas, to its incompatibility with the Catholic faith that the "divine Word" is the one and the same Son, of the Father and Theotokos, who died on the Cross for our salvation. Once again, “humanity” is understood by Crouzel and/or Alcain as an abstraction. Human persons are mortal, whereas abstractions, whether divine or human, are not. The assertion that “the .Word” is not liable to death refers, not to Jesus the Logos, but to the non-historical cosmological divinity, whose immunity to death is his immunity to history and his irrelevance to the faith of the Church that Jesus Christ the Lord died for our salvation.
No one knows better than Crouzel that the “theology of the Alexandrine” is centered upon his Christology, and that his Christology is founded on the communication of idioms in Christ the Lord. On the other hand, Origen’s commitment to the communication of idioms in Jesus is often confused by the cosmological convention that the Absolute cannot die which, read at the letter, prohibits the Henōsis, the communication of Names in Christ, upon which Origen's Christology is founded. It is no doubt for this reason that he understands the death of Christ to “concern directly the humanity of Christ;” indirectly it concerns the eternal Word. Over and again this direct-indirect tension occurs in Origen’s references to the redemption worked by Christ, whose hypostatic unity he insists upon. Nevertheless, as Crouzel has often pointed out. Origen’s Preface assures us that the Father’s Mission of the Son is his Mission of Jesus the Lord, whose unity is simply that of his Mission, i.e., primordially integral "in the Beginning," fleshly and kenōtic in fallen history.
[318] Crouzel holds it incontestable that the Origen understands that the Father acts in the world through the Son and the Spirit:
Nul ne contestera l’authenticité origenienne de l’action du Père ad extra par les deux autres personnes.
Traité des principes II, Quatrième section (I, 3, 5, -I, 4, 2., 68 ; see also Origen, 188.
Some years later, Crouzel developed this theme further, observing that the economic subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father “is closely linked” to the divine missions:
The ‘subordination’ of the Son to the Father does not bring into question either identity of nature or equality of power. The Son is both subordinate and equal to the Father, a double affirmation that can be found again after Nicaea in Athanasius and Hilary themselves. The subordination arises in the first place from the fact that the Father is Father, origin of the two other Persons and initiator of the Trinity. The latter role concerns the ‘economy’: the word oikonomia, the Latin equivalent of which is generally dispensatio denotes the activity of the Trinity externally, in the Creation and in the Incarnation-Redemption. The Father gives the orders, the Son and the Spirit receive them and are the envoys, the agents ad extra of the Trinity, each for his own part. If the Father is the center of decision, the Son and the Spirit are not mere executants of the paternal will, for while the Father’s initiative is often emphasized, so is the unity of will and action41 on the part of the Three Persons. Thus the subordination of the Son and the Spirit is closely linked to their 'divine missions' (emphasis added).
41 PArch I, 3, 7.
Crouzel, Origen, at 188.
We have seen Origen cite the teaching of the apostolic tradition that God the Father “sent the Lord Jesus Christ first for the purpose of calling Israel, and secondly, after the unbelief of the people of Israel . . . of calling the Gentiles also.” (Crouzel, Origen, 182; there the text quoted is from Butterfield’s translation of the Preface of the Peri Archon, p. 2). Origen understands the obedience of the Son to his Mission to be the obedience of Jesus Christ to the Father; the One God who sent him is the Father, not the Trinity, .
The term of the Father’s action ad extra is his Mission of Jesus the Lord to give the Spirit, which in Origen’s theology cannot be other than the free historical event of the Henōsis, the sending of the Son, the Christ, to give the Spirit. It terminates in the One Flesh of the Bridegroom and the bridal Church, which union Origen understands to be eschatological.
[319] Traité des principes I, 317-19 : Peri Archon II, 6, 4-6.
[320] Ibid., II, 6, 3-6. See Crouzel, Origen, 209-11; cf. 260, where Crouzel comments on the close analogy as knowledge with love which Origen draws between the nuptial unity in "one flesh" and the Henōsis of the humanity and divinity in Christ. It must be stressed only the latter unity is Personal, and therefore capable of supporting the communication of idioms by which Jesus is the Lord. The comparison drawn by Origen suggests a communication of idioms in the nuptial "one flesh." De Lubac has echoed him in this error; see the extended discussion in endnotes 20, 21, and 115, supra. Crouzel has remarked that Origen's use of imagery always expresses at once duality and unity, which is of course true, but the unity and duality of nuptial mutuality constituting their “one flesh,” whether understood as between bridegroom and bride, or head and body, are not the unity and duality of the forma dei and the fullness of humanity in the single hypostasis that is Christ the Lord. A transformation of the Personal unity of divinity and humanity in the Christ into a mutuality would not permit the communication of idioms, which presupposes his Personal unity. Origen does not make this mistake; he sees a far greater unity in the Henōsis than in the one flesh, but does not specify it further than by naming it a unity. It will be two centuries before the substantial unity of those for whom Christ died will be recognized at Ephesus and Chalcedon, and many more before the unity of the “One Flesh,” instituted by Christ’s One Sacrifice, will be recognized to be not that of “Una Persona,” as Augustine thought and taught, but of the free substantial image of the Trinity: this by John Paul II in the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World,” published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on May 31, 2004.
The analogy Augustine draws between the hypostatic or Personal unity of the Christ, and the covenantal unity of the "one flesh" of his union with the bridal Church witnesses also to a universal patristic inability to recognize the free unity of marriage as substantial. Reference to its unity as that of una persona was the closest patristic approximation to an affirmation of its substantiality. Faced with an analogous quandary; Origen uses hypostasis to designate the eternal Son of the Father and the personal humanity of Jesus as constituents of their Henōsis, recognizing each to be a unity distinct from that which in their Henōsis they constitute, viz., the Personal subsistence of Christ the Lord. This distinction is close to that of Tertullian’s Christology: duae substantiae, una Persona.
[321] Gregory of Nazianzen, in Orat. xxviii, 19, appears to have been the first to propose an anima mediante Christology on the basis of Peri Archon II, 6, 3; This does not prevent him, as it did not prevent Origen, from emphasizing the Personal unity of Jesus. Also, as had Origen, he assigns death to the humanity of Jesus, not to his Person, momentarily forgetting, as had Origen, that Jesus the Christ is the Personal agent of our redemption, achieved by his One Sacrifice, offered, inseparably, upon the Altar and upon the Cross. See J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 297-98, also John A. McGuckin, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity, 284.
[322] Marguerite Harl has made this ambiguity explicit::
Jésus est à la fois la chair mortelle qui voile la divinité et le Verbe divin qui se manifeste à travers la chair.
Lorsque Origène parle de la mort du Christ, il précise que « c’est le Verbe fait chair qui muert, tandis que le Verbe divin est éternel. »57
Harl, op. cit., at 203. In the extended footnote (57), Prof. Harl has detailed the sources supporting this summary, and pointed out as well the impact of Origen’s venture in diophysism upon his exegesis of Jesus’ One Sacrifice: he cannot admit that it include his divinity. To the contrary, see Traité des principes IV 257, Note 38., and endnote 664, supra.
[323] See Harl, op. cit., at 194.
[325] M. Harl set forth this coherence schematically in « Structure et cohérence du Peri Archon », Origeniana. Premier colloque international des études origéniennes (Montserrat, 18-21 septembre, 1973) dirigé par Henri Crouzel, Gennaro Lomiento, Josep Ruis-Camps ; ser. Quaderni di Vetera Christianorum – 12 (Bari : Insituto di Letteratura Cristiana Antica- Universitá di Bari, 1975), 11-32. In « Préexistence des âmes ? », Origeniana quarta; Series Innsbrucker theologische Studien ; Bd. 19 (Innsbruck : Tyrolia-Verlag, 1987), 238-58, Prof. Harl pursued that much-contested theme, and demonstrated its presence in Origen’s Christology, thus substantiating her assertion of the systematic coherence of his theology.
[326] In Origen’s “Preface” to the Peri Archon we read of the origin of the Holy Spirit:
Third, they (the Apostles) handed it down that the Holy Spirit is associated in honor and dignity with the Father and the Son. In His case, however, it is not clearly distinguished whether or not He was born (2) [at 199] or even whether He is or is not to be regarded as a Son of God; for these are points of careful inquiry into sacred Scripture, and for prudent investigation.
2The original Greek, as previously announced, is not extant. Rufinus reads natus an innatus (i,e., born or unborn), and it is his Latin that we are rendering. Jerome, however, is undoubtedly referring to this same passage, when, in his letter to Avitus (94, at 59) he severely censures Origen for not knowing whether the Holy Spirit is factus aut infectus, i.e., created or increate. One or the other authors has commented that Rufinus’ reading of natus an innatus reflects a probable Greek of γεννετος η αγαγεννετος, while Jerome’s factus an infectus would indicate that he read γενητος η αγενητος.
The distinction is not a valid one, since it depends too much upon a supposed difference in the meaning of the Greek terms γεννετος from γενναω and γενητος from γενστηαι, and totally neglects the simple fact that whatever etymlogical distinctions may be possible with the terms γενητος and γεννητος, in practice they are virtually synonymous. Whichever Greek term may be used, its precise meaning, whether born, made, produced, originated, etc., must be gotten from the context. Either term could be rendered as Rufinus renders it; and either as Jerome renders it. Jerome, however, in guilding a case against Origen’s orthodoxy, was interested in painting him as black as possible. On the other hand, the distinction Origen is making is hardly between generation and spiration, so Jerom is still right: for in fact, whatever Latin terms be used, Origen is still confessing that he does not know whether or not the Holy Spirit is natus vel factus (i.e., born or created).
Preface 4; tr. Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 191, 199.
On the basis of the quite gratuitous postulate underlined in the preceding paragraph, Jurgens’ note flatly contradicts Crouzel, who deals on several occasions with this issue: see Origen, 174; Traité des principes I, “Introduction,”V, 4, 42-43; ibid., II, Note 21, 14-16; Ibid.IV, “Recapitulation,” Note 9, 242-246; His more concise treatment in Traité des Principes I, pp. 42-43. is summed up in its final sentence:
Par manque de sens historique, les détracteurs d’Origène lisent ses expressions selon le sens de leur époque, non selon celui d’Origène. Ainsi, là où, dans la préface du Peri Archon3. Rufin emploie à propos du Fils et de l’Esprit le mot natus, Jérome lit factus. Le texte d’Origène devait comporter γενητός avec un seul nu Avant la crise arienne, γενητός et γεννητός , ἀγένητος et ἀγέννετος, avec un seul où deux nu, sont équivalents et interchangeables.4
A cause de ce vocabulaire anténicéen, Origène est accusé de faire du Fils et de l’Esprit des creatures, malgré des textes claires et indiscutables. Après la crise arienne, avec Athanase, ils se spécialiseront selon leurs étymologies, γενητός pour crèe : γεννητός pour engendré . Jérome , ne tenant aucun compte de ce qu’Origène dit ailleurs, et dans le Peri Archon même, de la géneration du Fils, traduit selon l’usage de son temps.
La même rémarque est à faire sur l’εmploi par Origène de χτίζειν, κτίσις. κτίσμα1. Selon Prov.8, 22, la Sagesse, qui, pour Origène, est le Christ, dit: <Ὁ Κύριος ἔκτισέν με>. Paul, en Col. 1, 15, appelle le Christ πρωτότοκος πασης κτίσεως , l’incluant dans le κτίσις. C’est pourquoι ces mots n’ont pas pour Origène le sens stricte de créer: conformément aux récits de Gen. 1 et de Gen. 2. ποιεῖν désigne la création spirituelle et πλάσσειν le ‘modelage’ des corps. Donc κτίζειν s’applique à toute la “production” divine par génération ou par création. La gradation κτίσμα/ποιήμα/πλάσμα se trouve explicitement dans le Commentaire sur Jean2.
A cause de ce vocabulaire anténicéen, Origène est accusé de faire du Fils et de l’Esprint des créatures, malgré des texts clairs et indiscutables.
3 §4.
4. Cf. G. L. Prestige, Dieu dans la pensée patristique, Paris 1945, p. 127-129.
1. Ce dernier mot est appliqué au Verbe par un fragment de Justinien étudié avec PArch. IV, 4, 1.
2. ComJn xx, 22(20), 182. voir pareillement Denys de Rome (Densinger-Schönmetzer 114) distinguannt κτίζειν de ποιεῖν. Sur cette question, voir aussi M. Simonetti, Studi sull’Aruabusnim 3-87.
•••
Origen’s indecision over the generation of the Spirit by the Father is curious, given his reliance upon the authority of Scripture. He wrote the first five books of his Commentary on John, and began the sixth, coincidentally with his composition of the Peri Archon (Jurgens, op. cit., 201-02; cf. Traité des principes I, v, 10-12). He could not but have been familiar with those passages in the Gospel of John (1:14, 1:18, and 3:16), which, together with I Jn. 4:9, insist upon the uniqueness of Jesus’ Sonship; particularly, Jesus’ reference to himself in Jn. 3:16 as the “Only-Begotten Son (τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ), nor would he have missed its reference to the sacrifice of Abraham recorded in Gen. 11:17. However, in Origen’s Commentary on John, which Crouzel considers his masterwork, these passages enter into his treatment of the Spirit’s origin in the Father. Certainly his survey and refutation of the entire range of opposition to the doctrine of the Trinity leaves nothing further to say. Of the Holy Spirit we read:
And this, perhaps, is the reason why the Spirit is not said to be God's own Son. The Only-begotten is by nature and from the beginning a Son, and the Holy Spirit seems to have need of the Son, to minister to Him His essence, so as to enable Him (the Holy Spirit) not only to exist, but to be wise and reasonable and just, and all that we must think of Him as being. And this he is by participation of the character of Christ, of which we have spoken above.
Origen's Commentary on the Gospel of John, Bk 2, 6. Tr. Allan Menzies, D.D. ANF 10, 328-29, Original Supplement to the American Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1951). The Holy Spirit’s dependence upon the Christ for all He does is explicitly stated.
[327] Crouzel, Origen, 198-203.
[328] See endnote 11, supra; Louis Bouyer, in Cosmos, cited in endnote 1, supra, provides a clear instance of the all-too-common and latently Monarchian identification of the Father with the divine substance. That latency is inherent in any Christological dehistoricizaion of the primordial Jesus, the subject of the Incarnation, as is pointed out in the Foreword of this volume.
[329] See Joseph Lienhard’s precise and generally favorable appraisal of Marcellus, Contra Marcellum: Marcellus of Ancyra and Fourth-Century Christology (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1999). The orthodoxy of the Antiochene followers of Eustathius is questioned by Annick Martin; Athanase, 551, n. 23, despite Athanasius unwavering support of them. His support culminated in his recognition of Paulinus as the authentic Bishop of Antioch, untroubled by the supposed irregularity of his consecration by Lucifer. It is difficult to understand the basis for this supposition. Antioch had no authentic, i.e., pro-Nicene bishop from the date of Eustathius’ exile ca. 337 until the Lucifer’s consecration of Paulinus in 362. Meletius was at best a confused homoiousian whose claim to the See of Antioch Athanasius refused to recognize, as Lucifer well knew; the notion that he should have sought Meletius’ permission to ordain Paulinus is absurd.
[331] Crouzel, ibid., 219. There can be in Origen’s theology no question of the Father’s mission of an ‘immanent’ Son. It is Jesus who is obedient to his Mission from the Father; he is obedient as the single hypostasis, the single subsistence, who is the Bridegroom, the head of the Church and of all creation. Origen understands the Father’s mission of the Jesus Christ, the Son, to be included in the apostolic tradition:
Et ce Dieu dans les derniers temps, comme il l’avait promis auparavant par ses prophètes, a envoyé notre Seigneur Jésus–Christ, pour appeler d’abord Israël, puis les nations après l’infidélité du peuple d’Israël.
Ibid., 81.
And this God, in the last age, as had beem promised beforehand by the prophets, has sent our Lord Jesus Christ, to call first of all Israel, then the gentiles, after the infidelity of the people of Israel.
[332] Crouzel, op. cit, 207-209, 218. Crouzel notes that the reference to male and female in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis applies to the pre-existent Christ with his Bride who is the “gathering of the Intelligences who, as unfallen, have no sexuality.”
[333] Crouzel, ibid., 207-08. Again, Origen’s hypothesis of the pre-existence of souls rests upon the apostolic tradition, and the conviction of the early Church, spelled out by the Apostolic Fathers, that Jesus transcends fallen history as pre- and post-existent; he is the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega, the second Adam, the Bridegroom, the “life-giving Spirit,’ the grace given us in Christ Jesus “ages ago” (πρὸ χρόνων αἰωνἱων (literally, “before the beginning of time:” 2 Tim. 1:9, New International Version). Only this conviction, that Jesus the Lord is the immanent Lord of history, founds the historical communication of idioms, whose historicity is liturgical and sacramental, and therefore radically Eucharistic. Consequently, it is not possible to isolate “the pre-existence of souls” from the Christology of the Henōsis. See endnote 325, citing M. Harl in agreement.
[334] Crouzel, Origen, 211, cites Simonetti’s article, “due note sull’angelogia origeniana,” Rivista di cltura classica e medievale, 4, (1962), 169-208, in which he presents a detailed examination of the evidence that Origen exempted some of the noes from the fall. Crouzel summarizes Simonetti’s argument in Traité des principes II, Note 31, 89. If it be granted that not all the noes fell, the simultaneity of the sins of those who are fallen still remains without explanation. A few pages further on, in Note 15, 95, Crouzel mentions the opinion of Daniélou (Origène, 213, that a passage in Peri Archon, I, 6, which Simonetti has cited in support of his conclusion, is in fact an interpolation by Rufinus.
[335] Crouzel, ibid., 184.
[336] The apostolic and ecclesial recognition of Jesus as the Christ, the Lord, the Son of God, as the pre-existent subject of the Kenōsis, is documented voluminously by Larry Hurtado in his fine work, Lord Jesus Christ, cited often heretofore.
[337] Crouzel, Origen, 174. Further with respect to the relevance of the pre-existence of souls to Origen’s Christology, Crouzel, op. cit., 192-202, presents a comprehensive synthesis of the central elements of a Christology whose depth of insight delivers Origen from any suspicion of a cosmological rationalization whether of the Trinity or the Incarnation. Crouzel‘s survey also reveals the Christological foundation of Origen’s hypothesis of the “pre-existence of souls,” Crouzel has often stressed the primacy of Origen’s Christology over the rest of his theology, which must include within it his apologia for the goodness of creation.
[338] In positing the formal identity of the noes as the foundation of their moral equality, Origen accepts the cosmological posture of Anaximander, who explained motion as the struggle of material entities to overcome the injustice of their differentiation. Material differentiation along the pantheistic “great chain of being” is intelligible only as the greater or lesser possession of formal perfection, and so invokes a hylemorphic dualism. Prescinding from whether or not the finite and therefore corporeal noes may be understood to be thus formally identical within this hylemorphic context, it may be urged that the entire difficulty vanishes when it is noticed that the noes are members of a free community by reason of their having their head in Jesus who, precisely as their head, is the source of their free unity which is that of the substance in which he subsists as its head, and with whom they are thereby consubstantial. Equivalently, he is the Bridegroom of the Church whose members they are.
Given the Trinitarian foundation of headship in I Cor 11:3, it is evident that headship has as its corollary the consubstantiality of those of whose free unity he is the source. Immanent in the free ecclesial community of the noes, i.e., the Church, Jesus, precisely as her head and theirs, is the primordial source of her free unity and consequently of theirs. This free unity, of the Church and the noes who are its members, is lost by the moral failure of the noes, which, as moral, is a personally responsible turning away by each nous from that freedom, which can only be a turning away from the head who is its source.
There is then no need further to account for the moral equality of the noes, inasmuch as each of them, as a matter of definition, is consubstantial with the head, and each consequently possesses, from the Beginning, the fullness of the substantial perfection, the dignity, which proceeds from Jesus the Christ as their head and which, in this primordial “accidental production,” is their “creation in Christ.”
The consubstantiality consequential upon Jesus’ headship of the noes was not defined until the Formula of Union’s affirmation of Jesus’ consubstantiality “with us,” but, like Irenaeus, Origen is well acquainted with I Cor. 11:3, as his reference to the Father’s headship of Jesus indicates, and he would scarcely have been ignorant of the Bridegroom’s headship of the bridal Church, and so of the noes who are its members prior to their fall.,
In sum, Origen’s postulate of the primordial Henōsis is the condition of possibility of the equal moral freedom of the noes, for it is the basis of his Christology. It will be recalled that in Origen’s Christology, Jesus, in his Kenōsis , remains the head of all creation, and specifically the head of the Church, whose free unity he restores on the Altar and the Cross.
[339] Crouzel, Origen, 211, citing Manlio Simonetti’s “Due note sull’ angelologia origeniana,”Rivista di cultura classica e mediavale, 4, 1962, 169-208. Crouzel appears to be in general agreement with Simonetti; ibid., 212-13. However, given the primordial consubstantial equality of the noes, it would follow that their primordial fall could only be of the substance as such, whose primordial unity is fragmented only by its fatal submission to the irrationality of fallen history. Origen seeks exceptions to this universality for exegetical, i.e., historical reasons, but at the expense of the raison d’être of his hypothesis. Since the interest of this examination of his theology is systematic in the sense explained abpve, it will suppose the primordiality of his “pre-existence of souls” to be inherent in the Henōsis, and in Christ’s sponsal headship of the Church, but confused by Origen’s inadequate conversion to history of the consubstantiality of the noes with their head, the primordial Bridegroom of the Church. The only possible conversion would find the source of primordial unity of the noes in the headship of Jesus, the Bridegroom and head of the Church which comprises them. The simultaneity and unanimity of their fall remains unexplained in Origen’s Christology, .
[340] Crouzel, Origen, 193-94.
[341] See Vol. ΙΙ (1996), ch. 6, endnote 42, pp. 603-06. The liturgical significance of the very early appearance of the “Logos epiclesis,” at a time when the “Spirit Christology” of the Apostolic Fathers was serenely in place in Alexandria, has been masked by the patristic designation of the Eucharistic Words of Institution as λογον τοῦ θεοῦ, notably by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Contemporary theologians have construed this expression as a Logos epiclesis in the sense of an invocation of the eternal Word, sensu negante. It is perhaps time to re-examine whether the Alexandrine Logos epiclesis presupposes the Spirit Christology of the Apostolic Fathers, and thus is an invocation of the risen Christ, the ‘Spirit’ whose Personal immanence in the second Eve, whether understood as the bridal Church or as the bridal Theotokos, is achieved by the transubstantiation of her offering.
[342] Crouzel, Origen, 43. citing the historian Socrates; see endnote 391, infra. It is also possible that Theotokos was used by Hippolytus: see The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005), s.v. 1619, citing Hugo Rahner, S.J., “Hippolyt von Rom als Zeuge für den Ausdruck Θέοτόκος,” Ζeitschrift für katholische Τheologie 59 (1935), 73-81; ibid., 60 (1936) 577-90.
[343] Crouzel, ibid., 209.
[344] Inasmuch as the head is the immanent source of the free unity of the free substance of which he is the head, as e.g., the Father, the eternal head of the Trinity, is immanent in the Trinity as the Source of its free unity, so the Son, freely obedient to his Mission from the Father, is primordially the head, the Bridegroom of the Church, is therefore is immanent from the Beginning in their created One Flesh. This poses no difficulties for Origen’s grant of exceptions to the fall, for the doctrinal recognition that the fall is of the primordially good creation a such, and can consequently can admit no exceptions, was not clear in his day. Here is may be noted that neither is it clear to the contemporary defenders of the Incarnation as propter peccatum sensu negante, whose presuppositon of a natural, i.e., ungraced creation independent of the historical mission of the “one and the same Son” renders unintelligible the factual universality of the fall.
[345] Crouzel, ibid., 193. Crouzel understands Origen to refer to the “kenōsis” of Christ in its economic sense, that of John and Paul, to designate the entry of the primordial Jesus into the fallenness of history. In the kenōsis the Christ remains the Bridegroom, the head of the fallen Church. Crouzel goes on to point out Origen’s varying application of “kenōsis;” sometimes he makes the subject of the kenōsis to be the Word, sometimes he refers it to the soul of Jesus the Lord and secondarily to the Word. Crouzel prefers the latter reading, holding that the direct subject of the Kenōsis is the ‘soul, i.e., the humanity, of Jesus. He understands Origen’s use of “kenōsis” to bear only indirectly upon the Son, given the communication of idioms in Christ. Here Crouzel’s application of the communication of idioms concedes to Origen’s waffling on this point, but it cannot be reconciled with the absolute unity of Jesus the Lord. Crouzel is of course well aware of this. In another place, remarking upon the anointing of Christ at the Jordan, Crouzel observes:
N’oublions pas que Christ veut dire Oint. Dans ComJn I, 29 (30)191-197, l’onction de Fils comme roi parait rapportée à sa divinité, et celle de Fils comme Christ à son humanité préeexistant à l’Incarnation. Mais le deux se formant qu’un Logos (ibid., 196).
ET:Do not forget that Christ means ‘(the Lord’s) Anointed. In ComJn 1, 29 (30) 191-97, the anointing of the Son as king appears to be referred to his divinity, and that of the Son as Christ to his humanity, pre-existent to his Incarnation (in the sense of Kenōsis ). Nonetheless the two form only one Logos.
Traité des principes II, 179, Note 26.
[346] This is not merely because the fall logically requires an unfallen status quo ante. The pre-existence of Jesus in the Beginning is taught in Jn. 1:1 and in Col. 1:15-20, in which the primordially good creation and its capitulation, the headship by which it is created in Christ, are at one: Jesus is "the firstborn of all creation;" he is "the Beginning, the first-born of the dead," The Event of his Henōsis with the eternal Logos, by which he is "one and the same Son," is identically his mission from the Father to give the Spiritus Creator, by which Gift creation is good and very good, by which all things are made new and remain new. The link between the “recapitulation” (ἀnakeφalaiώσασθαι: anakephalaiōsasthai) of Eph. 1:10, and the “reconcile all things” (ἀποκαταλλάξαι τὰ πάντα: apokatallaxai ta panta) οf Col 1:20 should not be missed. Further: these terms both refer to the restoration of the primordial goodness of the Good Creation, of the Gift of its free nuptial unity (Gen. 1: 26-31; 2::21-34; Eph. 5:31-32) which as free cannot be imposed but only received in freedom. This raises questions which pertain to theology of the Fall. They have been dealt elsewhere in some detail. See Vol. 3, V, A, 1-2, supra.
[347] See Phil. 2,6: "ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων"; Phil. 2, 7: "ἀλλά ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών". The Pauline parallelism linking Jesus the Christ's "subsisting in the form of God," to his "emptying himself, taking the form of a slave" establishes inexorably. as proper to the apostolic tradition, the primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Christ, the one subject of Jn. 1:14, Paul's ‘Kenōsis and Origen's ‘Henōsis’ Crouzel notes (op. cit., 193) that Origen understands Jesus’ Kenōsis, his acceptance of the “forma servi,” (Phil. 2:6-7 : (αλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών): sed semetipsum exinavit, forma servi accipiens”―“but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” RSV) to entail his loss of the forma Dei, although that exegesis is doubtful; he may have referred to the primordial perfection of Jesus the Lord as the “forma dei.” Insofar as it would bar the salvific immanence of God in history, the economy of salvation, as well as Mary's motherhood of God, which there is good reason to believe Origen also to have affirmed (see endnotes 339 supra and 388. infra). it is not possible to read this deprivation literally, i.e., as a loss of the divinity which Christ had from "the Beginning," and by reason of which he is the Redeemer. For the primordial masculinity of the Christ the Bridegroom, and the fall of the noes into feminine sexuality, see Crouzel, Origen, 218.
[348] Crouzel, ibid., 210ff. It must be remembered that Origen’s Spirit Christology, that of the Apostolic Fathers, is grounded upon the Church’s faith in the primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Christ, as the condition of possibility of his Kenōsis, (historically, of his conception by Theotokos), and his consequently redemptive obedience to his Mission from the Father. Origen understands the Mission of the Son to be his restoration of the fallen Church to her primordial union in one flesh with the Bridegroom, anticipated in the Old Covenant history, achieved sacramentally in the New. Crouzel, op. cit., 193-94, has pointed out that Origen holds the exegesis of Lk. 1:35 common to the Apostolic Fathers, viz., that the Angel Gabriel’s reassurance to Mary at the Annunciation, that “Holy Spirit shall come upon you, and Power of the Most High overshadow you” is not said of the Third Person of the Trinity, but of the pre-existent Word, the primordial Lord Jesus, whose pre-existence we have seen the Apostolic Fathers designate as "spiritual," and whose risen integrity Paul names "a life-giving Spirit” (I Cor. 15:45) Crouzel here cites Origen’s Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles III (GCS VIII, 182). It is upon this apostolic tradition, the conviction of the early Church that Jesus pre-exists fallen history as the Beginning, the Alpha, the second Adam, the Bridegroom, that Origen bases his hypothesis of the primordiallly pre-existent “second” creation, that of the noes, and it is on this ground that his speculation, his construction of a “connected body of doctrine,” proceeds. His theology is thus a hypothetical, i.e., theological and speculative, integration or synthesis of his personal fides quaerens intellectum, addressed to an understanding that unity which later theology will follow him in designating the analogy of faith (κατὰ τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως). This, the "connected body of doctrine" intends a freely coherent hypothesis, a personal quaerens intellectum, a question addressed to the free unity of the Catholic tradition of the revelation that is in Christ. It must be kept in view that the mediation, the historicity, of this tradition is wholly liturgical and consequently sacramental, at once scriptural, doctrinal, and moral. It transcends Catholic theology as the mystery of the faith transcends the perennial fides quaerens intellectum by which the Catholic theologian continually seeks a yet more profound understanding than he possesses in any given moment of the faith that Jesus is the Lord
Consequently the cosmological interpretation of Peri Archon II, 6, 3: "hac ergo substantia animae inter deum carnemque mediante (non enim possibile erat dei naturam corpori sine mediatore miscere) nascitur,” as setting out an “anima mediante” Christology, amounts to supposing once again that here Origen is offering an account of the prior possibility of Jesus’ Kenōsis in dissociation from the primordial Henōsis of the “second creation,” which makes no sense at all for, as Crouzel has affirmed, Origen's Trinitarian-Christological theology is historical. Its foundation is the Event, the Beginning, of the creation ex nihilo that is in Christ as inseparable from his Mission from the Father. This Event, this Beginning, is the Henōsis, the factual primordial unity that is Jesus the Lord, the free, concrete immanence of Jesus the Lord in fallen history, which neither requires nor permits a prior possibility which a cosmology might presume to assess,
In the passage quoted, Origen is inadvertently thinking in terms of the dehistoricized or cosmological Son as the subject of the Incarnation, thus “following his pen,” not his convictions, for in previous chapter, Peri Archon II, 6, 2, he has already insisted upon the communication of idioms in Jesus. As there is no moment in the second creation in which the Logos is not in irrevocable primordial union with the finite and therefore corporeal nous who is Jesus, the head, the Bridegroom, of the primordial Church, so there is no basis for inquiring into the antecedent conditions of possibility of that primordial Henōsis. Origen’s sporadically Platonic imagination emerges, incongruously, in this evident concern to isolate the divine from any historical contamination.
The Henōsis is Origen’s summary affirmation of the radical mystery of the faith of the Catholic that Jesus is the Lord. This concrete realization of the communication of idioms in Jesus is the prius of all Christology for Origen, and it is only by Jesus’ revelation of his Mission from the Father that we know of the Trinity that is the One God. Because it is the object of the Church’s faith, the inexplicable hypostatic unity of Jesus the Lord cannot but be the sole object of the Catholic theologian’s fides quaerens intellectum. Focused on this mystery, the historical object of the Church’s historical faith and worship, Origen’s theology is historical per se, and cannot regress to the task of a non-historical and therefore cosmological reconstruction of the supposed prior possibility of the object of the Church’s faith without abdicating its raison d’être. That abdication is the “Origenism,” whose conclusions would be condemned three centuries after Origen’s death. Its fascination with cosmology has no foundation in his Peri Archon.
[349] Adversus Haereses I, 9, 2; 3, 16, 2 f.; 3, 16, 8; 3, 17, 4. I, 3, 16, 9 – 3, 19, 1-2; See Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 92-93, §§ 218-222. Thus also “Hippolytus” a decade or two later in Contra Noetum, 4, whose author is not Hippolytus; see M. Richard. Hippolyte, 553.
[351] Crouzel believes that Origen presents the first clear statement of the communication of idioms:
Unde et merito pro eo vel quod tota esset in filio dei vel totum in se caperet filium dei, etiam ipsa cum ea qua assumserat carne dei filius et dei virtus, Christus et dei sapientia appellatur; et rursum dei filius, per quam omnia creata sunt, Jesus Christus et filius hominis nominatur.
Peri Archon II, 6, 3, 114-19; Traité des principes I, 314, 316.
The Latin verbs,“appellatur,” “nominatur” assert a Naming; hence Crouzel’s French translation capitalizes the Names: « Fils de Dieu et Puissance de Dieu, Christ et Sagesse de Dieu et, réciproquement, le Fils de Dieu par qui tout a été crée est nommé Jesus-Christ et Fils de l’homme. » For commtary, see Traité des principes II, Nn. 20-22, 176-177. From the outset, Origen’s communication of idioms is of divine and human Names. When composing the Peri Archon, he was unfamiliar with πρόσωπον as well as with its Latin equivalent, persona, and so was forced to use ὑπόστασις equivocally, opening his text to its Eusebian deformation.
[352] Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, I-III; Tr. from the 2nd German edition by Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943-1945), Volume I: Archaic Greece. The Mind of Athens (1945), 156-161, esp. 159-60; see also Jaeger’s Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers. Ser. The Gifford Lectures, 1936 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1947), 23-37, esp. 34-7, and W. K. C. Guthrie, .A History of Greek Philosophy, 1, 76ff.
[353] Eleatic logic has its origin in Parmenides, a native of Elea in southern Italy, who dismissed the reality of differentiation as an affront to the unity of truth. His disciple Zeno is famous for his supposition that the alternative to Parmenides’ affirmation of the absolute unity of the universe (which, for Parmenides, had to be finite to be intelligible) could only be an assertion of an absolute disunity. He proceeded to its reductio ad absurdum, arguing that a denial of the unity of being required that between any two material entities there must be an infinity of others, hence motion is impossible: it cannot begin. Thus the hare cannot begin to outrun the tortoise, the arrow never leaves the bow, and so on. Anaximander accepted the logic of this division, along with the irrationality of differentiation, and resolved that irrationality and the injustice that is its corollary, by defining motion as a quest for the utter equality,the utter elimination of all differentiation, as implicit in the logical unity of Parmenides’ finite material universe. Anaximander’s view of motion anticipates the asymptotically expanding universe confronting temporary physics.
[354] Crouzel, Origen, 122, noting that Hippolytus wrote the first commentary on the Song of Songs, describes Hippolytus’ understanding of nuptial symbolism as “collective” because, in contrast to Origen’s commentary, he applies it simply to the Church. This labelling of Hippolytus’ apostolic interpretation of nuptial symbolism as “collective” would seem to beg the question, supposing as it does the primary meaning of nuptial symbolism to be the nuptial union of the feminized human soul with Jesus the Bridegroom, but we have seen that Crouzel denies this easy dichotomy: he understands Origen to hold the worship of the individual soul to reinforce the worship of the Church, and vice versa.
However, in Eph. 5:31-32, Paul applies the “one flesh” of Gen. 2:24 to the nuptial union of Christ and the Church, and then goes on to apply the “mystery” of marriage to this union of Christ and the Church. This is also the interpretation of the Apostolic Fathers; viz., the oldest homily we have, II Clement, ca. 140, is explicit; the Church is the bride of Christ, and the routine patristic exegesis of Jn. 19:34 reads it as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Gen. 2:21-22. It follows that Hippolytus’ reading of the Pauline nuptial symbolism as applying to the one bride of the Bridegroom, the Church, is faithful to the apostolic tradition; it will be followed by Origen thirty years later. Neither Hppolytus nor Origen consider the members of the Church to be a “collection” of feminine souls, The Church has the personal unity of the Bride of Christ, the second Eve. whose free unity is the presupposition, emphatically not the creation, of the noes who find their unfallen unity only in her. As fallen, they recover that free unity by baptism into her pre-existing free unity with her Lord in the One Flesh instituted by his One Sacrifice.
[355] The Platonic Form is the transcendentally necessary and historically ineffable unity of its members, the transcendentally objective resolution of the problem of the one and the many whose intuition (anamnesis) Plato knew to underlie the rationality of reality. Thereby he saw Aristotle’s effort rationally to unify reality in terms of the act and potency analysis to require the a priori resolution of the otherwise insoluble problem of the one and the many which only the Forms provide. Fallen reason cannot transcend its own disunity. On the other hand, Plato’s “theory of Forms” illustrates the historical pessimism, the inevitable cosmological flight from history, which all quest for a finally necessary intelligibility entails. The quest for an objectively free, concretely historical intelligible unity could occur to no one apart from the Judaeo-Christian revelation of the covenantal Event-immanence of God in history; it is a cosmological impossibility.
[356] The present account of the role of the head in Origen’s theology must accord with his synthesis, whose failure to grasp the full significance of the headship which he knew to be his Lord’s is hardly blamable; for the subject of Christ's headship has aroused little interest since. Before Origen, only Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria had noticed the association of Eph. 1:10 and I Cor. 12:3, after him it has been ignored. His hypothesis of the primordiality of the good creation (i.e., the pre-fallen community of the noes, his recognition of the necessary submission of their head to their fall, and his ascription to the Mission of the Head by the Father the office of restoring to the good creation the newness that once it had, testifies to a grasp of theological significance of headship surpassing that of any theologian prior to the Council of Chalcedon, and nearly all thereafter. Its further implications are addressed in the present volum at A., 2, supra.
[357] In his treatment of Origen’s mysticism, Crouzel offers an illuminating discussion of Origen’s assimilation of the members of the historical Church to her own Bridal unity with her Lord:
Several basic convictions underpin Origen’s exegesis of the New Covenant and its mystical themes. First that of man’s freedom willed by God; of this we have already spoken.45 God does not rule man as a master, as He does the rest of creation, but as a Father: He asks him to adhere freely to the union to which the Fathers' prevenient love destines him. Second, a balanced position between the individual and the collective: redemption is not simply a collective matter nor simply an individual one, but indissolubly both: salvation is both personal and ecclesial. The Commentary on the Song of Songs finds no problem in passing, sometimes without the transmission even being noted, from the Church as Bride to the soul as bride; Origen seems to think that these ideas, far from exhibiting a contrast, are complementary; the faithful soul is bride of Christ because she forms part of the Church which is the Bride, and the more she behaves as a bride in the perfection of her Christian life, the more the Church is Bride.
45/ For example, p, 85. But the idea will constantly recur in the course of this work.
Crouzel, Origen, 77. While this leaves unresolved the anti-sacramental implication of the immediacy of the soul’s bridal union with the Christ, it suffices to absolve the Peri Archon from involvement in that error..
[359] Crouzel, Origen, 172.
[360] Plato strictly links piety to the Gods and devotion to the state; infidelity to either merits death. His citation of a sentence from Homer summarizes this piety:
Telemach
us, some things thou will thyself find in thy heart, but other things God will suggest; for I deem that thou wast not born or brought up without the will of the Gods.2
2.Homer, Odyss. iii. 26 foll.
Laws VII, Translated by B. Jowett, M.A. The Dialogues of Plato, Volume Two (New York: Random House,1937), 559. Werner Jaeger’s discussion of Plato’s Laws (Paideia III, 213-262 stresses the elderly Plato’s stress on the role of God in legal education, which he knew to ge an extension of paideia:
The state built around Plato’s central educational ideal moves, from The Republic to The Laws, nearer and nearer to the kingdom ruling over the souls of men which the church later brought into being. But Plato always maintains his principle that this kingdom is not hing but the inner spiritual nature of man himself, let to action by superior intelligence. It is the rule of the thigher in us over the lower: the fundamental axiam is laid down in The Laws.
Paideia III, 253.
[362] The thesis that Malchion's Christology, condemning that of Paul of Samosata at the latter's trial at the Council of Antioch in 268, is an anticipation of Apollinarius' Logos-sarx Christology, has been discussible since its proposal by Reidmatten: see Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 165. Robert Sample has summarized the contrarian view, which finds no sufficient evidence for this inference:
That a certain Malchion, a priest of Antioch and apparently the head of a rhetorical school in that city, was prominent in the proceedings against Paul is fairly certain,28 and it is probable that written records of some sort issued from the final session of 268. But about Malchion's beliefs we can say nothing.
28 Eusebius Hist. eccl. 7, 29, 23 (Ed. Schwartz, GCS, vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 704).
Robert Sample, "The Christology of the Council of Antioch (268. C.E.) Reconsidered,", Vol. 48, No. 1 (Mar., 1979), pp. 18-26, at 21.
Doubtless little can be known of Malchion’s prosecution of Paul, given the paucity of records, but it is not very hazardous to impute to him, quite evidently a scholar, that commitment to the apostolic Spirit Christology of Tertullian, Hippolytus and Origen which was dominant in the third century. William P. Haugaard, “Arius: Twice a Heretic? Arius and the Human Soul of Jesus Christ,” Church History, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Sep., 1960), pp. 257-58, makes this point, following Sellers, viz., that Malchion’s “Word-flesh” theology cannot be assimilated to the later Christological speculation of the fourth century which travelled under the Logos-sarx label. Sellers would seem to have been be correct in claiming that Malchion and the bishops at Antioch.
. . . fell back upon the Christological thought of an earlier age, and are satisfied with the formula that Jesus Christ is the logos incarnate, Himself God and man, without entering into the question of what is involved when it is said that he is ‘man.’ Indeed it would seem that it was not until the second half of the fourth century that this question came to be asked.3
Endnote 3, pp. 32-33, runs to more than a page of fine print: too long to be presented here. It comprises an extended discussion of whether the humanity of Christ is ensouled. It is summarized in the following commentary upon a fragment written by Eustathius of Antioch:
Accordingly, we suggest that here the Bishop is arguing that his opponents are, from their writings, “:showing”―it will be noted that he does not use a word like “assert”; his basis is what they themselves were saying―that they teach that Christ has a body without a soul (else, his thought would seem to be, they would have attributed human passions to the manhood of Christ, to which they belong) and that they are only seeking someone to put out this doctrine, and then they will have a real case for upholding their main contention that the Logos is a creature, since then, human passions clearly belonging to Him, there would be no doubt at all concerning the mutability of the Logos. So it would seem that we can by no means be certain that the doctrine that the Logos took the place of the human soul in Christ ”dates from an early period of the [Arian] controversy” (cf Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, p. 26, n. 5). The evidence, rather, leads one to suspect that we have here an illustratioon of the tendency to saddle the “fathers”of a heresy with the thought of its later exponents. Perhaps it is not without significance that―excluding, as we think we must, that of Eustathius―our earliest direct evidence comes from the Anchoratus which was written (apparently in 374) at a time when the question of the reality of Christ’s human rational soul was being discussed both by the Anomoeans and by Apollinarius of Laodicea.
Ibid, n. 3, p. 33.
Sellers, Two Ancient Christologies (London, 1940), p. 32. The question was first asked by Diodore, later the bishop of Tarsus, ca. 350; his inability to answer it was mocked by Lucian the Apostate as a “two sons” doctrine.
The “Christological thought of an earlier age” to which Sellers refers, is simply the apostolic Spirit Christology, universal in the third century which, were Ernest Evans’ assessment of Eusebius correct, was rendered obsolescent by the “common sense” of Eusebius of Caesarea; see Evans, Adversus Praxeas, at 69. .
[363] The Image of the Trinity must be at once created, primordial, historical, substantial and triune. Only the Event of the Eucharistic institution of the union in One Flesh of Christ and the bridal Church meets these conditions. It must be remembered that the members of the triune One Flesh are immanent in its substantial unity, quite as Members of the Trinity are immanent in the divine Substance. As the Holy Spirit, the subsistent Love of the Father and the Son, is a Member of the Trinity, so in the human Image of the Trinity, i.e., the One Flesh, the subsistent love of Jesus the Head and the bridal Church, their irrevocable union which can be identified with neither, is a Personal and consubstantial member of the One Flesh.
[364] Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity, devotes over twenty pages to showing that the designation Gregory gives to Jesus the Christ, "Ὁ σύνθετος" is a title, not a description. His argument would appear to hold for Tertullian's Christological use of "krasis" and "mixtio" as well.
[365] Crouzel, Traité des principes II, Deuxième section, 30-32; Origen, 189-92.
[366] Crouzel, Origen 190, has noted “a certain parallelism” between that emanation of the Mind or Intelligence which Plotinus ascribes to the One, and the significance that Origen attaches to the Logos-epinoiai, and thus to the Father’s “first production,” i.e., his eternal begetting of the Son. Origen understands the Trinitarian Logos to be eternally generated by the Father, to be the eternal pattern of creation in all its variety. As eternal, the Logos-Son is the source of the intelligibility of the universe, the Personification of all virtue. The parallel which Crouzel remarks between Origen’s eternal Logos and the Neoplatonic Nous (Intelligence), i.e., the first emanation from the One, arises out of the placing, by both Origen and Plato, of a mediator between the utter unity of the Source of being, whether as the Father or as the One, and the multiplicity of the material world, clearly in prospect of its creation. However, Origen regards creation as a primordial Event, not as ab aeterno. The Neoplatonic Intelligence, or Nous, is the unity of a quasi-infinite plethora of Ideas, equivalently the Platonic Forms, while Origen’s epinoiai doctrine attributes the same intellectual complexity, for the same reason, to the eternal Son of the Father’s “first production,” who, as the eternal Logos, is the eternally begotten pattern of the material universe which will be constituted by the “second production.” Origen understands the eternal Son to possess or, perhaps better, to constitute, the same intrinsic intelligibility of the physical universe as does the first Neoplatonic emanation, the Intelligence.
Pace Crouzel, the evident parallelism between the Neoplatonic emanationism and Origen’s recourse to “epinoiai” is not only dispensable to Origen’s Trinitarian theology and to his Christology, but is also alien to both, for the Father’s historical Mission of the Son who is Jesus the Lord, the Personal Head of all creation, far transcends the immanently necessary emanation, by the One, of the impersonal Nous or Intelligence of the Neoplatonic cosmology.
Jesus is is the source of the free intelligibility of the redeemed creation, while the immanent intelligibility of the material world, whether provided by the first Neoplatonic emanation, the Logos-Nous-Intelligence, or the second emanation, the World-Soul, is that of an immanently necessary pantheism. It can have no parallel with the headship of Christ, which is nuptial, that of the Bridegroom of the bridal second Eve, the Church. Further, the multiplicity of epinoiai which Origen places in the eternal Son is incompatible with his Personal consubstantiality with the Father, which Crouzel affirms Origen to have taught, thus anticipating Nicaea. Personal consubstantiality can only be entirely simple.
Crouzel, in Origen, 192, observes that Origen’s Christ, as the Bridegroom of the pre-existent Church, (i.e., as Head of the Church), corresponds to the third Neoplatonic hypostasis, the World-Soul, who contains the individual souls, ”which are both distinct from each other and not distinct.” He notes, however, that as the Bridegroom of the pre-existent Church, Christ has a greater respect for the person, for the individual soul, than does the Neoplatonic World-Soul. This is evident.
The correspondence which Crouzel asserts of the Christ, the Bridegroom, to the Neoplatonic World-Soul is all but dismissive of the Christ’s office as the Head of the Church, the primordial source of her free unity as his Bride, and of the freedom by which she is One Flesh with him, irreducibly distinct from him that she may be in free nuptial union with him. His headship of the Church, as her Bridegroom, is eo ipso his headship of the created noes whom the primordial Church comprises, and of whose personal free unity the Christ-Bridegroom is therefore the source, the creator. His office of headship continues in the Kenōsis, his free immanence in the fallen human substance, the Church, of which he is the Bridegroom, the source, the creator. In fallen history he is her redeemer by his sacrificial institution, in his blood, of the One Flesh of the New Covenant. This is the Apostolic tradition, at once Eucharistic and scriptural.
[367] See Johannes Betz, Eucharistie in der Schrift und Patristik; ser. Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte; eds. Michael Schmaus, Alois Grillmeier, Leo Scheffczyk und Michael Seybold: (1 Teil) Band IV, Faszikel 4a (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 1979). pp. 47-52; also Lothar Lies, Wort und Eucharistie bei Origenes: zur Spiritualizierung-Tendenz des Eucharistieverständnisses; ser. Innsbrucker theologische Studien 1; (Tyrolia: Innsbruck, Wien, München, 1978), and its sequel, Origenes Eucharistielehre im Streit der Konfessionen: die Auslegungsgeschichte seit der Reformation; ser. Innsbrucker theologische Studien 15; Tyrolia: Innsbruck, Wien, 1985: Batiffol’s defense of Origen’s Eucharistic orthodoxy against Gore, Loofs et al. in Études d'histoire et de théologie positive, 2e série, L'Eucharistie, la présence réelle et la transubstantiation, dixième édition, (Paris: Librairie Lecoffre, J. Gabalda, 1930, II. 262-84, applies equally against Johannes Betz’ comparable reduction of Origen’s Eucharistic theology to a symbolism.
[368] Crouzel, Origen, 164-65, has excerpted two eloquent passages from Pamphilus' Apology for Origen.
[369] I Cor. 12:3 is the oldest explicit Scriptural witness to the faith that Jesus Christ is Lord although the preceding chapters of I Cor. are replete with its parallels. The declaration in Phil. 2: 11, that "Jesus Christ is Lord" is thought to resume an older Christian hymnody, while its liturgical foundation, the Eucharistic Sacrifice, is coeval with the Church of which it is the cause.
[370] Baptism in the Trinitarian order of Names is prerequisite to entry into the historical Church, whose historicity is her liturgy, radically her celebration of the One Sacrifice. The recognition by the Catholic Church of the validity of Protestant baptism rests upon the Protestant profession of the Church’s Trinitarian faith, whose affirmation is complete in her liturgy. Baptism permits participation in the worship of the Church; its prioity to that participation, witnessed by the architectural separation of the baptistry from the cathedral, as at Florence, is of particular ecumenical significance, for it stands in the way of the Protestant ecclesiology, which finds the cause of the church in baptism, not in the Eucharistic offering of the One Sacrifice.
[371] Tertullian's use of "substantia" to designate what is two in Jesus (i.e., the human and divine 'natures') effectively equates the Latin "substantia" with the Greek "hypostasis," much as would the Council of Nicaea, which used "ousia " and "hypostasis" indifferently as equally acceptable designations of the unity of the Trinity, although in affirming the Personal consubstantiality of the Council chose to affirm that he is "homoousios" with the Father rather than "homo-hypostasis," for reasons which continue to be discussed.
Theological use of "natura," the Greek "physis," as a substitute for "substantia" or for "hypostasis," has unacceptable implications, due to its connotation of impersonality, which in turn implies subjection to immanent necessity and thus determinism. Its Christological application, insofar as impersonal, entails the identification of the Personal 'subject of the Incarnation with the non-human Logos, This becomes Monophysite if "natura" is understood to exclude the human soul, and diophysite if ”natura” is held to include the human soul. This consequence points up an ambiguity latent in the Christological use of "substantia," and, for that matter, of "hypostasis." The Trinitarian use of “nature” too easily connotes a divisible divinity, an error latent in the all-too-commonplace contemporary references to the "sharing,” by Son and the Spirit, in the divinity received from the Father. Read literally, this imports the “Neo-Nicenism” attributed by Harnack to the Councils of Alexandria and I Constantinople. Substance, whether in its concrete or abstract sense, denotes unqualified and indivisible unity; to ignore this, with Harnack, is to cease to speak intelligibly: Neo-Nicenism posits the divisibility of Trinity, which is nonsense.
Tertullian used "persona" to designate the distinct unity of each of the members of the Trinity, as well as to designate the unity of Jesus the Lord. There is no reason to suppose his Christological use of the term in the Apologeticus to be abstract. It is clear, as Evans has noted, that Tertullian distinguishes the unity of the human person from the unity of the human substance, i.e., the human community, which he supposes to be single, taking for granted that the human substance comprises the whole of humanity, i.e., the children of Adam and Eve. Evans has further noted Tertullian's very close association of Jesus' "Name" with his "Person".
This association is less clear with respect to the Trinitarian Names. The Church’s use of “Name” is always liturgical and therefore concretely historical, referring always to the economy of salvation, through which the Trinity is revealed. Tertullian’s designation of the Father, Son, and Spirit as distinct Persons relies on this liturgical foundation. However, contra Ernest Evans, Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology is historical, never losing its reference to the revelation of the Trinity in the Mission of Jesus the Christ: cf. Apologeticus 21. He does not attempt to justify the faith that Jesus is the Son of the Father and thus the Son of God; rather, that Jesus is in fact the Son of the Father is the basis of his exposition of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine in the Apologeticus and thereafter. Were the musing “moment of reason” in which he indulges in Adversus Praxean 27, taken as foundational for his theology, it would force the choice between a monophysite and a diophysite Christology which that passage poses. But once again, Tertullian’s Christology as set out in the De Carne Christi is that of the apostolic tradition: Jesus Christ is Lord, the eternal Son of the eternal Father, whose mother is Mary.
Tertullian had also recognized the communication of Names in Jesus the Lord in his stress upon Jesus' Personal unity. His use of "Persona" to designate the Name of Jesus the Lord is not technical. It serves in the Apologeticus as “hypostasis” serves Origen in the Peri Archon. Tertullian, like Origen in his use of “hypostasis” and “ousia ,” did not attempt to explain what his Persona-Substantia usage at once affirmed and distinguished, the unity of Jesus the Lord, and the unity of the Trinity Knowing that only the Persons of the Trinity are Named, he does not Name the substantial God, the Trinity. Origen also will dismiss that latent cosmological quandary by recognizing that the union of personal humanity and personal divinity in Jesus the Lord is a Henōsis of hypostases, thus a hypostatic union in the strictest sense, which is Jesus the Lord’s Personal subsistence in the Trinity and in humanity.
Tertullian's theological use of "persona" was entirely novel: it had no parallel in Western or in Oriental theology. At this time, the waning of the second century and the dawning of the third, the distinction between the unity of the concrete intellectual subject, i.e., the 'person', and the unity of an intellectual “nature,” had not been examined except in Aristotle's unsatisfactory development, in the De Anima; of an act-potency analysis of humanity as a material intellectual species whose members could be so only by an impossible participation in an abstract “species,” or “second substance.” Thus it left unresolved the relation between the unity of the species and of each of its members, offering a classic example of the insoluble problem of the one and the many. In his youth, St. Thomas thought to have resolved that problem in the De Ente et Essentia, by assigning substantiality to the many members of the human reality and leaving their essential unity abstract: see Sancto Thomae Aquinatis Tractatus de Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas. Editio Critica. Leo W. Keeler, in Pont. Univ. Greg. Prof. Ser. Textus et Documenta series Philosophica 12 (Romae: apud Aedes Pont. Universitatis Gregorianae, Piazza della Pilotta, 4, 1946). His Averroist opponents affirmed the substantiality of the human essence and the potentiality of the members relative to that essence. Nearly seventy years after Keeler’s edition, it is difficult to imagine anyone paying it any serious attention.
Origen's exploitation, in the Peri Archon, of "ousia " and "hypostasis" for theological purposes, at once Trinitarian and Christological, antedates Nicaea by perhaps a century. There he used "ousia " to designate the paramount unity of the Trinity, and "hypostasis" to designate the unity of each of those who three in the Trinity, i.e., the divine Names of Father, Son, and Spirit. He used "hypostasis" also to designate what is two in the Church's affirmation of faith in Jesus the Lord, the Names whose union is their hypostatic Henōsis. Crouzel has noted that Origen was then unfamiliar with the Greek equivalent of Tertullian's "Persona." Prestige, in God in Patristic Thought, 161-62, has noticed that Origen used the word frequently in the Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles, written more than a decade later. Evans, op. cit., 24, has proposed the likelihood that this term was introduced into Greek theology by Hippolytus' translation of it as Πρόσωπον: We have seen that Prestige, op. cit. 159-60, agrees, while suggesting that Tertullian's familiarity with Greek, and his close association with Hippolytus, may have led him first to write "πρόσωπον" and only thereafter translate it back into "persona." No documentation of correspondence between Tertullian and Hippolytus exists. Their affinities are sufficiently explained by their common indebtedness to Justin.
Tertullian's equation of substance with hypostasis became a standard Latin usage. Its inability to account for the plurality of Names in Jesus the Christ, the Lord, noted by Evans, op. cit., 50, did not trouble the Latin tradition, which was not much given to speculation. The substance-hypostasis equation found its way into the Tome of Leo, read and acclaimed at Chalcedon, but Leo's use of "substantia" was there refined. The Conciliar Fathers required the translation of Leo's "substantia" into the Greek "hypostasis" to match the vocabulary of the Symbol of Chalcedon which, following Origen, defined as "hypostatic," i.e, as Personal, the union of the divine and human Names of "the one and the same Son." The later refusal of dissident theologians to "receive" the Chalcedonian identification of Jesus with the subject of the Incarnation, is also a refusal of the Chalcedonian affirmation of the "hypostatic union" of Personal humanity and divinity in Jesus the Lord.
Origen's use of "ousia " to designate the unity of the Trinity, and of "hypostasis" to designate the Members of the "substantial" Trinity induced a change in the meaning of "hypostasis" which finally would bar the facile equation of "hypostasis" and "ousia ," as by the Council of Nicaea. His "mia ousia , treis hypostaseis" would finally carry the day. Athanasius had earlier rejected that terminology by reason of its subordinationist interpretation by the disciples of the two Eusebii but, shortly before the Council of Alexandria, he had come to recognize that his loyalty to the Nicene proclamation of the Personal homoousios of the Son, and therefore to the "mia hypostasis" of the Trinity, was compatible with the "mia ousia , treis hypostaseis" of Origen. His Tome to the Antiochenes conceded the compatibility of that language with the Nicene Creed, a judgment confirmed by the Symbol of Chalcedon.
[372] The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005), s.v. 778a. It was five years after this visit that Hippolytus began his attacks upon Zephyrinus and Callistus.
[373] Marcel Richard, citing Hippolytus’ Refutatio omnium haeresium, edited by Miroslav Marcovich; ser. Patristische Texte und Studien, Band 35 (New York, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1986), [hereafter, Refutatio], X, 32-34, observes :
Cet exposé nous assure que seul le Verbe a été engendré de Dieu. Seul il est sorti de l’Être et c’est pourquoi il est Dieu et substance de Dieu (33, 1 et 8) .
M. Richard, « S. Hippolyte de Rome, » Hippolyte de Rome, » Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, t. vii, première partie (Paris : Beauchesne, 1969), 521-71 ; ibid., t. vii, 549.
The texts of the Hippolytus’ Refutatio particularly relied upon by M. Richard are Ch. X, 33, 1 and 33, 8; they read as follows:
33, 1: Οὗτος οὗν <ὸ> μόνος καὶ κατά παντων θεὸς Λόγον πρῶτον ἐννοηθεαὶς ἀπογγεννᾷ∙ οὐ <δὲ>Λόγον ὡς φωνήν, ἀλλ’ ἐνδιάθηετον τοῦ παντὸς λογισμὸν. Τοῦτον <οὖν> μόνον ἐξ ὄντων ἐγέννηθεν.
33, 8 :τούτου <δὲ> ὁ Λὁγος μὁνος ἐχ αὐτοῦ.διὸ καὶ θεὁς, οὐσὶα ὑπάρχων θεοῦ. ὁ δὲ κόσμος ἐχ οὐδενός διὸ οὐ θεός.
Hippolytus uses the expression “homoousios tou Patrὶ” only once in the Refutatio, and then in a Gnostic context, see Refutatio, 491; 186, 27¨(τῳ πατρὶ); see also 156, 98: (ὁμοουσιος τῷ Ἀνθρώπῳ).΄.
[374] See John Chapman, "Dionysius of Alexandria." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), s.v.
[375] J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, at 251-252.
[376] Crouzel, op. cit., at 179, citing Athanasius’ attribution to Origen of the phrase, “there was not when he was not.” Cf. Traité des principes I, 2, 9, 130-31, and Ibid, II, 48, note 55.
[377] Ibid., 181. Crouzel has seen in this begetting of the Son and production of the Spirit a dynamic understanding of their consubstantiality with the Father; “dynamic” in this context invokes the intra-substantial perichōresis of the Persons as revealed by the Missions of the Son and the Spirit.
[378] It should be kept in mind that the Apologists, as later Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen, knew nothing of a generic consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit. This was precluded by their common emphasis upon the indivisibility of the divine substance, as well as by their recognition of the Trinity and consequently of the co-eternity of the Son with the Father and further, by clear implication at least, of their Personal (i.e., hypostastic) consubstantiality. These inferences were not grounded in speculation, but in the Church’s liturgy. This is not a matter upon which Dionysius, a disciple of Origen, would have been likely to be confused: for further discussion, see endnote 178, supra. Further, inasmuch as Dionysius is preeminently one of those bishops whose pastoral efficacy Kelly elsewhere credits with the defeat of Gnosticism; we may suppose him to have been well acquainted with the emanationist subordinationism.of the Gnostics. Finally, Dionysius was invited to preside over the first of the two provincial Councils of Antioch which met in 265 and 268 A.D. to try Paul of Samosata for his adoptionist Christology, which had reduced Jesus to the standing of a “mere man”―psilanthrōpos. It is possible that, like Pamphilus a few decades later, Dionysius was rather a student of Origen’s exegesis than of his theology. It is otherwise difficult to account for his unfamiliarity with the "homoousios," given Origen’s express teaching of the unique substantiality of the Trinity, and of the consequent consubstantiality of its members with each other. Dionysius’ reluctance to use the term because it is not biblical witnesses to a disinterest in its use to explain the problem of the One and the Many in God, and such imprecision has been thought to have opened him to the charge of tritheism made by his Libyan suffragans. In sum, the vocabulary used in his reply to Dionysius of Rome in re his failure to use the "homoousios" suggests that his scholarly forte was not theology. On the other hand, he was the head of the Catechetical School from 348 until his death seventeen years later, and had brought the Sabellianism of the Libyan bishops to the attention of Sixtus II. Until the basis of Pope Dionysius’ concern for Dionysius of Alexandria’s failure to use of “homoousios” is better understood, any Cross-examination of the latter’s “Apologia and Defense” will find no place to stand.
[379] Crouzel devotes the fifth chapter of Origen to Origen’s spiritual anthropology, an existential account of man’s spiritual life “dans la pespective du combat spirituel.” This struggle is predicated upon the universal gift of an absolutely immaterial pneuma, a created participation in the Holy Spirit, which Crouzel likens to the scholastic notion of sanctifying grace. In fact, its universal distribution and its permanence are irreconcilable with the accidental standing of sanctifying grace in the usual Thomist doctrine of grace. Origen’s understanding of pneuma is close to Augustine’s understanding of the “trahi a Deo,” whose universality and inamissability require its identification with the fundamental gratia Christi, our creation in Christ and, more precisely, with the eleutheria, the Pauline “freedom to be free” won for us by the One Sacrifice. Origen’s approach to this grace is much that of the Augustinian correlation of sacramentum-res sacramenti, whose interest is thus anagogical as effectively to identify the freedom of the Christian with its anogogical orientation in such wise that only thus is it precisely the freedom to be free, the freedom to accept personal and sacrificial responsibility for those for whom Christ died. In sum, pneuma is at once our invitation to covenantal fidelity and our acceptance of that invitation to exist as πνεῦματικος (pneumatikos), in Origen’s language. This would appear to consist with the relative immateriality of the soul as graced, pneumatika, as taught by Origen; Augustine knew that our trahi a deo is to be drawn to the Beauty who is the Christ, the ancient beauty who is forever new, but Augustine knew also that all beauty is veiled, crucified, in this fallen world.
[381] Peri Archon II, 6, 6.
[382] Crouzel, Origen, 193. Inasmuch as “forma dei” in this instance refers to Jesus’ glory, not his divinity, it is evident that Origen recognizes that Jesus does not cease to be divine by his kenōsis.
[384] Crouzel, Origen, 89-91. The corporeal soul (nous) of Christ is joined to the eternal Logos, the Son from the beginning, from the primordial creation of the noes who are from their creation in a fervent contemplation of the Logos who, from the Beginning, is the primordial Christ, who is their head because he is the head, the Bridegroom, of the Church. Their unfallen existence is primordial, not ab aeterno, for creation as such has the Beginning assigned it in the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis. Origen has clearly distinguished the two orders of divine ktisis, viz., the substantial order, the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of the Spirit, from the accidental order, the physical universe that is created in Christ. The corporeal nous who is Christ, in Henōsis with the Son, is sinless and incapable of sin because possessing, from the Beginning, the “form of God” (Phil 2:6): see Peri Archon. II, 6, 6; Here Crouzel points out that Origen's treatment of kenōsis issues in a dichotomous soul, corresponding to the distinction Paul draws between the pneuma and the sarx of fallen man, wherein pneuma is our solidarity with the victory of Christ over death, and sarx, our solidarity with the mortality of fallen Adam. To these correspond the "simul justus et peccator" of Augustine's anthropology.
In Origen's anthropology of fallen man, the individual "nous," is dichotomized by the fall. His intellect is spontaneously open to the Spirit, while the lower part of his soul, the product of the “cooling" of the primordial contemplative ardor, comes into being only with a turning away from that contemplation of the Logos. It is a source of suffering, of concupiscence, but not of personal sin, which is free even for those who are fallen.
Origen adapts Plato’s trichotomous anthropology to Christian uses: for Origen, it includes the body. The noes, apart from the nous of Jesus the Christ, the head of the noes, who is in hypostatic, i.e., Personal union with the Logos and possesses the forma dei, are each formally a nous, an Intelligence, in their unfallen primordial pre-existence. They are etherially corporeal, finite intelligences, freely contemplating the Logos under the inspiration of the Spirit, given them by their Jesus the Lord, their head and their creator, in the Beginning. It is with their fall that their secondary concupiscent soul comes into being, in union with its now mortal “flesh:” its union with the higher soul corresponds to the Pauline anthropology of fallen man as a composite of flesh and spirit in permanent tension.
However, by a conversion to the freedom which is possible only through the continuing presence of the Spirit, the gift of Christ the head to the nous throughout its terrestrial existence, the nous-become-soul can recover its free unity with the Logos, the Christ. In that fallen state, the pre-existent “ethereal” corporeality (soma, body) that is the corollary of their primordial finitude, has become sarx (flesh), a state of existence devoid of of intrinsic unity, whose ongoing fragmentation corresponds to the no longer integral and therefore dying soul of fallen human existence. It is into this fallen historical condition that the primordial head of the noes, Jesus the Lord, has entered. This entry is his Kenōsis, his Incarnation (i.e., his enfleshment, ensarkosis). The kenōsis (emptying out) that his Incarnation connotes: his loss of primordial integrity and his consequent mortality, ignorance, and capacity for suffering proper to the historical Jesus the Lord, but not the loss of Personal divinity, nor his Mission from the Father to give the Spirit. The refusal by the first Adam and Eve of his primordial Gift of free nuptial unity, Jesus’ Mission to give the Spirit became redemptive and sacrificial, but his obedience to the Mission remains: Jesus the Christ, anointed for historical Mission by the Holy Spirit, must now overcome death, “the last enemy,” by taking it upon himself in the offering to the Father of the One Sacrifice, the institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh in which the lost unity of the good creation is restored, in sacramento, in ecclesia, in Christo. By his One Sarificee, Our Head, Jesus the Lord, has freed each of us from the prison of our fallenness; he has given each of us the freedom to enter into freedom, into the liturgical worship of the Church, into her celebration of her union with her Lord, by which his Spirit is continually bestowed upon her, his Bride, and through her, upon his restored Good Creation. To sustain us in a worship that now is arduous, were are given, through the Church, the Bread of Life and the Chalice of eternal salvation, the medicine of immortality, given that we may not die.
[384] In Origen, 182, the editor (A. S. Worall) substitutes for the excerpt from Traite des Principes in Origène (238) a parallel quotation from Butterworth’s translation of Kötschau's edition of the text of the Preface in which Origen sets forth the rule of faith; it is republished in the Harper Torchbook edition of Peri Archon. Cf. Crouzel’s critique of that edition in endnote 631, supra.
[385] In Origen, 182, Crouzel quotes Butterworth’s translation of Koetschau's edition of the text of the Preface in which Origen sets forth the rule of faith; it is republished in the Harper Torchbook edition of Peri Archon.
[386] Peri Archon II, 8, 3-4; for commentary see Crouzel, Origen, 192ff., and 205ff.; also, Crouzel’s "L'anthropologie d'Origène," Archē e Telos: L'antropologia di Origene e di Gregorio di Nissa. Analisi storico-religiosa. Atti del colloquio Milano, 17-19 Maggio, 1979. Pubblicati a cura di U. BianchiError! Reference source not found. con la cooperazione di H. Crouzel. Vita e Pensiero. (Milano: Pubblicazioni della Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 1981), 43, cited in Volume I, Chapter 2, endnote 161, supra. Crouzel notes (op. cit., 210) that Origen, using a classic albeit doubtful etymology, linked psyché (soul) with psychōs (cold) in such wise as to suggest that remoteness from God is remoteness from the divine warmth, hence a cooling. Daniélou has quoted a passage from Tertullian suggesting the pertinence of Plato’s doctrine of the pre-existence of souls to Origen’s use of the ‘cooling’ metaphor in his account of the fall:
I am sorry that Plato, in good faith, should have been responsible for spreading all kinds of heresies. In the Phaedo, for example, he says that souls come from various places at various times (Phaed., 60 c) and, in the Timaeus, that the descendants (genimina) of God, having been given the task of begetting (genitura) mortals, received the immortal principle of the soul and made a mortal body freeze around it (circumgelaverint) 9 (Timaeus 69, c.).
9.Cf. De Princip.,ix, 5, with gelata.
Tertullian, De Anima xxiii, 5.
Jean Daniélou, Latin Christianity, 224.
[387] Crouzel, in Origen, 213-14, deals with Origen's treatment of the demonic level of the fall. It suffers from a certain confusion, because Origen understands the unfallen Intelligences to constitute the primordial Church, and as fallen, to constitute the fallen Church, from which the demons are alien and of which they have no knowledge. Origen's main concern with demons is their original creation in integrity. The fall of Satan and his angels is a part of the tradition; they freely fell to the demonic level of utter ignorance of Christ.
[388] Crouzel presents a notable exception in his early Théologie de l’image de Dieu chez Origène (Paris : Aubier, èditions Montaigne, col. Théologie 34, 1955), 152-53. However, later in that work (pp. 228-30, cited infra by Chênevert) Crouzel is able to assimilate Origen’s notion of the “insemination” of the soul by the Logos to the growth of virtue in the Christian by way of his imaging of God. See also Crouzel’s Origène et la ‘connaissance mystique;” préface du R. P. Henri de Lubac; Museum Lessianum, section théologique 56 (Paris, 1961). Cf. Gervais Aeby, OFM Cap., Les missions divines de saint Justin à Origène; col. Paradosis : études de littérature et de théologie anciennes xii (Fribourg, Suisse : éditions universitaires, 1958); also Henri de Lubac, S.J., Histoire et ésprit: L'intelligence de l'Écriture d'après Origène; ser. Théologie 16 (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1950) ; Jacques Chênevert, S.J., L’église dans le Commentaire d’origène sur le Cantique de Cantiques ; col Studia : Travaux de recherche (Bruxelles, Paris : Desclée de Brouwer ; Montréal : Les éditions Bellarmin, 1969); J. Christopher King, Origen on the Song of Songs : The Bridegroom’s Perfect Marriage-Song ; col. Oxford Theological Monographs (New York, Oxford University Press, 2005). Here we follow Chênevert’s citation of Aeby and Crouzel in support of his own stress upon the ecclesial and sacramental context of Origen’s nuptial spirituality:
Toutefois, comme le montre bien le P. Aeby, la réception du Verbe et la conception des virtus, mais avant tout la naissance du Christ dans l’âme sanctifiée, sont à replacer dans une contexte sacramentelle, ce qui réintroduit ces opérations dans un milieu ecclésial3.
3 G. Aeby, Missions, 168-169, 175-178. Cf. H. Crouzel, Image, 228-230.
Chênevert, op. cit., 140.
There is no doubt that Origen’s spirituality is integral with his worship of his Lord in the Church, and that he understood it to be in some manner coordinate with the Catholic sacramental liturgy. The question is whether in fact it is thus compatible with Catholic sacramental worship. Fr. Aeby’s exposition simply begs this question. For him, the nuptial relation of the soul to the Word begins with baptism, and remains in this context throughout the life of the Christian, whose spiritual progress is measured by a development understood as “naissant et grandissent:”
Parallelment à cet aspect du Verbe naissant et grandissant dans l’âme, nous trouvons celui de Verbe devenu au baptême l’époux de l’âme. Sur ce point, Origène dépend de saint Hippolyte mais à la différence de ce dernier son application se porte davantage sur l’âme individuelle que sur l’Église.
G. Aeby, op. cit., 170.
Fr Aeby accepts Origen’s notion of the insemination of the soul by the Word, and the soul’s consequent generation of the Word, as a valid interpretation of Paul’s stress, in Gal. 4:19, upon the necessity for the formation of Christ in the soul, pushing beyond absurdity this imagery of the soul’s giving birth to the Son, to the point of referring to his Procession from the Father, i.e., to the Father’s begetting of the Word, as “sa naissance éternel du sein du Père.” This language feminizes the Father in a radical sentimentalizing of the Catholic tradition. Fr. Crouzel’s interpretation of the same texts from the Commentary on the Song of Songs, and the two associated homilies, is more restrained. He recognizes the Origen’s doctrine of femininity of the soul; “Its role is to receive in order to generate.” (cf. endnote 247, supra). This reading of ‘spirit’ and its cognates as denoting immateriality is of course Platonic, not Pauline. Its consequence is the feminization of Catholic spirituality, understood as the worship by souls, feminized by the fall, who are inseminated by and give birth to the Christ. This is of course a radical departure from the Catholic tradition: e.g., it removes the foundation of sacramental marriage . Its interpretation of the Catholic worship of the Christ and the Trinity revealed in him is dualistic and therefore false.
[389] DS §*301, 108.
[391] The earliest instance of the liturgical reference to Mary as the “Theotokos” occurs in a hymn which has been responsibly dated to the third century: see “Sub Tuum,” Theotokos: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Virgin Mary, by Michael O’Carroll, C.S.Sp. Revised edition (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983) [hereafter Theotokos] 336. It is then not surprising that the communication of idioms should have played so great a role in Alexandrine theology. The church historian Socrates notes in his Historia Ecclesiastica that:
Origen also in the first volume of his Commentaries on the apostle’s epistle to the Romans, (Cf. Origen, Com. in Roman. I. 1. 5) gives an ample exposition of the sense in which the term Theotocos is used.
Socrates, H.E. vii, 32,
It is unfortunate that Rufinus’ abbreviated translation of Origen’s Commentary on Romans omitted this part but, given Socrates’ criticism of Nestorius’ opposition to the “Theotocos,” it is evident that the passage he cites from the now lost unabbreviated text of the Commentary on Romans supports his own insistence, contra Nestorius, upon naming Mary the mother of Jesus, the “Theotokos.”
Origen’s reference to Mary as theotocos in the first book of the Commentary on Romans, as reported by Socrates, is repeated in Origen’s Commentary on Deuteronomy, in his Commentary in Ps. 21:21, and in his Homily 7 in Lucam, as noted by John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 22, n. 52. Thus Origen’s attribution to Mary of Theotokos title antedates its use by Pierius and by Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria. A sentence from one of Alexander’s Letters is famous:
In these things we know the resurrection of the dead; of this the first fruits was our Lord Jesus Christ, who truly and not merely in appearance bore flesh, taken from Mary, Theotokos.
Letter 12 ad Alexand. Byzant. 1, 2: (P.G. 18:568 C). Tr. by Michael O’Carroll, C.S.Sp., Theotokos, 13-14. Kelly, Creeds, 206, note 5, observes that the addressee of Alexander of Alexandria’s letter cannot have been Alexander of Byzantium, who was not bishop of Byzantium at the time, and notes Opitz’ suggestion of Alexander of Thessalonica as a possible alternative addressee.
Another early application of Theotokos title to Mary is attributed by Tixeront to Pierius of Alexandria:
Pierius,[7] who succeeded Theognostus (as director of the Catechetical School), was a distinguished orator in the time of Bishop Theonas (282-300). The titles of some of his discourses, with a few fragments, are known to us through St. Jerome, Philip of Side, and Photius.[8] Among them is to be found one On the Mother of God (περὶ τῆς θεοτόκου),— a remarkable thing for this period. Photius esteemed in Pierius both originality of thought and facility of expression.
[7] P. G., X, 241-246, and C. de Boor, Neue Fragmente, in Texte und Unters., v. 2, Leipzig, 1888.
[8] Codex 119.
Joseph Tixeront, A Handbook of Patrology (St. Louis, Herder, 1927), 99; cf. Quasten, Patrology II, 111-113.
Annick Martin, Athanase, 145, n. 128, citing V. Martin, Papyrus Bodmer XX, Apologie de Phileas de Thmuis, Genève, Bibl. Bodmeriana, 1964, reports the recent discovery that Pierius denied his faith under the duress of Diocletian’s persecution. Subsequent research also rejects Philip Sidete’s unique reportage of Theognostus’ tenure as director of the Catechetical School, e.g., The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. I Origins to Constantine; edited by Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young; assistant editor, K. Scott Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 341.
The title is the corollary of the Spirit Christology’s confident assertion that Jesus is the subject of the Incarnation. This tradition is common to Clement, Origen, Alexander, Athanasius and Marcellus, as is also the Alexandrine emphasis upon the Personal unity of the Jesus the Christ, the liturgical and doctrinal criterion taught at Nicaea, which transcends the fixation of the later Alexandrine Christology, that of Cyril, upon the eternal Logos sensu negante as the subject of the Incarnation and thus the agent of our redemption: i.e.,
For Cyril . . . Christ’s human nature did not exceed the limits of its own capacities (or ‘proprieties) on its own terms―something that would indeed have been nonsensical―but precisely because it was being used as an instrument within an infinite design. The human nature is, therefore, not conceived as an independently acting dynamic (a distinct human person who self-activates) but as the manner of action of an independent and omnipotent power―that of the Logos;; and to the Logos alone can be attributed the authorship of, and responsibility for all its actions. This last principle is the flagship of Cyril’s whole argument.
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 186.
As has earlier been noted, the “principle” which forbids Cyril’s granting the humanity of Christ a Personal salvific role is also a “flagship” of the Christology of St. Thomas, who, like Cyril, assigns Jesus’ humanity an instrumental role in our redemption. In neither case is the supposition sustainable that the only alternative to Cyril’s Christology is the Nestorian diophysism, for Nestorius is easily shown to be wrong on the same “principle:” viz., the cosmological impossibility of Jesus’ coincident Personal subsistence in the divine substance and in the human substance. Cyril and Nestorius both suppose, with the approval of J. N. D. Kelly and of J. A. McGuckin, that the immediate and permanent task of Christology is explaining how the eternal Word could become flesh (Kelly, Doctrines, 138-139, 280; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 136, 138, 178, 184, 194, together with a detailed analysis in pp. 146-51 of the problem of the “how” of the Incarnation is unavoidable.
When the logic of the Christology of either Cyril or Nestorius is pushed, the identical problem appears, if in distinct guises: neither theologian supposes it possible that the Word, thus cosmologically misunderstood, can become flesh―which term is also cosmologically misunderstood, viz., to become human, rather than, as the kenōsis in Phil. 2:6-7 has it, to enter into our fallenness―to become like us in all things but sin: in short, to become flesh.
Kelly’s uncritical and in fact impossible translation, at 138, of the Pauline κατᾲ σᾴρκα, κατᾲ πνεῦμα, as though referring, respectively, to Jesus the Christ’s pre-existence “i.e., as man,” and “i.e., as God,” follows the Eusebian flat dehistoricization of the historical meaning of those terms in the New Testament. Loofs thought this dehistoricization of the Pauline tradition to be “the foundation datum of all later Christological development.” In fact, it has barred that development. Kelly, backed by McGuckin, has seen the basic problem of Christology to be the accounting for the Incarnation of the eternal Word, which testifies to the immobility of the dehistoricized Christological quaerens, which has been unable to contribute to the doctrinal tradition established by the first four Councils.
Kelly’s mistranslation, of sarx and pneuma, rejected by Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, Marcellus, Gregory of Nazianzen and Amphilocius of Iconium, is rather the “foundation datum” of the radical failure of any development of Christology since Chalcedon. Those theologians who hold that the subject of the Incarnation is the Trinity-immanent Word, not Jesus the Lord, have been unable to accept the faith of the Church, set out in the Chalcedonian Symbol, the definitive doctrinal development of Christology, because they remain locked into the obviously false cosmological problem which bars that development.
Jesus’ pre-existence, which is simply as pneuma, is primordial, as well as eternal. It is the pre-existence of the Lord of history, the Alpha and the Omega, the single Personal subject of the Incarnation, the one and the same Son. Jesus’ Incarnate existence κατᾲ σᾴρκα (according to the flesh) is historical, consequent upon his kenotic entry into our concrete fallenness, our flesh, which is not our corporeality but our fallenness. Emphatically, his kenōsis is not his becoming man, for he is the head of humanity “in the Beginning.” Jesus is that Beginning; thereby all creation is “in him.”
Thus it is that Nestorius’ critique of Cyril’s Christology as reductively monophysite is avoided but not answered by McGuckin in his St. Cyril Of Alexandria. Nestorius was not condemned at Ephesus for any failure in the logic of his criticism of Cyril’s theology, but for a denial of the faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord: Cyril rejected the Apollinrianism which had already been condemned at I Constantinople, and insisted that the divine Logos, sensu negante, is the single subject of the Incarnation and thus the single agent of our redemption. This agent, the divine "immanent Logos,” is ”humanized” in a fashion which, however extolled by McGuckin as a ‘divinization’ of the assumed humanity, provides no explanation of its unity with the Logos, for the “analogies” which Cyril provides are only that (cf. McGuckin, Cyril of Alexandria, 191-92).
Cyril’s failure to account for the Incarnation needs no excuse, for it is not to be explained in the terms of antecedent possibility which are inseparable from his theological supposition that the non-historical Logos is the subject of the Incarnation and the agent of our redemption. The “how” of the Incarnation, which McGuckin has named the basic problem of fifth century Christology and, by implication, of Christology as such, is a false problem, on which was recognized and rejected at Chalcedon by refusing its dehistoricization of the Incarnation, insisting instead that the subject of the Catholic tradition is Jesus the Lord, “one and the same.” It is evident that the unfathomable mystery of the Incarnation is ex nihilo; it has no "how." Those theologians who accept as their own the problem of explaining the “how” of the Incarnation thereby suppose its subject to be, not the “one and the same Son,” Jesus the Christ, but rather the cosmological absolute, the ‘immanent Logos,’ whose prospective incarnation is an oxymoron. The dynamic or dialectical Christology to which McGuckin continually refers as proper to the Alexandrine tradition, according to which the Logos assumes the humanity of Jesus as an instrument, while retaining the absolute divinity that is his by reason of his consubstantiality with the Father, is rationally impossible. The supposition that the Logos, while remaining divine, is the bridge between the absolute Father and the relative reality of humanity requires a Personal immanence in fallen history that is either free and historical, or necessary and cosmological. Clearly there can be no necessary relation between the absolute divinity and the relative humanity which might constitute this ‘bridge.” On the other hand, if the historical immanence of the Logos is free, it is historical rather than cosmological, and must identify with the radically mysterious yet concretely historical Mystery that is Jesus the Lord, a revelation, a free truth and reality, which has no possible explanation, for it is ex nihilo simply, and depends upon no antecedent whatever. The Church's affirmation of the truth of this mystery, of its intelligibility, is at one with her faith that Jesus is the Lord. His Lordship is foundational for all Catholic theological inquiry, and requires no speculative support whatever. As Ambrose famously observed, ‘it did not please God to make his people safe by dialectic.’ Cyril’s insistence upon the communication of idioms, as enucleated in his unqualified conviction that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is Theotokos, the Mother of God, is not sustained by his theology, but by his faith that Jesus is the Lord, which he had heard Nestorius deny.
In short, we have once again to do with the communication of divine and human idioms in the unique Person of Jesus the Lord. There is no question of Cyril’s personal faith-commitment to the communication of idioms in the Christ: his long-sustained insistence upon Mary’s standing as Theotokos removes that point from discussion; this is simply the Alexandrine tradition. On the other hand, his theological relegation of the salvific role of Jesus’ humanity to that of an instrument anticipates the confusion of St. Thomas on this point, and is alike incompatible with the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord, the divine Son of Theotokos.
Like Cyril, St. Thomas insisted on the single subject in Christ, and insisted, again as had Cyril, that this subject is the cosmological Logos, the abstract, non-historical Son of the Father: he alone is the agent of our salvation. St. Thomas accepted the consequence of this position. Given this stance, Mary becomes Theotokos only abstractly, i.e., she is the mother of Jesus’ “humanity,” not of the “one and the same Son” of the Chalcedonian Symbol. It is not necessary to point out the further embarrassments of this Christology: they are summed up in the insistence that Jesus is not a human Person despite his human mother, his human ancestry, his human Name given by the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation, and despite the absurdity of supposing that Mary is the mother of what can only be an abstraction, his human "nature." Cyril did not draw these “scholastic” inferences, but they are clearly latent in his “dialectical” or “dynamic,” or “paradoxical” Christology, which McGuckin has examined in detail, explained and attempted to defend.
Long before Cyril, at the end of the second century, Irenaeus had proposed the only possible foundation for Christology in affirming that Jesus is “one and the same Son.” The Chalcedonian Symbol is founded on this insight. Contra McGuckin, the Symbol owes no more to Cyril than it does to Nestorius. Cyril’s insistence upon the single agency of Christ, over against Nestorius’ refusal to affirm that Personal unity, is balanced by his failure to recognize that this subject must be a human as well as a divine Person, the “one and the same Son” of the Father and of Theotokos. Nestorius was correct in insisting upon the full and therefore Personal humanity of Jesus the Lord; he was correct in seeing that any composition of the human and divine natures of Christ was an impossible return to the Monophysite error. His mistake was to fail to grasp the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, and the necessity for a single Agent of our redemption. Both Cyril and Nestorius were trapped by the cosmological presuppositions which the Chalcedonian Symbol rejected in its focus upon Jesus the Christ as the subject of the Incarnation, not upon an abstract Logos who could not "become flesh."
The Symbol rests entirely upon the liturgical tradition of the mystery of Christ; its authors refused to be sidetracked by the prevailing cosmological confusion of the disputing monophysite and diophysite Christologies, and affirmed instead the liturgical and doctrinal tradition, precisely that Jesus, not a dehistoricized Logis, is the subject of the Incarnation. The Council thus confirmed Cyril’s basic dogmatic insight: the single subject of the incarnation must be the Logos, the consubstantial Son of the Father; in the same Symbol it confirmed Nestorius’ insistence that the single subject must be a human Person. It transcended both of these theological dead ends by teaching that the single subject of the incarnation is the “One and the same Son,” at once of the Father and of Mary. Both Cyril and Nestorius were frustrated by their theological focus upon the cosmologized Son, the absolute Logos whose impossible Incarnation in Jesus the Lord must be shown to be antecedently possible, but of course this is impossible, for the radical mystery of the faith does not bear upon a non-historical Logos, but upon the Jesus Christ, whose Incarnation, whose Kenōsis , has no prior, i.e., cosmological, possibility and for that reason is the mysterium fidei, the historical object of the Catholic faith.
[392] E.g., G. L. Prestige supposes Origen to have been a subordinationist; in fact, he considers him to be the source of Eusebius' subordinationism:
But in his own speculation (Eusebius of Caesarea) clearly represents a tradition which was strongly subordinationist, and it would not be impossible to make against him a colorable accusation of ditheism. His subordinationism was derived from Origen, the father alike of Arian heresy and Nicene orthodoxy.
Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, 131. To the same effect, see Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 162-63.
Inasmuch as Eusebius' uncritical subordinationism forced him to reject Origen's express affirmation of the eternal generation of the Son, and so to dismiss the "Nicene orthodoxy" as Sabellian, it must follow from Prestige’s view of Origen is exactly that set out in the supposed Canon 11 of II Constantinople, i.e., that a generic heretic, one embracing heresy as such, quod absurdum est. It is true that Origen was included nominatim in the condemnation of the Three Chapters at II Constantinople: see Canon 11, DS (1965), *433, p. 149; however, as Crouzel, Origen, 178-179, has shown, Canon 11 does not belong to the decisions of the Council itself. There is thus no evidence that Origen was ever a subject of the Conciliar discussion.
Of the bishops of the fourth century, only Alexander, Athanasius, who succeeded him to the See of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nazianzen remained loyal to Origen's integration of Trinitarian theology and Christology in support of the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord. Gregory’s five Theological Orations echo Origen throughout, and set the standard for Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy of the Greek Church for centuries.
[393] Thus T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 94.
[394] Ibid. In asserting the likelihooed of this adopption, Barnes relies on Photius, Bibliothèque II, Codex 127, 99-101; see also Bibliothèque I, Codex 13, 11; Bibliothèque II, Codex 118, 90-92.
[395] The date at which Eusebius began the Ecclesiastical History is contested. Kirsopp Lakes' extensive 'Introduction" to the Loeb edition (1926) points up the complexities attending any effort to date the beginning of Eusebius composition of the Ecclesiastical History. T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 128, dates its composition from 290, i.e., a few years into Eusebius’ association with Pamphilus' school and his library. G. A. Williamson, "Introduction," Eusebius: The History of the Church, 1-29, esp. 19-21, believes Book 1 to have been published after 311, and Book 10 not later than 325. Because Eusebius’ scholarly reputation was well established by the time of his elevation to the See of Caesarea about 313, Barnes’ early dating of the composition of the Ecclesiastical History is the more likely.
[396] Our knowledge of Pamphilus' grasp of Origen's thought must depend upon his Defense of (or Apologia for) Origen, in five volumes, to which Eusebius later added a sixth. Of these, only the first volume now exists, and that in Rufinus' translation. Photius, in the ninth century, read the whole of the original Greek text. A fierce opponent of Arianism, he found nothing objectionable in the Apologia; see "Pamphile et Eusèbe,", Photius: Bibliothèque, Tome II, Codex 118, 90-91. He mentions there that Pamphilus' had studied under Pierius, an admirer of Origen who was probably the head of the School of Alexandria during the last two decades of the third century. In the following Codex (119) Photius indicates that during this time Origen's was counted "among the men of repute;" see Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 162-63. Grillmeier supposes the subordination of the Holy Spirit, of which Photius accuses Pierius, to have been learned from Origen. However there is no evidence that Pierius taught any such subordinationism to Pamphilus for none appears in his Defense of Origen; had there been any, Photius would not have missed it. Grillmeier’s attribution of subordinationism to Origen, in agreement with J. N. D. Kelley, Doctrines, 129, repeats the standard interpretation of Origen’s theology as governed by his Middle Platonism, therefore subordinationist and consequently adoptionist. To the same effect Hanson, Search, at 60-71. Its merits will be dealt with further on.
[397] A current rediscovery of this cosmological truism is celebrated in Elizabeth Johnson's She who is: The mystery of God in feminist theological discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992).
[398] See Numa Denis de Coulanges, The Ancient City. A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 19551901), a classic study whose revised edition, published in 1875 and still in print after nearly a century and a half, is largely devoted to an examination of the nuptial liturgies of the Greek and Roman cultures of the ancient world as the foundation of their law; consequently it is of signal importance for the study of our own.
[399] The affirmation , in Basil’s supposed Eighth Letter, which affirms the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, is repeateed in Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto, which nonetheless fails to affiirm the homoousios of the Holy Spirit, a refusal consistent with the homoiousian subordinationism from which he never departed. Courtonne has written of the contested Eighth Letter that :
Cette lettre n’est probablement de S. Basile. En tout cas, son contenu indique clairement qu’elle ne s’addressée pas in réalité aux habitants de Césarée. Le fait que’elle ne se trouve que dans un seul monument des Lettres rendu déjà son authenticité suspecte. Certains l’attribuent à Évagre le Pontique.
Courtonne, Lettres, I, 22. To the same effect, with a considerable additional citation of authorities, Sr. Agnes Clare Way, Saint Basil: Letters (2 vols.). Ser. The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, 13 (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1951), I, 20, note 1.
[400] Even in 325, at the Council of Nicaea, ousia and hypostasis were used indifferently to designate the substantial unity of God. Eustathius of Antioch’s emphatic attribution of mia ousia to the divine Substance did not connote the collapse of the Son into the Father, as Eusebius charged, but simply reaffirmed the Nicene stress upon the substantial unity of the One God of the Christian faith. Basil of Caesarea appears never to have grasped the significance of the Father’s immanence within the Trinity, viz., that it requires that the Nicene definition of the homoousios of the Son be referred to the Father as the immanent Head of the Trinity, not to the divine Substance, which is neither Monad nor Dyad, but the Triune God, the Trinity.
[401] J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 217-226, Hanson, Search, 157-63.
[402] It must be kept in mind that the Nicene Creed identifies the eternal and Only Begotten Son with Jesus Christ. His homoousion with the Father is Personal, proper not to a non-historical eternal Word but to the human Name, Jesus the Christ, the Lord. Because his consubstantiality with the Father is thus Personal, it engages the Personal unity in him, Jesus the Lord, of the fullness of humanity and of divinity. It is on this basis that the Council of Chalcedon defined his consubstantiality with those for whom he died, precisely as their head with whom, as their source, they are by definition consubstantial.
[403] Robert Sample admits that Malchion may have been the head of a school of rhetoric in Antioch, but denies that much else is known of him; see endnote 362, supra. If Sample is correct, there were two didaskaleia in Antioch at the time of Paul of Samosata’s condemnation: Malchion’s rhetorical school, and Lucian’s, apparently exegetical, which had been established well before the condemnation of Paul of Samosata. That condemnation included Lucian as well, probably as Paul’s disciple, one of the so-called Paulinists. It would follow that Lucian’s association with the heresy of Paul of Samosata had been theological, from which it may be supposed that he taught a comparably adoptionist theology,. Lucian’s school may be the forerunner of the School of Antioch, notable not only for its refusal of allegorical exegesis in favor of the literalism that came to characterize the Antiochene exegesis, but also for its subordinationism, which its alumni, the Arian “sylloukians,” Arius, Eusebius of Nicomedia, Asterius the sophist, Leontius of Antioch, and others of that persuasion referred directly to Lucian, according to Philostorgius (Eccl. Hist, III, 15). Lucian, condemned by the Council for his association with Paul of Samosata, remained excommunicate for nearly twenty years. It is possible that he is the Lucian Martyr who died in 312 during the revival of Galerius’ persecution under his nephew, Maximinus Daia. However, there are considerable difficulties, resumed by Hanson, Search, 81-83, concerning the identification of the Lucian condemned as a follower of Paul of Samosata, with the Lucian who founded the School of Antioch, and still more, with the Lucian Martyr who suffered in Nicomedia under Maximinian’s renewal of the Galerian prosecution ca. 312. However, there are considerable difficulties, resumed by Hanson, ibid., concerning the identification of the Lucian condemned as a follower of Paul of Samosata, with the Lucian who founded the School of Antioch. His identification with the Lucian Martyr who suffered in Nicomedia under Maximinian’s renewal of the Galerian prosecution ca. 312, is also attended by considerable complications. On the other hand, they are linked by a common subordinationism (cf. Handbook of Church History (New York : Herder and Herder, 1965), Vol. I, 242; see p. 256 for further details concerning Paul of Samosata. See also endnotes 437and 438 infra for further commentary on Malchion’s prosecution of Paul of Samosata.
[404] See endnote 362, supra. Haugaard, art. cit., does not hesitate to append the Logos-sarx label to Athanasius’ Christology, recognizing that while Athanasius used “sarx” “soma,” and “anthrōpos” as equivalent terms, he understood them historically, to denote the fallen human condition. As has earlier been noted, Ernest Evans considered Athanasius to be the last exponent of the Spirit Christology, the obsolescence of which Evans credits to the “common sense” of Eusebius of Caesarea:
Eusebius points out that this interpretation (by Marcellus of Lk. 1:35) is constructively Sabellian—this being not the only occasion on which the bishop of Caesarea threw new light on an old-fashioned theory, and procured its tacit rejection by theologians who would have thought him too dangerous a man for their overt agreement.
Evans, Against Praxeas, at 69.
The other occasions in which Eusebius “threw new light upon an an old fashioned theory” may be summed up in his furious reaction to the Nicene Creed which also he condemned as Sabellian, persuading most of Oriental bishops, Athanasius and Marcellus apart, to live in that heresy for another fifty-six years. For the rest, the Spirit Christology rests upon the faith that Jesus is the Lord. This faith is defined with absolute clarity by the Symbol of Chalcedon. It was never “rejected;” the doubts of muddled theologians, tacit or otherwise, do not touch the faith of the Church that it is Jesus who is the Lord, who guaranteed that the gates of hell shall not prevail his bridal Church.
Evans, writing his Against Praxeas prior to 1948, cites the Sabellian theory proposed in the Oratio contra Arianos IV, whose author he refers to as the “writer”―whom he doubts is Athanasius (ibid., 13ff.). Regardless of their attribution, the author of the excerpts from Athanasius’ Contra. Arianos iv, 32 and 34, which Evans, cites at page 69, accepted the early exegesis of Lk. 1:35, the hallmark of the Spirit Christology, whose first post-apostolic witness is Justin, and whose last, quite arguably, is Athanasius; his insistence upon the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord presupposes that Mary is Theotokos.
At p.70 of Tertullian’s Treatise against Praxeas Evans notes the failure of Cyril of Alexandria’s Logos-sarx defense of the Spirit Christology; it required the inversion of the historical Trinitarian Missions, whereby the Holy Spirit effects Mary’s conception of her Son. This obvious error has found a home in the Church’s liturgy, for which we may thank Eusebius of Caesarea, who never knew an orthodox moment. Despite his massive influence upon Oriental Christology apart from Alexandria, the Spirit Christology is the Christology defined by the four Great Councils, implicitly at Nicaea, explicitly at I Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon, and presupposed by every subsequent ecumenical council. The liturgists responsible for the content of the new Roman Missal should come to terms with the absurdity of its repeated assertion of the role of “the Holy Spirit” in the conception of Jesus, that is, in the Father’s Mission of the primordial Son, Jesus the Lord, upon whose Mission that of the Holy Spirit is dependent. This error is well established in the I.C.E.L. edition (1982) of the Lectionary still in current use, and even in the RSV, but there can be no excuse for its repetition throughout the official (2011) edition of the Roman Missal.
[405] Ernest Evans, Against Praxeas, 41, 45.
[406] See John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Sixth Edition. Foreword by Ian Ker (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 268-76, “Syrian School of Theology,” not to be confused with Note 1, “Liberalism,” Apologia Pro Vita Sua: John Henry Cardinal Newman. A Norton Critical Edition by David L. DeLaura (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1968), 216-25.
[408] Origen, Peri Archon, II, 6, 3:
[409] One of these, Origen’s conversion from an adoptionist Christology of a Bishop Beryllus, is reported by Eusebius; see Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History, II, with an English Translation by J. E. L. Oulton; col. Loeb Classical Library 265 (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2000), VI, xxxiii, at 87; see also Crouzel, op. cit., at 33 and 158. The second instance, concerning a Bishop Heraclides, appears to have prompted Origen’s recently discovered Dialogue with Heraclides: see Treatise on the Passover: and Dialogue of Origen with Heraclides and his fellow bishops on the Father, the Son, and the Soul. Translated and edited by Robert J. Daly; col. Ancient Christian Writers no. 54 (New York: Paulist Press, 1992). The Dialogue is a very brief examination by Origen of Heraclides’ Trinitarian orthodoxy. It may be surmised from Heraclides’ insistence upon the divine unity in his final statement in the Dialogue that he was under some suspicion, as perhaps also was Beryllus, of having denied the divinity of Jesus the Christ by way of an implicitly Sabellian adoptionism. However, Origen did not pursue the matter after the inconclusive Cross-examination that constitutes his Dialogue with Heraclides.
‘[410] Leo the Great, “Letter 28 to Flavianus,” Liturgy of the Hours II, 1745; «Sermo 1 de Ascensione, 2-4, ibid., 899; “Sermo 2 de Ascensione,” 1-4; ibid., 938; “Sermo 12 de Passione” 3, 6-7; (PL 54, 355-57), and “Sermo 15, De passione domini, 3-4 ; (PL 54, 366-67).
[411] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 224-25.
[412] The vigorous anti-Arianism of Eustathius, the Bishop of Beroea (now Aleppo in Syria), warranted his promotion to the See of Antioch by a provincial Council which met in Antioch a few months before the Council of Nicaea. His anti-Arianism, together with his support of the Nicene “mia ousia , mia hypostasis” during and after the Council, drew upon him the enmity of the Arians and their allies, particularly his suffragan, Eusebius of Caesarea who, in concert with Eusebius of Nicomedia, within two or three years after the Council of Nicaea, presided over a second council held in Antioch, in which Eustathius was accused of various malfeasances, but particularly of the Sabellianism which the two Eusebii read into his advocacy of the “mia ousia .” This Eusebian council condemned Eustathius, whom Constantine then deposed, perhaps as early as 326 or 327; thus A Martin, Athanase, at 341-2, n. 2. Contra, Hanson, in Search, at 210, argues that this early dating provides insufficient time for the two Eusebii to have arranged the Synod that condemned Eustathius, since it is not clear that they were reconciled with Constantine before 328. Prof. Martin has rejected this approach to determining the date of the condemnation and deposition of Eustathius. See also R. W. Burgess, “The date of the deposition of Eustathius of Antioch,” Journal of Theological Studies, New Series, 50 (April, 2000), 150-160. He concludes from a detailed examination of the evidence that 328 is the most likely date of Eustathius’s deposition.
Eustathius may have died in exile before 337, when the pro-Nicene Western Augustus, Constantine II, cancelled Constantine’s deposition and exile of the pro-Nicene bishops condemned by the Eusebians, for Eustathius never returned to Antioch. On the other hand, he may have died as late as 360, at the hands of Lucian the Apostate. Most of what is reported of his Christology is owed to the preservation of its fragments by Theodoret of Cyr in his Eranistes. Gérard H. Ettlinger, in Theodoret of Cyrus: Eranistes; col. The Fathers of the Church (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003) Hereafter, Eranistes] has provided an English translation of his critical edition of the Eranistes. Ettlinger's translations of of the fragments of Eustathius’ Christology preserved by Theodoret’s Eranistes appear on pp. 73-75, 139-141, and 225-229 of his translation of the Eranistes. Read at the letter, they permit Theodoret’s interpretation of them as diophysite.
Eustathius' sole surviving work is On the Belly-Myther Against Origen, an attack on Origen’s allegorical exegesis of I Sam. 28: see Joseph W. Trigg, “Eustathius of Antioch’s Attack on Origen: What is at Issue in an Ancient Controversy?” The Journal of Religion 75/2 (April, 1995) 219-228. Eustathius’ disagreement with Origen’s allegorical exegesis of I Sam. 28 is without Christological significance, but it offers textual critics of proposed fragments of Eustathius’ works a benchmark instance of Eustathius’ distinctive style and thus a criterion of their authenticity.
Theodoret wrote the Eranistes in 347 while confined to his residence in Cyr by Dioscorus, well over a century after Eustathius’s exile and disappearance. Spanneut’s edition of the fragments preserved in the Eranistes, supports their authenticity but does not support Theodoret’s systematic interpretation of them as diophysite. Spanneut’s Recherches is authoritative with respect to the authenticity and interrelation of the fragments. However he leaves their interpretation open in the sense that he considers it an error to systematize Eustathius.
While Eustathius was Bishop of Beroea, Ossius of Cordoba, then Constantine’s theological advisor, had selected him early in 325 for elevation to the patriarchal See of Antioch in order to remove it from Arian influence. Once installed as the patriarch of Antioch, Eustathius called an anti-Arian council, probably presided over by Ossius, which condemned Eusebius of Caesarea for Arian sympathies; a conviction pending the approval of the Council of Nicaea, which was forthcoming a few months later. After the Council closed, Eusebius of Caesarea was soon restored to the imperial favor, whereupon he undertook to restore Arius to favor, while vigorously pursuing, with Constantine’s evident approval, those bishops who had been most instrumental in obtaining Arius’ condemnation, and his own, by the Council of Nicaea.
Eusebius’ targets were those bishops who at Nicaea had seen to his condemnation by the Council, who had condemned his subordinationism and its inherent rejection of the divinity of the Christ. His first choice was Eustathius of Antioch, whose challenge to his orthodoxy before the Council of Nicaea met and its vindication by the Council had humiliateed him. Between 326 and 328, with at least the tacit approval of Constantine, Eusebius called and presided over a council held in Antioch which condemned Eustathius precisely for the Nicene, anti-Arian orthodoxy he had displayed in the earlier Council of Antioch that had condemned Eusebius shortly before the Council of Nicaea, and had continued to displacy at the Council of Nicaea, where Eustathius, bishop of the ancient patriarchal see of Syrian Antioch, had continued militantly to uphold the key Nicene doctrine, the absolute unity of the Triune God which, for Eusebius of Caesarea, could not avoid Sabellianism.
Eustathius’ Trinitarian obduracy, condemned as “Sabellianism” by Eusebius and his Arian ally, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and supplemented by an accusation of adultery that was accepted as true by Constantine, sufficed to warrant his deposition and exile ca. 328, perhaps a year or two earlier. He died in exile sometime after 336, perhaps as late as 360. It is evident that during this decade of persecution, exile and illness, he had neither the peace, nor the leisure, nor the opportunity for controversy, still less for composing theological works.
[413] Crouzel, Origen, at 193.
[414] As has been seen, the systematic necessiity of providing an explanation of the “how” of the Incarnation is also taken for granted by McGuckin in St.Cyril of Alexandria, at 137 et passim. On page 138, McGuckin assumes that God is absolute, as a matter of definition, which assumption would meld the historical, Trinitarian absolute, viz., the Father’s sending of the Son to give the Holy Spirit, with the cosmological Absolute One God, the Monad to whom historicity is impossible. The historicity of the Mission of the Son requires the historicity, i.e., the Personal humanity, of the “one and the same Son” be the subject of the Father’s mission. Cyril’s Christological focus upon the Personal divinity of the Son as the agent of our redemption seems to have prevented him from understanding that the humanity of the Son must be as Personal as his divinity, although this is demanded by Cyril’s insistence upon Mary’s motherhood of God. The clear dogmatic recognition of the unity of Personal humanity and Personal divinity in the one and the same Son would wait upon the Formula of Union, summing up the doctrine of the Council of Ephesus, and its linkage to Irenaeus by the Symbol of Chalcedon.
[415] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 89.
[416] Ibid., at 105, citing this passage from Isaiah.
[418] The “triadism” of Athenagoras and Theophilus was Trinitarian in maintaining the distinction between the Father, Son and Spirit; the divinity of each, and the unity of God. While their assertion of the Trinitarian faith was incomplete, as any theologyical inquiry into the Mysterium of the Church's faith must be, their conversion to her liturgical mediation of the apostolic tradition drove them to seek to transcend the inadequacy of their insight, as it has driven all authentically Christian theology since. In brief, they sought to understand what they knew to be true, the faith of the Church that Jesus is the Lord, and in this quest they were engaged in theology in the classic sense which St. Anselm would give it a millennium later: “faith seeking understanding.”
This quest entails always a conversion from the cosmological determinism native to our fallenness to the historical freedom mediated by personal participation in the worship of the Church. In the second century, this conversion was from an unreflective participation in the regnant Middle Platonism rationality to a liturgycally-informed historical consciousness. Such conversion remains always incomplete; we see only as in a mirror, obscurely, but the Light of the world, concretely present in the Eucharist, the Redeemer transcending our fallenness and thus our history, illumined their century as it illumines ours.
The result of that illumination is the development of doctrine, which began with the Apologists, Justin, Athenagoras and Theophilus. Their cultural immersion in Hellenism tended to identify the Father with the divine Substance, the Platonic Monas or the Stoic Logos endiathetos, whose Word and Spirit were always with him. Yet: at the same time, they rejected this essentially pagan heritage in favor of the divine Trias well before Tertullian designated the unity of the Trinitas as substantial, and the unity of the Father, of the Son, and of theHoly Spirit as Personal. The determinist logic of the cosmological rationality of their time could support the substantial identity of the Father with his Word and his Spirit, but not their distinction from him, and thus the Apologists used language (Logos endiathetos) implying the subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, while at the same time affirming the unfailing liturgical ordering (τάξις) of Father, Son, and Spirit within the Godhead. Theophilus and Athenagoras both affirmed the divine τρíάς, and its immanent τάξις, which was only to affirm their adherence to ith the apostolic tradition that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are One God, and that Jesus is the Lord, the Son of the Father and of Mary. They were thinking in terms of the “economy,” a tag supplied by Irenaeus to denote the mediation of salvation in history, but they had not yet come to consider the economy as the revelation of the eternal order of Father, Son and Spirit that is the Trinity.
The development of doctrine is the struggle to dispel this cosmologically-induced confusion, and gradually to discover, by transcending and correcting the quest for necessary reasons which constitutes cosmological rationality, the intrinsic free coherence of the faith, the free unity (the analogia fidei) of the Church’s liturgical and therefore historical appropriation of the Truth. This Truth, the Mysterium fidei, is the revelation who is Christ himself in nuptial union with the second Eve. The dogmatic rejection of the determinist cosmological rationality was in principle complete in the work of Tertullian, Hippolytus and Origen well before the Council of Nicaea, whose definition of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father asserted a truth of the faith which was a clear cosmological impossibility. Simply for this reason, the impact, doctrinal and theological, of the Nicene homoousios of the Son was delayed for most of the following fifty years: see Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J., Contra Marcellum, esp. 28-46, and the articles cited in endnotes 776, 915???, and 971???, infra.
[419] Daniélou has summarized, in Latin Christianity, 361-63, the complexities of the adversarial relation between Praxeas and Tertullian, here relying upon studies by J. J. Moingt, R. Braun and R. Cantalamessa. Together these question whether the Trinitarian doctrine underlying Praxeas’ opposition to Montanism was modalist or merely archaic, and whether or not Tertullian’s opposition to Praxeas forced a modification of his own Trinitarianism. Cantalamessa upholds the latter position; Lebreton’s defense of Praxeas as archaic rather than unorthodox is rejected by Moingt who. like Cantalamessa, thinks Tertullian corrrected his position somewhat during his contest with Praxeas. It is worth noting that the most likely source of the archaism which these authors have in view is the Judaeo-Christianity to whose influence Tertullian strongly objected.
[420] See endnote 660, supra. As Crouzel has pointed out with respect to an apparent relapse to cosmological rationality in the Peri Archon, there Origen is thinking about the implications of a fact in being, the hypostatic unity of Jesus; the assertion of which founds his theology. Much the same may be said of Tertullian’s use of indutus carnem to describe, not to account for, the Incarnation, the Kenōsis, of the Sermo, the primordial Jesus the Lord, the Word who, in becoming flesh (not ‘man’), emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. Tertullian’s attempt to warrant his faith in the divinity of Jesus resembles Origen’s account of the Father’s κτίσις (production) of the Trinity as its head―which, like Tertullian, he never questioned, having taken it for granted as of course, quite as he took for granted the apostolic tradition that Jesus is the Lord.
[421] Nonetheless, following Moingt, Daniélou denies “census” a place in Tertullian’s Trinitarian vocabulary. Nonetheless, granted that the word appears only once, it does so in a most strategic context:
it (“census”) describes the unfolding of the monarchy in the Trinity from its source in the Father.
Op. cit., at 351, citing Adv. Praxean III, 5. Emphasis added.
It can hardly be the economic flavor of census which prompted the removal of the term from serious Trinitarian discussion, for its sense in this passage is clearly intra-Trinitarian. While the term “unfolding” is unfortunate, as implying a transition within the divine substance, when it is used in an intra-Trinitarian context, “census” is decisive; it describes the dynamic Personal interrelations which later theology would name the processions, the Trinitarian perichōresis. The standing of census as a hapax legomenon was evident enough; Evans found census used but once of the Trinity (Adversus Praxeas 3: “totum census monarchiae”; Against Praxeas, p. 92, 10. However, at 133, Evans translates the phrase as “the whole trappings of empire.” At 198ff. his commentary on the interrelation of census, status and gradus manifests his familiarity with Tertullian’s use of these terms. Given Evans’ his quasi-economic exegesis of “census,” “in totum census monarchiae.” it is likely that “census” refers to what Daniélou has termed the “internal structure” of the Trinity; see. endnote 494 supra for commentary. It then is difficult to understand on what grounds it could be excluded from a Trinitarian vocabulary, whether Moingt’s or Tertullian’s.
[423] .J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 125. Sed contra, Ernest Evans, Against Praxeas, 9, note 2, citing Novatian, De trin. 31.
[424] Athanasius showed that Dionysius’ supposed reduction of the Son to a creature, as alleged by his Libyan suffragans, and later taken up by Arians who wished to find support for their own position in Dionysius of Alexandria’s letters, stemmed from the latter’s reference to Jesus as a man, thus a creature: see Athanasius’ De sententia Dionysii, 9-10. This entailed no denial of his divinity, although to adoptionists such as Paul of Samosata, and to contemporary theologians who deny that Jesus is a human Person, that point is less than clear. A youthful and uninformed Basil of Caesarea, in his Ninth Letter, 9, 2, (Courtonne, Basilius Lettres, vol. I, 37-40) adressed to Maximus the Philosopher, dismissed Dionysius’ theology out of hand as driven by Dionysius’ personal ambition into a vulgar subordinaionism. Feltoe, op. cit., 175-76, interprets this Ninth Letter as a defense of Dionysius’ theology which, pace Feltoe, it quite obviously is not. Basil’s commentary on Dionysius of Alexandria in the De Spiritu Sancto, 72, some dozen years later, is also entirely negative. In his Ninth Letter, written ca. 361-62, Basil admitted not having the “books” with him; (according to Courtonne I, 39, these are “sans doute” the four volumes of the Dionysius’ Refutatio ετ Apologια), but this ignorance did not inhibit Basil’s indictment of Dionysius of Alexandria’s correspondence with his Libyan suffragans as revelatory of his subordinationism. Basil had recently from his studies at Athens, where he had a humilating encounter with Aetius, a master dialectician.. His Ninth Letter is perhaps an attempt to restore his damaged authority as a theologian.
By this time, the anti-Nicene Eusebian and the dependent anti-Nicene homoiousian reading of Origen’s ”treis hypostaseis” as subordinationist was a commonplace, one upon which Basil, a homoiousian, relied; and which he disdainfully reads into the theology of Dionysius of Alexandria, despite the admission in his Ninth Letter that had not read the four volumes in which Dionysius had defended his orthodoxy. In the same letter, at this early date (361-62) Basil stated his own Trinitarian position; viz., he was willing to accept the homoiousion of the Son as orthodox by Nicene standards, but only with the qualification “like in all things” which is mere ignorance, for by that time “like in all things” was the homoean camouflage for Arianism. In that Letter Basil professed a preference for the homoousion, as less open to confusion. The confusion would have been over the Holy Spirit’s divinity, which the subordinationism latent in the “homoiousion” paradigm, “similar in substance” (homoios kat’ousian - ὁμοιος κατ'οὐσιαν), could not admit. See Hanson’s commentary, cited in endnotes 447 and 457 infra, upon the influence of Basil of Ancyra upon the Cappadocians:
Their intellectual pedigree stemmed from the school of Basil of Ancyra. It was with the Bishop of Ancyra that Basil of Caesarea paid a visit to the Council of Constantinople at the very end of 359--not greatly to his credit nor profit. The doctrine of ‘like in respect of ousia’ was onε they could accept, or at least take as a starting point, and which caused them no uneasiness. They were all ready on occasion to defend the epithet homoousios, and the two Gregories were ready to apply it to the Spirit, but it was not for them the kind of indispensable slogan which it was to Lucifer of Calaris, who did not understand it, or eventually to Athanasius, who did. It was important to the Cappadocians only insofar as it was of the creed N, and this creed they were always ready to champion and commend.. . . . .
Hanson, Search, 678
Hanson’s contemptuous dismissal of Lucifer of Cagliari has in turn been dismissed by Annick Martin: Athanase, 534, note 302. Further, the “two Gregories” are Gregory of Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa. Hanson’s notion that Gregory of Nyssa was ready to apply “homoousion” to the Holy Spirit ignores his bitter resistance, in alliance with Diodore of Tarsa, to Gregory of Nazianzen’s effort at the Council of Constantinople to persuade the Council fathers to define the homoousion of the Holy Spirit.
What the Cappadocians were on occasion prepared to do is of rather less moment than which in fact they persisted in doing. Earlier Hanson had quoted a reference of Basil of Ancyra to the meaning of homoios kat'ousian (ὁμοιος κατ'ουσιαν):
Thus, when all the proper eliminations and allowances have been made, 'there shall be left the single concept of likeness'.20
20 μόνε καραλειφθήσεται ἔννοια τοῦ ὀμοίου,73.4.1 (272).
Hanson, Search, 352, note. 20.
Hanson dissociates this crucial reference to a “single concept of likeness―which was single in that it referred uniquely to the Son, and had no application to the Holy Spirit―from the need to come to terms with the Macedonian refusal to accept the divinity of the Holy Spirit. This refusal was not merely a “transient phenomenon” as Hanson supposes; it was inherent in the “single concept of likeness” which defined Basil of Ancyra’s theology, as well as that of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, neither of whom would grant hypostatic standing to the Holy Spirit. Hanson’s lumping together of “the two Gregories” as though they were of one mind vis à vis the Holy Spirit cannot be justified. Gregory of Nazianzen was always pro-Nicene, which can be said neither of Basil of Caesarea nor of Gregory of Nyssa.
Basil of Caesarea never accepted the hypostasis of the Spirit. As Annick Martin has pointed out, Lucifer of Cagliari was sufficiently acquainted with the meaning of ‘homoousios’ to have applied it to the Holy Spirit well before Athanasius did. If Athanasius understood the Nicene meaning of homoousios, it must follow that Basil did not, for in 363 he accepted its merger with the homoiousios by Meletius at the Council of Antioch. In alliance with the Diodore, Gregory of Nyssa successfully obstructed the application of the homoousios to the Holy Spirit at I Constantinople, quite as Basil had refused it in the De Spiritu Sancto some five years earlier. As for Lucifer, Annick Martin considers him to have anticipated Athanasius’ attribution of “homoousios” to the Holy Spirit: see endnote 601 infra.
Basil of Caesarea was himself loath to attribute the homoousios to the Spirit, even in the nuanced reading of homoousios set out in his Ninth Letter.. Hanson interprets this hesitation as diplomatic, a concern seldom displayed by Basil; cf. Christopher Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzen on The Trinity, 298. Basil’s adroit refusal to attribute a distinct hypostasis to the Holy Spirit underlies the equivocations which Kelly has cited (Doctrines, 260-61), and which are evident also in the quotation from the De Spiritu Sancto which Hanson (Search, 773).has described as a “magnificent account of his doctrine of the Spirit”
[425] Athanasius’ introduction of the “homoousion” into the discussions at Nicaea is here supposed, as having a greater likelihood than the alternatives proposed: this despite Hanson’s dismissal, as highly unlikely, of the bishops there present deigning to accept instruction from a mere deacon. As Alexander’s secretary, and quite evidently his successor to the See of Alexandria, Athanasius at Nicaea was much more than a mere deacon. Eusebius of Caesarea’s attribution of the introducetion of the homoousios to Constantine is not an aspect of his adulation of the Emperor, for Eusebius bitterly opposed the use of the term at the Council, The Emperor Constantine’s subsequent vacillation on the matter undercuts the credibility of Eusebius’ report. Other candidates, e.g., the incursion of the Tertullian’s una substantia, tres personae by way of Ossius of Cordoba, are similarly unlikely. On this issue, see J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 250-54. Kelly concludes that the dominant subordinationist interpretation of the “three hypostases” in the Orient entailed a common mistrust of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father:
The great mass of conservative-minded bishops must have been taken aback to read the creed they were expected to accept. Eager enough to ostracize Arianism proper, they had no desire to be saddled with an un-Scriptural term suggestive of a theology which appered to strike at the roots of the doctrine of the three divine hypostases which was prevalent over most oif the Eastern Church. They must have been relieved to hear the minimizing explanation Constantine gave of it, and to observe that it was their signatures to it that he wanted more than anything else. Even the Arians, including Eusebius of Nicomedia, when they became aware of the emperor’s attitude, found it consistent with conscience to sign. Only a omparatively small group, consisting of a handful of Western bishops, St. Alexander, St. Eustathius of Antioch, Marcellus of Ancyra, and a few others, wholeheartedly welcomed the language of the Creed, realizing that it entailed, at least implicitly,1 that theory of the identity of substance between the Father and the Son which they wanted to push into the foreground.
1. For this distinction, see esp. I. Ortiz de Urbino, El Simbolo Niceno, 207 f.
J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 254.
Kelly’s condescension to the sainted “Western bishops” permits his elision of the deacon Athanasius from any notice. However, the “conservative-minded” bishops were sequaces of Eusebius of Caesarea who over a dozen years prior to Nicaea had managed to persuade all the Oriental bishops save the Alexandrines that they must choose between his own implicitly Arian subordinationism and the Sabellian denial of the Trinity. He brought this conviction with him to the Council of Antioch early in 325, where it was condemned it as Arian, a verdict confirmed a few months later by the Council of Nicaea. Eustathius, the patriarch of Antioch who had condemned Eusebius at his Council of Antioch, charged Eusebius with heresy at the Council of Nicaea, and the Council agreed. Alexander of Alexandria, bishop of the largest and most populous diocese in the Orient, aided and abetted by the deacon Athanasius who, at Nicaea, had sufficiently disturbed Eusebius of Caesarea, in close alliance with the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, as to undertake his destruction. Although Eusebius pursued him to his dying day, he was unable to subvert or destry Athanasius. Eusebius and his fellow “conservative-minded bishops” saw the Council of Nicaea as an insolent affront to the universal authority of the Roman emperors; they wanted no part of an autonomous Church.
[426]Feltoe, Letters of Dionysius of Alexandria, at 169. Although at the outset of his treatment of “The controversy between the two Dionysii,” 165-67, Feltoe recognizes the Christological problem raised by the Sabellianism of the Libyan bishops, and quotes the letter preserved by Athanasius in which Dionysius of Alexandria objects to the Libyan Sabellianism on specifically Christological grounds, nonetheless he ignores the Christological motif of Dionysius’ rebuke of his Libyan suffragans, preferring to accept Basil’s dismissal of Dionysius as driven by ambition to a subordinationist stance. For this no evidence exists. In Feltoe’s lengthy examination of Dionysius’ attack upon the philosophy of Epicurus and of Democritus, as reported by Eusebius and recorded by Feltoe, ibid, 127ff., Dionysius attacks the inherent absurdities of both philosophers in order to defend the Christians in his See of Alexandria from the temptations to which they otherwise might succumb when presented with the Epicurean equation of happiness with personal iresponsibility. In fulfilling his pastoral obligations to defend his flock, Dionysius reveals a most attractive personality; alernately amused by and indignant at the foolishness of the philosophers whom he would rather ignore but is obliged to challenge. The personality displayed by Dionysius in his encounter with the foolishness of Greek wisdom is that of a gentleman through and through.
[427] Basil of Caesarea, Ep. 9, 2, to Maximus the Philosopher. Basil’s later encounter with a similar lacuna in the available Trinitarian vocabulary found him in comparable difficulties: see Hansen, op. cit., at 691-92. Earlier, at p. 309, Hansen refers to the opinion, widely accepted after its proposal by Harnack, that the Cappadocians held a generic understanding of the Trinity. This generic understanding is implicit in the subordinationist homoiousian doctrine of Basil of Ancyra, whose reduction of the homoios kat’ ousian to univocity, i.e., to a “single concept of likeness,” (Hanson, Search, 352, n. 20: μόνη παραλειφθήσεται ἔνννοια τοῦ ὁμοίου is dependent upon and consequently compatible with the generic notion of divinity and the consequent subordinationism held by Eusebius of Caesarea. Basil of Ancyra’s inherently binitarian commitment to the “single concept of likeness” which could not recognize the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit, also afflicted the Trinitarian hermeneutic of Basil of Caesarea and of Gregory of Nyssa, who so dissociated the economy from the “essence” of the Trinity as to deny its revelation by Jesus the Christ. On the other hand, if Gregory of Nazianzen had ever held a generic notion of the Trinity, he had dropped it by 379, when he travelled to Constantinople, and two years later became the President of the First Council of Constantinople, where his insistence upon the homoousios of the Holy Spirit failed to persuade Gregory of Nyssa and his influential anti-Nicene ally, Diodore of Tarsus, of its truth. See the acute discussion of the contrasting theologies of Gregory of Nazianzen and Basil of Caesarea by Christopher Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzen on The Trinity, pp. 292-303; cf. endnote 272, supra.,
[428] Irenaeus and Hippolytus had arrived at much the same solution to the same problem: see Kelly, Doctrines, at 148-49.
[429] Lonergan, The Way to Nicaea, at 43-48. The latency is scarcely definitive: Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine never departed from his “three Persons, one nature” formula, nor did he retreat from its Christological corollary, the “one Person, two natures” formula, which marked the Latin tradition thereafter, and entered into the Chalcedonian Symbol. Obviously, neither were intelligible in the cosmological context of the Greek philosophical tradition, but Tertullian converted that tradition by his novel Christological equation of “person” with a historical “name.” This equation had its foundation in the historical liturgical tradition, and was cosmologically indigestible. Its novelty, together with Tertullian’s equation of the human substance with the human community rather than with the human person, presaged the breakdown of the influence of an unreflective culture of metaphysical monism, This cosmological rationality was definitively rejected at the Council of Nicaea by the definition of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, contra the Arian monism and the Eusebian subordinationism. That definition was made it impossible to identify the Godhead with the Father; for it made his Name to be his relation to Jesus the Son, and to those whom the Symbol of Chalcedon would declare to be consubstantial with the Son.
[430]Lucian Turcescu remarks of Basil’s Epistle 236 to Amphilocius that:
This text shows more clearly than the previous letters that Basil has come to a solid understanding of the notions he uses. Ὑποστασις is now understood as a particular way of existence. Πρóσωπον, as used at the end of the passage, seems to be synonymous with ὑπόστασις. Nonetheless, in the very next paragraph (Ep. 236, 6.22-28), which I have not quoted because of its length, Basil insists that πρóσωπον is redolent of Sabellianism. Consequently, he avoids using it as a technical term to designate the divine persons. In Basil's view the phrase τρεις ὑπόστασεις is an excellent protection against Sabellianism (cf. Ep. 236,6.34). Ep. 236, 6 constitutes a reference to the trinitarian formula that Basil, more than any other, has established and imposed: one substance, three persons. This text also displays Basil's awareness that the trinitarian dogma is paramount for the sound, orthodox faith.
Turcescu, “Prosōpon and Hypostasis in Basil of Caesarea’s “Against Eunomius” and the Epistles,” Vigiliae Christianae Vol 51/4 (Nov., 1997), 374-95, at 388.
Sed contra,
For both Ps-Ath. and Basil, prosōpon is the most frequent, and the standard, term for naming what is plural in God.
Joseph T., Lienhard, “Ps-Athanasius, Contra Sabellianos, and Basil of Caesarea, Contra Sabellianos et Arium et Anomoeos;. An Analysis and Comparison,” Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 365-389, at 382: Thus also Prestige, God in Patristric Thought, at 162.
This is stated within the context of a comparison of a late article by Basil with an article of uncertain date and attribution within the “Athanasian corpus.” Joseph Lienhard, in “Ousia and Hypostasis: the Cappadocian Settlement and theology of “One Hypostasis” The Trinity. An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity. Ed. Stephen T. David, Daniel Kendall, S.J., Gerald O’Collins, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), [hereafter “Ousia and Hypostasis”, pp. 99-122, at 118ff., has called attention to a “widespread opposition” by the upholders of the “One Hypostasis” to Basil’s effort to establish his interpretation of the “one substance, three persons” formula first proposed by Origen but to which Basil had given a homoiousian interpretation. Tertullian, writing a century and a quarter before Nicaea, had used the equivalent Trinitarian formula, but there could be no question of his having imposed it on the Latin tradition, for Dionysius of Rome was not at peace with it in the latter half of the third century. However, by the time of the Council of Alexandria (362) the “mia hypostasis” doctrine that had been accepted by the bishops who had gathered with Athanasius upon his return in that year to Alexandria, was also that of most of the bishops of the West, as Lienhard has here observed. Mark Weedman, in The Trinitarian Theology of Hilary of Poitiers; ser. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 89 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), has noted that the Trinitarian doctrine of Hilary of Poitiers prior to his exile rested largely upon the anti-adoptionism of Tertullian. Ernest Evans is convinced that Tertullian never departed from his exposition of the Church’s Trinitarian faith in the Apologeticus. The Western affirmation of the substantial unity of God rested upon Tertullian’s distinction between the trinitas, the substantial unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and their distinction, as “personae,” from the “substantia” that is the one God, the Trinity. Its Greek equivalent of a decade or two earlier, the trias proposed by Theophilus of Antioch, had not attained this clarity, and his distinction between “God” and his Word and his Wisdom (Kelly, Doctrines, 104) was open to subordinationism were Theophilus to push the Stoic rationale he had used to illustrate it, which he did not do. The same may be said of Athenagoras, whose Legatio understood the Word to emanate from God (cf. Schoedel, op. cit., xviii), a notion connoting an immanent cosmological necessity. On the other hand, Athenagoras’ assertion of an order (τάξις)distinguishing the Father, Word and Spirit in the economy of salvation rather than in graded perfection of being amounts to his recognition of their equal divinity (Legatio, 103-04). The Trinitarian meaning of “Persona” in the Latin West carried no tinge of modalism: rather, it was suspect of a latent tritheism, as by Pope Callistus’ wariness of tritheism in the Trinitarian theology of Hippolytus and Tertullian, and by Pope Dionysius in his correspondence with his namesake of Alexandria thirty years later.
[431] Jörg Ulrich cites and controverts W. A. Beinert, “Das vorniceanische homoousios als Ausdruck der Rechtglaubigkeit,” Kirchengeschichte 90[ 23] (1979) 3-29:
The only example of the pre-Nicene use of the term "homoousios" in the West is the so-called "controversy of the Dionysii," Dionysius of Alexandria and Dionysius of Rome, in the middle of the third century. The bishop of Alexandria uses the word indirectly, referring to it, but not adopting it himself.18 Bienert thinks that Dionysius of Rome had demanded that his colleague accept the word, because it was part of a valid decision on doctrine, but the difficulty with that reading is that Dionysius of Rome never uses it himself. This is even more astonishing, when we consider that Athanasius quotes this text in his "De decretis synodis,"19 written in about 358, with the intention of justifying the term "homoousios" in the Nicene creed. The fact that Athanasius does not quote the "homoousios" in Dionysius' text indicates clearly that Dionysius himself had not used it. The "controversy of the Dionysii" can therefore neither be understood as a precursor for the later Arian controversy nor can it be taken as a convincing proof for pre-Nicene use of "homoousios." Luise Abramowski has given a number of good reasons in support of theory that these texts do not belong at all to the "controversy of the Dionysii" in the third century, but to the time directly before the synod of Serdica in 342,20 seventeen years after Nicaea.
18 Athanasius, Sent. Dion. 18, 2.
19 Athanasius, Dec. 26.
20 L. Abramowski, Dionys von Rom (…268) und Dionys von Alexandrien (…264/5) in den arianischen Streitigkeiten des 4. Jahrhunderts, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 93 (1982) 240-272.
Jörg Ulrich, “Nicaea and the West,” Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 51, No. 1, (Mar., 1997), pp. 10-24, at 11-12.
Ulrich’s rejection of a pre-Nicene use of the homoousios in the West, and specifically by Pope Dionysius, is contradicted by J. N .D. Kelly:
When they (the Sabellian Libyan bishops rebuked by Dionysius of Alexandria) appealed to the homoousios as their watchword they meant by it that the being or substance of the Son was identical with that of the Father. The way in which they invoked homoousios in their complaint to the Pope is thus highly significant. It suggests, first, that it was already becoming in certain circles a technical term to describe the relation of the Father and the Son, and, secondly, that they expected it would be recognized and approved at Rome. It is equally significant that St. Dionysius (i.e., the Pope) abstained from pressing the necessity of using it upon his Alexandrine namesake. His formal reply condemned the views reported to him, particularly the separation of the divine Being into “three powers and unrelated hypostases and three Divinities,” and took a markedly Monarchian line. St. Dionysius of Alexandria made an extremely skilful defense of himself. While maintaining all the essentials of the Origenist position, he explained that he had not used homoousios because it was not a Scriptural word, but had really intended the doctrine it enshrined.
Kelly, Creeds, 246-47,
Ulrich thus leaves unexplained and inexplicable Dionysius of Alexandria’s reply, in Ἔλεγχος καὶ Ἄπολογία (Refutation and Defense,) to the accusation brought against him, whether by the Libyan bishops, or Dionysius of Rome, or both, of having failed to use “homoousios” in his exposition of his Trinitarian doctrine. Whoever accused him, the accusation was mediated to Dionysius of Alexandria by the Pope’s personal correspondence, to which he felt the need to reply in the Refutatio and Defense, where he defended his doctrine as consistent with the homoousios of the Son with the Father. Feltoe, in Letters of Dionysius of Alexandria, 167, reports that the fourth charge brought against Dionysius by the Sabellian bishops was his “having virtually rejected the term homoousios as descriptive of the Son”. For Dionysius of Alexandria to have “virtually” rejected the Libyan bishops’ Sabellian interpretation of the homoousios would in their view be to hold a ”virtual” or implicit tritheism, inasmuch as their cosmological reading of the divine substance identified it with a single divine Self. Karl Rahner, from the same Sabellian stance, indicted as tritheist those misguided souls who hold to the Trinitarian faith of the Church, the Personal consubstantiality of Father, Son and Spirit. Neither charge is worthy of attention. Dionysius of Alexander was not an Origenist in the subordinationist sense developed by Eusebius of Caesarea early in the next century. As a disciple of Origen, Dionysius the Great would have upheld the co-eternity, in fact, the consubstantiality, of the Father and the Son as correlative: neither could be so Named except as existing in eternal and substantial interrelation. Origen was the first to understand the Name of “Father” in this relational sense, and thus also the first to understand the Son as in relation of mutuality with the Father, dependent upon him, distinct from him, but divine: i.e., “substantial,” as the Father is “substantial.” The Libyan bishops saw in Dionusius’ rebuke of the adoptionist Christology inherent in their Sabellianism an opportunity to attack as tritheist his apostolic faith in the Trinity, the sole alternative, as they supposed, to their modalism. Their metropolistan’s Christology interested them not at all; their own Christology would have been a crude adoptionism. The implication of their rebuke of Dionysius of Alexandria might well have troubled the Pope, who, in a local synod, without much reflection, upheld the traditional Roman stress upon the unity of God, but also condemned Sabellianism. J. N. D. Kelly finds him influenced by Novatian, but it is unlikely that the Pope would have paid much attention to an anti-Pope whose Trinitarian doctrine was in any case so muddled. See endnote 427, supra, for further discussion of this matter.
[432] Lonergan, The Way to Nicaea, 121, n. 50. The cosmological assumption that the possession of supreme authority must be limited to one person, divine or human, pervades all history. The division of that power is impossible by definition. The U.S. Constitution’s effort to limit political authority by dividing it between three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial) to render it compatible with a free polity has only rediscovered the permanent political tension, the problem of the one ruler versus the many ruled, the standoff summed up by the Greeks as “stasis. ;” see endnote 688 infra. The perennial contestation in the U.S. between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government offers a most persuasive illustration of the simultaneous irrationality and inevitability of that tension, which has no rational solution. Efforts to find one are attempts to deduce freedom from necessity, an unlikely prospect. It is only when the substantial monism of cosmological rationality is explicitly refused in favor of the freedom of the substantial Unity of God as Trinitarian, and of the human imaging of that free Unity in the nuptial One Flesh, that it can be grasped that authority itself is free, because possessed fully by each of the Persons who constitute the free Unity of God that is the substantial Trinity, and by each of those who constitute the free and substantial unity of humanity, whose source is the nuptial unity, the One Flesh of the New Covenant, the redeemed Good Creation. It is thus that the praxis of sacramental marriage offers the only basis for the rule of law, and for a free political order, i.e. for a free society.
This consideration goes far to explain the Roman distrust of the distinctions posed by Hippolytus and Tertullian between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, as also the initial hesitation of Pope Zephyrinus and Pope Callistus to condemn the Sabellian simplification of the divine Unity, the denial of any concrete, i.e., economic, distinction between the divine Persons. However, the a priori liturgical commitment of the Roman bishops to the truth of the faith, with its clear delineation of the “economy” of Father, Son, and Spirit, barred that recourse. Callistus soon condemned Sabellianism; thirty years later, so would Pope Dionysius. Free participation in the Church’s worship in truth, in her faith that Jesus is Lord, sent by the Father to give the Spirit, forced its way through the naive cosmological assumptions which could not accommodate the apostolic faith that Jesus Christ is Lord ; in fact that barred it outright. Consequently, as Kelly observes (Doctrines, at 224), Dionysius of Rome affirmed the faith in spite of his inability to understand it: i.e., to provide its rationale: Kelly’s intimation that, lacking such a rationale, the faith is unintellible is hardly sustainable: “it has not pleased God to make his people safe by dialectic.” Thus in affirming the ‘homoousion” of the Son, the Pope Dionysius would only affirm the truth of the mystery, the liturgically-mediated revelation of the Unity of God and the Trinity of divine Persons: he was under no obligation to resolve it, for the liturgical mediation of its truth had long been clear. Magisterial responsibility in and for the Church, then as now, is liturgical, not academic: it is a doctrinal office, not a theological profession.
[433] Kelly, Doctrines, at 134, Creeds, 241-42;. Kelly did not enlarge on this Novatian influence upon Dionysius of Rome, except insofar as he considers it to favor Monarchianism, thus to uphold the divine unity against the tritheism thought to be latent in the supposedly subordinationist language used by Dionysius of Alexandria in his correspondence with his Libyan suffragans, in which he had rebuked the Sabellianism infecting the clergy of the Libyan Pentapolis. Their appeal from the bishop of Alexandria to the bishop of Rome, Pope Dionysius, required his attention. The Pope’s Trinitarian doctrine was of the Roman tradition, emphasizing the unity of God rather than the distinction of Persons, and thus was certainly conservative. Novatian may have influenced his views but, if so, the influence would not have been Sabellian, as Daniélou’s careful commentary upon Novatian has made clear: see Latin Theology, esp. 329-338. On the other hand, Novatian was still presenting himself as an anti-pope after the election of Cornelius in 251. His attempt to gather support for his opposition to Cornelius’ election instigated a schism which had become widespread when Dionysius became the Pope in 258. While the lack of historical records may preclude clarity on the matter, it remains difficult to imagine that less than a decade after his schism began Novatian's theology retained a vital influence in Rome or, a fortiori, upon the Pope.
Dionysius of Rome’s brief to the clergy of Alexandria, condemning subordinationism in terms aimed at the specific accusations made against Dionysius of Alexandria by his rebellious subordinates in Libya, but with no mention of names, had been prefaced by an equally stringent repetition at a Roman synod (Athanasius, De synodis, 44) of the condemnation of Sabellianism by his predecessor, Callistus, and of a perhaps yet more stringent condemnation of the tritheistic subordinationism of which Dionysius of Alexandria was in his eyes suspect. It may be that the condemnation of subordinationism by Dionysius of Rome in his Letter to The Roman Clergy arose out of the Roman emphasis upon the divine unity, but by his time Monarchianism had become Sabellianism, and long since had been condemned by Callistus. Novatian’s efforts to carry water on both shoulders in his De trinitate may describe also a Papal puzzlement; how to uphold the divine monarchy, once forced by Tertullian and Hippolytus to recognize that the Monarchy is a Trinity. There is no reason to seek an explanation in Novatian for the readiness of the Pope to accept the condemnation of Dionysius of Alexandria by his suffragan bishops. The accusation of tritheism contained in the appeal to him, whether by the Sabellian bishops or their dubious Alexandrine counterparts, is the evident basis of the Pope’s criticism of the Trinitarian doctrine of Dionysius of Alexandria, bolstered by the charge that Dionysius of Alexandria had avoided the term “homoousios” and also by the accusation that he had reduced Jesus the Christ to a creature; see Feltoe’s Letters of Dionysius of Alexandria, at 166-67 and Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I at 153-59.
No traces remain of the personal letter Pope Dionysius sent to Dionysius of Alexandria apart from what may be inferred from the latter’s reply to it Refutatio et Apologia. What remains of the pope’s open letter to the clergy of Alexandria was preserved by Athanasius in the De sententia Dionysii. The Pope appears to have taken quite seriously the Sabellian bishops’ criticism of Dionysius of Alexandria’s theology in that he had not used “homoousios” with respect to the Son, although there is no reason to believe that the Pope himself had any clear understanding of that term, for whose misuse Paul of Samosata was about to be tried in distant Antioch. Its acceptance by Dionysius of Alexandria, in his Refutatio et Apologia, quoted in Athanasius’ De Decretis, 26, was in reply the accusation that he had avoided its use; his defense does not inform us of the meaning which the Pope may have attached to that term.
However, the inference that the Pope had joined in that Libyan criticism is avoidable only by depriving him of a reason for mentioning the homoousios at all in his letter to the Diocese of Alexandria, and doubtless in his personal letter to Dionysius of Alexandria. It is obvious that the Pope could not have understood “homoousios” in the Sabellian sense imputable to the Libyan bishops, for Sabellianism had long since been condemned by Pope Callistus, and very recently by Pope Dionysius’ own council in Rome.
The approval of homoousios implicit in the Pope’s communication to the Bishop of Alexandria of the objection made by his Libyan suffragans to his avoidance of that word is without explanation. In fact, within the anti-tritheist context of his correspondence, the Pope’s approval of the homoousios can only be seen as anticipating its use by the Council of Nicaea to defend the divinity of the Son as a Person distinct from the Father but who, as generated by the Father, must be, and is, of the same substance as the Father.
In this, he would only have endorsed the Roman doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Son, a heritage of Tertullian’s Christological formula that would pass into the Symbol of Chalcedon. In endorsing the homoousios of the Son, Pope Dionysius did not clarify the mystery of that consubstantiality. At best, he must have had some intimation of its pertinence and truth.
This at least must be accepted: otherwise there is no reason for Pope Dionysius to have mentioned the term, nor for Dionysius’ of Alexandria to have accepted its validity and defended his conformity to it. It must be on this basis that he replied in a respectful manner to the accusation that he had not used “homoousios” of the Son. He might have explained his avoidance of homoousios as a term integral with the Sabellianism with which he knew the Libyan bishops to be infected, had he not understood the Pope to have taken up the charge himself in a definitely non-Sabellian context. Yet, in the view of Dionysius of Rome, the Bishop of Alexandria’s rebuke of the Libyan bishops smacked of tritheism.
Most of the Western theologians of his time were troubled by the supposed threat to the divine monarchy inherent in concrete reference to the divine Names as Trinitarian Personae, Πρόσωπα, or ὑπόστασεις, and it is likely that the Pope was of a similarly conservative mind. If so, it would explain why the Bishop of Alexandria defended his avoidance of the “homoousios” on the ground that it is not found in Scripture for, as endorsed by the Pope whom he knew to be no Sabellian, he had no doctrinal objection to it. In the excerpts from his defense which Athanasius published in his De sententia Dyonysii nearly a century later, Dionysius of Alexandria maintained that he had given it concrete application to the Son who is Jesus the Christ. Sixty years later, the Council of Nicaea would do precisely that.
Tertullian had made the Western bishops familiar with the substantia-persona distinction in God and its resolution in the Trinitas, which they accepted as the doctrinal transcendence of the ancient enigma of unity and plurality in God, but Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology was unknown to the Oriental theologians in the third cenury: Bethune-Baker, whom Feltoe cites as an authority (op. cit., p. 172), assumes the contrary, and is in error. Feltoe’s recognition and acceptance of Dionysius’ reliance upon Origen’s usage (op. cit., 177, n. 4,), indirectly corrects Bethune-Baker.
For Tertullian and for Origen, the divine substance is the Trinity: Substantia and Trinitas, Ousia and Trias coincide, although Origen rarely used Trias. The substantial unity of the Trias is implicit in the term itself, and would have been taken for granted by Theophilus, who coined it. However, Tertullian is the first to have affirmed it; well knowing that the attribution of “substantia” to the Trinity bars all divisibility in the monarchy. J. N. D. Kelley, although convinced that Constantine is responsible for its introduction into the Nicene deliberations (Creeds at 249-54), is willing to consider the possibility that Hosius (Ossius), a representative of the conservative Latin tradition, brought the “homoousios” to Constantine’s attention. Hosius’ close association with Athanasius at the Council of Nicaea may be thought further to buttress this possibility.
On the other hand, it is rather more likely that Athanasius had learned of the homoousion of the Son well before Nicaea, whether from his bishop’s reply to Arius’s correspondence of 320 or, more likely, from the papal correspondence with Dionysius, who had become the head of the School of Alexandria after Heraclas, who held that office after Origen’s departure for Caesarea, but ceased to hold it upon succeeding Demetrius to the episcopacy of Alexandria. Dionysius was the head of the School when himself succeeding to the See of Alexandria, and appears to have continued to direct it during his episcopacy (Kelly, in Doctrines, 132, like Grillmeier, supported the now rejected notion that Theognostus directed the School during that time; see endnote 256, supra).
The archives of the Catechetical School would have provided Athanasius’ access to that correspondence, as well as to Dionysius of Alexandria’s Refutation and Apology, whose allegedly generic understanding of the homoousion Kelly thinks may have been found satisfactory by Dionysius of Rome (Doctrines, 235), although it is evident that an explicitly generic acceptance of the term would have been a regression to subordinationism which the Pope had condemned. Origen, whose disciple Dionysius the Great had been, had never taught the subordinationism with which, e.g., J. N. D. Kelly, associates him (Doctrines, 133). Origen had taught the three divine hypostases without any thought or accusation of tritheism, for his attribution of substantial unity (mia ousia) to the Trinity anticipates the Nicene doctrine of the substsantial unity of the Trinity (mia hypostasis, mia ousia of a centutry later. Given that Dionysius was Origen’s disciple, it may be supposed, in the absence of any contrary evidence, that here he followed his eminent mentor. A generic understanding of ‘homoousios’ is further highly unlikely in an author defending himself against just that charge of tritheism, however ineptly, and of course still less so in the Pope who made or conveyed that indictment. If it cannot be supposed that the numerical substantial unity entailed in the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son would become clear until well after Nicaea, it makes as little sense to suppose that a clearly generic understanding of the term was in place beforehand, for the distinction between the generic and the numerical uses of the term did not then exist: it remained inconceivable to Eusebius of Caesarea seventy-five years later. The generic-numerical distinction was in fact forced by the Church’s Trinitarian faith that Jesus is Lord: absent that faith, the distinction had no application. Given that faith, the generic sense became impossible. Finally, Dionysius of Alexandria relied upon Scripture to support this orthodoxy, and the Scripture always speaks historically of the Son: he is Jesus the Lord.
[434] See endnote 419, supra. The Arian attempt to find support in Dionysius the Great rested on his assertion that the Christ had a beginning:
4. ἦν ὅτε οὐκ ἦν. “There was when He was not.” This was the phrase which the Arians afterword took up as describing the γέννησις of Christ: they avoided the word χρόνος as they wished to imply that His Sonship was before all time.
Feltoe, op. cit., 180, n. 4:
Athanasius defended Dionysius’ use of this phrase not only against its misuse by Arians, but also against its misuse by Pope Dionysius, whose rebuke of Dionysius the Great as a subordinationist rested upon an entirely uncritical acceptance of the Libyan bishops’ transposition to a Trinitarian context of Dionysius of Alexandria’s Letter criticizing the Libyan Christological heresy. Athanasius did not bother to refute the Libyan misuse of Dionysius’ Letter, whose content together with that of his Refutatio et Apologia, had made that unnecessary. Feltoe however accepts as valid Harnack’s uninformed criticism of Athanasius’ defense of Dionysius of Alexandria:
11. διὰ τὴν σάρκα There is much truth in Harnack’s remark (op. cit. p. 92, n. 2), “the attempt of Athanasius to explain away the doubtful utterances of Dionysius by referring them to the human nature of Christ is a make-shift born of perplexity.” For even if the words εἰ δέ καί...δυνατόν imply that Dionysius would have been glad to escape from his difficulty by a reference to the Incarnation, yet he very soon retires from that ground; and surely Athanasius would have quoted any other passages in the Ἔλεγχος that proved his point more directly than this does, if he could. D.’s real defense seems to be that he used the word ποιητής in a general sense and to some extent inaccurately, of the Father’s relation to the Son, if he used it at all. It must be remembered that D. had not a copy of his words by him at the time of writing.
Feltoe, op. cit., 194. n. 11.
This summing up of the case against Dionysius and Athanasius hardly requires refutation, for it is simply a contentious begging of every question raised. In order to ratify Harnack’s quite obvious error, Feltoe must suppose the befuddlement of two of the finest minds and greatest bishops the third and fourth centuries knew. In another curious and unsubstantiated remark, Feltoe observes that:
In one of these letters, which Dionysius generally speaks of as addressed προς Εὐφράνορα καὶ Ἀμμώνιον (To Euphranora and Ammonion) though the title does not exactly tally with any in Eusebius’s list) and which was written about the year 260, Dionysius made use of certain illustrations and expressions about the Son of God which were seized hold of by some members of the Church either at Alexandria or in the Pentapolis as heretical.
Feltoe, op. cit., 166.
Feltoe has provided no reason to suppose that Dionysius of Alexandria was under attack for heresy by members of his own See. His reference to “some members of the Church” as “either at Alexandria or in the Pentapolis” comes out of the blue. Dionysius’ reputation as the Bishop of Antioch was sterling; together with Cyprian, he was one of the two great bishops of the third century. In 264, at about 75 years of age, he received an extraordinary invitation from the See of Antioch to attend a Council to be held in 265 to deal with the case of Paul of Samosata. Feltoe is aware that the accusations addressed by Dionysius of Rome to the See of Alexandria in 260 had no impact in the Orient with the exception of Basil of Caesarea, whose criticisms of Dionysius the Great, early and late, have no foundation. While knowing nothing of Dionysius, Basil reveals perhaps too much of himself.
The Father’s relation to the Son is invokes the doctrine of the Trinity, whereas the interest of Dionysius of Alexandria’s correspondence with the Libyan bishop, like his earlier correspondence with Sixtus II concerning their Sabellianism, is entirely Christological. Feltoe (op. cit., pp. 165-66) admits that this concern is evident in Dionysius’ preliminary correspondence with Pope Sixtus, and remains so thereafter. It therefore assumes the primordial pre-existence of Jeus the Lord “in the Beginning;” Paul went so far as to identify Jesus as “the Beginning.” (Col. 1:18); thus Dionysius’ insistence that Jesus has a “beginning,” i.e., that there was when he was not,” is entirely justified. Its assertion is not a makeshift born of perplexity as Harnack supposes, but rather expresses the apostolic faith that Jesus Christ is Lord; fifty years earlier, Irenaeus had famously named him /”one and the same Son” of the Father and the Virgin Mary.
[435] Daniélou, in Latin Christianity at 361-3, has drawn attention to an appreciation of Praxeas’ supposed monarchianism as less a heresy than an archaic form of orthodoxy, citing Raniero Cantalamessa, “Prassea e l’eresia monarchiana”, La Scuola Cattolica, 9 (1962), pp.28-50; ‘Il Cristo Padre negli scritti del II-III secolo’, Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa [RSLR], 3 (1967), pp. 1-27.
[436] Quasten, Patrology I, 160, mentions a report by Eusebius (E.H. 7, 30, 20) that Paul of Samosata was accused of having suppressed the singing of hymns addressed to Jesus Christ on the ground that they were modern and the composition of modern authors. This was a century and a half after Pliny the Younger‘s report to Trajan of having heard the Bithynian peasantry singing hymns to Christ “as to God.” See endnote 17, supra.
[437] See G. A. Williamson, Eusebius: the History of the Church, 318, note 7:
7. We may well accept the statement of Jerome that this letter was the work of Malchion, the learned headmaster. Apart from borrowings from Demosthenes and Lucian and the use of two Latin words, it reeks of rhetoric, with its abuse, its pretended unwillingness to accuse, and its immensely long and involved sentences, one of which (with a single main verb) stretches to 330 words.
[438] The Christology of Paul of Samosata condemned at the Synod of Antioch (268) is generally recognized to have been adoptionist: thus J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 140. Kelly, ibid., at 159, thinks that the alternative Christology apparently proposed by Paul’s prosecutor, Malchion, anticipated the monophysism of Apollinarius. U. M. Lang has provided an extended commentary on that Synod in “The Christological Controversy at the Synod of Antioch in 268/9, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, Vol. 51, Pt. 1 (April 2000), 54-80, which includes a vigorous defense of the reliability of the report of the synod by Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, 27-30 (sed contra, see endnote 362 supra). Lang concludes that Malchion's defense of the divinity of Jesus is most likely to have been inspired by Origen. This Synod, held in the last third of the third century, scarcely a dozen years after Origen's death, occurred during a period in which the primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Lord as "Spirit," and the commonplace "Spirit Christology," taken for granted by Tertullian and by Origen, had not yet been suppressed by Eusebius of Caesarea's assault upon it in the Contra Marcellum: (see endnote 625, infra) which stands in the way of any involvement of Origen in the Logos-sarx project of providing for the prior possibility of the Incarnation. The Spirit Christology is pre-eminently historical, it provides no basis for that cosmological analysis of the Christ.
[439]Hugo Rahner, Church and State in Early Christianity; tr. Leo Donald Davis, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 19921961) at 269, quoting "An official interrogation of Maximus the Confessor," dated August, 656 (P. G. 90:136-172 at 148), where Anastasius quotes Maximus the Confessor who, in the course of his interrogation, referred to the presidency over the Synod of Antioch (268) of both Dionysius of Alexandria and Gregory Thaumaturgus. However, Eusebius (HE 7, 27), records that Dionysius of Alexander had been prevented by ill health from attending the Synod which issued the letter condemning Paul of Samosata; this had been held in 268. Duchesne (Early History of the Church [1909], at 343), denied that Dionysius was present at either synod: although invited to an earlier Synod of Antioch, of 264 or 265, he was by then too infirm to attend it. Duchesne thus reads Eusebius as referring to an invitation to Dionysius to attend the earlier Synod. It is then agreed that he did not attend the Synod of Antioch held in 268 and probably not that of 265. Feltoe, op. cit., General Introduction, §13, xxi-xxiii, amends this chronology, concluding that Dionysius the Great died during the Council of 265, which the Antiochene bishops had invited him to attend. Feltoe cites Dionysius’ reply to the invitation, but does not indicate whether he was present at the Council when he died.
[440] Hanson, Search, at 366-67,
[441] For a summary exposition of Sabellius and Sabellianism, see Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, 113ff., 161ff. et s.v.
[442] It should not be supposed that Trinitarian modalism no longer presents a doctrinal problem. The expressions of it by St. Thomas, Newman, Albright, Rahner, and Jaki raise Christological issues with which contemporary theology has yet to come to terms. First, how can each unique human person be understood to be created in the image of the Tri-Personal God, and thus charged with the imaging of God? Secondly, given the current universal theological reception of the cosmological postulate of the unique substantiality of each human person created in the image of God, how can our common―i.e., in the sense of consubstantial―solidarity with the sin of the first Adam and with the redemption worked by the second Adam, be made theologically intelligible?
Apart from a complete rejection of the classic anthropology’s atomization of the human substance, at once the object of creation and the historical image of God, and the rejection as well of its corollary, the postulate of our substantial uniqueness, viz., of our monadic personal objectivity as substantially unique, indivisum in se, divisum ab omni alio, these questions can have no answer, for the solidarities in question are then impossible. Solidarity between monads is inconceivable. The questions do not on that account cease to be theological questions, for they arise out of our very existence in ecclesia, neither do they cease to be asked, for they are inherent in our worship in truth of the Truth incarnate.
The Catholic anthropology to be deployed in this historical connection is that which is required by the human homoousion of Jesus “with us”,:as taught at Ephesus and Chalcedon. The Chalcedonian doctrine of the homoousion of the “one and the same Son” with the Father requires a numerically single divine substance in which Jesus, the one and the same Son, Personally subsists consubstantially with the Father and the Spirit. The homoousion of the Son with each human person requires a numerically single human substance in which Jesus, the one and the same Son, Personally subsists consubstantially with each human person.
Only the consubstantiality of the Son with us is consistent with his headship of humanity. Only this headship, refused by the first Adam, fulfilled by the second Adam, explains our solidarity with the fallen flesh of the first Adam and the redeemed “one flesh” of the second. There is no other possibility.
The biblical tradition (Gen. 1 - 2) teaches the nuptial creation of man, while the ordinary teaching of the Church at the beginning of the twenty-first century, developed over more than two decades by Pope John Paul II, requires that the human imaging of the Trinity be nuptial, having the free unity of One Flesh, for it is in his institution of the New Covenant, his offering of the One Sacrifice, on the Altar and on the Cross, that Jesus images the Father by having a glory, the bridal Church, proceed from him as from her Head. The human substance, as the substantial object of creation, is a nuptial unity, and is therefore sacramentally objective in history, primarily as the Eucharistic One Flesh, secondarily in the one flesh of the sacrament of matrimony. Thus, the human imaging of God is actual in personal participation in the covenantal, Eucharistic worship of the Church. Our creation in the image of God, and our imaging of God, is by grace, not by nature.
In the end, the problem of modalism, early or late, Trinitarian or Christological, is rooted in a fixed, nearly ineradicable supposition that substantial being, simply as such, must be monadic: i.e., that each actual entity must be a substance, for no other notion of substantial unity is conceivable. Because the normative unity of being is divine, one might suppose the revelation of the Trinity to induce theological conversion from a monadic to a Trinitarian metaphysics: specifically to a trinitarian understanding of substance insofar as created in the image of God: i.e., insofar as human. However, this has yet to be recognized, although it is demanded by the Council of Chalcedon, which understands human substance, like the divine Trinitarian substance, to be multi-personal: Jesus, the One Son of the Father and of Mary, is “homoousios” with the Father, and with us.
Contemporary Christology is not only uniformly incompatible with this defined doctrine; it is unable to deal with the paradoxes pointed out long ago by the Church’s critics, the chiefest of these being our twin solidarities, in the fall, and in the redemption from the fall, which are intelligible only as presented by the doctrine of headship taught by I Cor . 11:3 as developed in Rom. 5 and Eph. 5. Our solidarity with the first and the second Adam is otherwise unintelligible.
[443] Athenagoras: Legatio and De Resurrectione; edited and translated by William R. Schoedel. Col. Oxford Early Christian Texts. (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1972.
[444] Ad Autolycum by Theophilus of Antioch; text and translation by Robert M. Grant (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970).
[445] For the critical text of this famous ‘Panegyric,’ see Remerciement à Origène, suivi de la lettre d’Origène à Grégoire. Texte grec: introd., traduction et notes par Henri Crouzel. Col. Sources Chrétiennes, no. 148 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969). An English translation has been provided by Michael Slusser: see St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: life and works. Introduction and tr. by Michael Slusser. Col. Fathers of the Church 98 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), at 91-126. The authorship of the Panegyric is contested, as with many of the works attributed to Gregory. Slusser cites Pierre Nautin’s denial of Gregory Thaumaturgus’s authorship, summarizing Nautin’s argument as follows:
Nautin, Origène, 81-86, claims that the Address was the work of another student of Origen in Caesarea named “Theodorus,” and that Eusebius conflated him with the famous bishop of Pontus.
Slusser, op. cit., note 69, at 10, citing Nautin’s Origène: sa vie et son œuvre (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977), 81-86. Slusser might well also have cited Crouzel’s criticism of Nautin’s thesis as insufficiently substantiated, in Origen, page 2, note 1.
Slusser’s “Introduction,” pp. 36-37, proceeds to point out that the major testimony to the traditional attribution of the authorship of the Panegyric (more precisely, “The Address of Thanksgiving to Origen,” as Slusser prefers) to Gregory Thaumaturgus is Origen’s Letter to Gregory, whose addressee has also generally been identified with be Gregory Thaumaturgus. Origen characterizes its addressee as “my son.” After discussing the evidence for and against the traditional identification of the Letter’s addressee with Gregory Thaumaturgus, Slusser decides against it. Although he upholds the traditional attribution of the Panegyric to Gregory Thaumaturgus, the distinction he places between the Gregory to whom Origen addressed his Letter, and Gregory Thaumaturgus whom he believes to have written the Panegyric, tends to undercut his support of the traditional attribution of the Panegyric to Gregory. On this, see Joseph W. Trigg’s positive review of Slusser’s translation, in Church History, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Mar. 2000), pp. 152-153.
For further commenary on Nautin’s argument, see T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, at 329, n. 39. Crouzel, in an extended footnote in Origen, at 2, note 1, finds Nautin’s conclusion to lack a sufficient foundation. More recently Christopher Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity, at 274, has raised further doubts over the attribution of “The Address of Thanksgiving to Origen” to Gregory Thaumaturgus; he also rejects the attribution to Gregory of the Expositio Fidei.
[446] Grillmeier, “Gregory Thaumaturgus and Arius,” Christian Tradition, I, 232-37. Gregory’s authorship of the Expositio Fidei has been in doubt since C. P. Caspari’s critical edition of the Expositio in Alte und neuen Quellen zur Geschichte des Taufsymbols und der Glaubensregel (Christiana, 1879), 1-34, which concluded to the greater likelihood of Apollinarian authorship. W. A. Jurgens, in Faith of the Fathers, I, at 252, refers to Caspari’s study, but attributes authorship of the Expositio to Gregory, as does Grillmeier, supra. Crouzel follows Caspari, naming Apollinarius of Laodicea as its author as though a fact beyond discussion: this in a brief article, “Gregory of Thaumaturgus, St.,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., v. 6, at 524-25, published thirty years after Jurgens’ 1970 publication of the first volume of The Faith of the Early Fathers.
In any case, and regardless of who wrote the Expositio, the notion that its recognition of the unity of God as Trinitarian rather than monadic is a “marked advance” upon the Trinitarian doctrine of Origen is without justification. Origen assigned the Father, the Son, and the Spirit each the same divine or “substantial” standing, entirely consistent with his debated use of “homoousios” to describe them The Eusebian subordinationism consequent upon the identification of the Father with the Godhead is simply foreign to his thought, as Crouzel has shown.
[447] J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, at 249 and 252. In Doctrines, at 228, Kelly notes that Arius’ letter to Alexander, preserved by Athanasius in Contra Arianos 1, 5 and 2, 37, describes the relation of the Son to the Father as “alien from and utterly dissimilar to the Father’s essence and individual being” (ἀλλὁτριος καὶ ἀνόμιος κατὰ πάντα τῆs τοῦ πατρὁς οὐσίας καὶ διὁτητος). Kelly goes on (Doctrines, 249) to point out that this language directly anticipates the Anomoeism of Aetius and Eunomius.
[448] Grillmeier, Christian Tradition, 234ff., Hanson, Search, 86, nn. 137-38. What is known of the Thalia derives from Athanasius’ excerpts from it. Hanson discusses them in Search, 10-15, with the requisite recognition of the antagonism Athanasius has elsewhere displayed toward Arius.
[449] For freedom Christ has set us free;” (Gal. 5:1, RSV),
[450] Evans, Against Praxeas, 69.
[451] Feltoe, Letters of Dionysius of Alexandria, 166-67, provides the English translation and summary of the charges brought up by the Libyan bishops against Dionysius of Alexandria, as recorded in Athanasius’ De Sententiae Dionysii:
Feltoe introduces his discussion of “The Controversy Between the Two Dionysii” with an excerpt from Athanasius’ De Sententia of what is perhaps the final letter of Dionysius to the Libyan bishops:
“I have sent you,” he says, “with reference to the doctrine which has now arisen at Ptolemais in the Pentapolis, for it is impious and contains much blasphemy about the Almighty God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and much unbelief about His only begotten Son, the First-Begotten of all Creation, the Incarnate Word, and a want of perception of the Holy Spirit.”1
1.See pp. 51ff. On p. 51, in his translation of and commentary upon a letter sent by Dionysius to Pope Sixtus setting out the problem posed by the rise of Sabellianism in Libya, Feltoe inroduces Dionysius’ concern over Libyan problem, well before the controversy raised by his letters to the Libyan bishops.
Feltoe, op. cit, 165.
Feltoe confirms the validity of Dionysius concern:
In Libya the heresy gained such a hold upon the Church that even certain of the Bishops were infected with it and the Son of God was no longer preached.1
1.ἐν Πενταπόλει τῆς ἄνω Λυβύης τενικαῦτα τινες τῶν ἑπισκοπων εφρὁνησαν τὰ Σαβελλἱου καὶ τοιοῦτον ἴσχυσαν ταῖς ἐπινοἱαις ὡς ὸλἱγου δεῖν μηκέτι ἑν ταῖς ἐκκλεσἱαις κηρύττεσθαι τὸν υἴὸν τοῦ θεοῦ ((Athan, de sent. D, 5). Sabellius had invented the word υἴοπάτωρ to designate the Godhead (Athan. de synod. 16; Hil. de Trin. iv 12; Harnack, Hist. of Dogma iii pp. 85ff.
Feltoe, op. cit., 165-66.
Feltoe’s language is a shade coy. The Libyan bishops infected with Sabellianism may safely be assumed to be those addressed by their metropolitan’s letters, and their failure to preach “the Son of God” any longer was Christological, for their Sabellianism would have imposed an adoptionism, as it did with a follower of Sabellius, Paul of Samosata, along with the correlative refusal of the divinity of Christ. This rejection of the Mysterium fidei, the central object of the faith of the Church, prompted Dionysius’ letters; their focus was Christological simply. To understand them otherwise is simply to refuse the facts readily at hand. The faith of the Church is rooted in the Mysterium that is Jesus the Lord. The refusal of his suffragan bishops to preach the Son was a flat denial of the faith which Dionysius the Great could not ignore, as his surviving letter to them makes entirely clear:
[452]Lucian Turcescu remarks of Basil’s Epistle 236 to Amphilocius that:
This text shows more clearly than the previous letters that Basil has come to a solid understanding of the notions he uses. Ὑποστασις is now understood as a particular way of existence. Πρóσωπον, as used at the end of the passage, seems to be synonymous with ὑπόστασις. Nonetheless, in the very next paragraph (Ep. 236, 6.22-28), which I have not quoted because of its length, Basil insists that πρóσωπον is redolent of Sabellianism. Consequently, he avoids using it as a technical term to designate the divine persons. In Basil's view the phrase τρεις ὑπόστασεις is an excellent protection against Sabellianism (cf. Ep. 236,6.34). Ep. 236, 6 constitutes a reference to the trinitarian formula that Basil, more than any other, has established and imposed: one substance, three persons. This text also displays Basil's awareness that the trinitarian dogma is paramount for the sound, orthodox faith.
Turcescu, “Prosōpon and Hypostasis in Basil of Caesarea’s “Against Eunomius” and the Epistles,” Vigiliae Christianae Vol 51/4 (Nov., 1997), 374-95, at 388.
Sed contra,
For both Ps-Ath. and Basil, prosōpon is the most frequent, and the standard, term for naming what is plural in God.
Joseph T. Lienhard, “Ps-Athanasius, Contra Sabellianos, and Basil of Caesarea, Contra Sabellianos et Arium et Anomoeos;. An Analysis and Comparison,” Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 365-389, at 382: Thus also Prestige, op. cit., at 162.
This is stated within the context of a comparison of a late article by Basil with an article of uncertain date and attribution within the “Athanasian corpus.” In “Ousia and Hypostasis: the Cappadocian Settlement and theology of “One Hypostasis” The Trinity. An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity. Ed. Stephen T. David, Daniel Kendall, S.J., Gerald O’Collins, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), [hereafter “Ousia and Hypostasis”, pp. 99-122, at 118ff., Joseph Lienhard has called attention to a “widespread opposition” by the upholders of the “One Hypostasis” to Basil’s effort to establish his interpretation of the “one substance, three persons” formula first proposed by Origen but to which Basil had given a homoiousian interpretation. Tertullian, writing a century and a quarter before Nicaea, had used the equivalent Trinitarian formula, but there could be no question of his having imposed it on the Latin tradition, for Dionysius of Rome was not at peace with it in the latter half of the third century. However, by the time of the Council of Alexandria (362) the “mia hypostasis” doctrine that had been accepted by the bishops who had gathered with Athanasius upon his return in that year to Alexandria, was also that of most of the bishops of the West, as Lienhard has here observed. Mark Weedman, in The Trinitarian Theology of Hilary of Poitiers; ser. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 89 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), has noted that the Trinitarian doctrine of Hilary of Poitiers prior to his exile rested largely upon the anti-adoptionism of Tertullian. Ernest Evans is convinced that Tertullian never departed from his summation of the Church’s Trinitarian faith in the Apologeticus. The Western affirmation of the substantial unity of God rested upon Tertullian’s distinction between the trinitas, the substantial unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and their distinction, as “personae,” from the “substantia” that is the one God, the Trinity. Its Greek equivalent of a decade or two earlier, the trias proposed by Theophilus of Antioch, had not attained this clarity, and his distinction between “God” and his Word and his Wisdom (Kelly, Doctrines, 104) was open to subordinationism were Theophilus to push the Stoic rationale he had used to illustrate it, which he did not do. The same may be said of Athenagoras, whose Legatio understood the Word to emanate from God (cf. Schoedel, op. cit., xviii), a notion connoting an immanent cosmological necessity. On the other hand, Athenagoras’ assertion of an order (τάξις) distinguishing the Father, Word and Spirit in the economy of salvation rather than in graded perfection of being amounts to his recognition of their equal divinity (Legatio, 103-04). The Trinitarian meaning of “Persona” in the Latin West carried no tinge of modalism: rather, it was suspect of a latent tritheism, as by Pope Callistus’ wariness of tritheism in the Trinitarian theology of Hippolytus and Tertullian, and by Pope Dionysius in his correspondence with his namesake of Alexandria thirty years later.
[453] Feltoe’s citation (op. cit., 173, n. 1), of Jerome’s Adv. Rufinam, i.e., Apologia adversus libros Rufini libri duo (P.L. 23, 397-492). a work Jurgens describes as “the most bitter and vitriolic of all his writings, and perhaps the most unjustified.” (Early Fathers II, 205), is hardly to be taken seriously today. Feltoe’s search for a linkage between Dionysius’ exegesis and that which Jerome condemns in Origen is rather too great a reach, even for a work published in 1904.
[454] Hanson sets out Basil’s Trinitarian use of hypostasis and ousia:
Basil’s most distinguished contribution toward the resolving of the dispute about the Christian doctrine of God was in his clarification of the vocabulary that had hitherto been used. He can on occasion use hypostasis as equivalent to ousia, to mean substance [citing instances]. But usually he distinguishes their use in Trinitarian contexts with care. He defines hypostasis as ‘that which presents and circumscribes that which is general and uncircumscribed within any object by means of the peculiarities which are manifested.’[citing an example] It is necessary to distinguish the hypostases within the Godhead. [citing an instance] But much more often Basil uses hypostasis to mean ‘Person of the Trinity’ as distinguished from ‘substance’ which is usually expressed as either ousia or ‘nature’ (physis) or substratum (ὑποκείμενον) [citing examples).
Hanson, Search, 690,
Further on we read:
He also has to explain that he does not intend to say (as certain Arians allege) that the Son is ‘homoousios in respect to his hypostasis, (as of course was the logical conclusion to be drawn from N). He may have given the false impression, he says, by trying to accommodate an explanation of doctrine to simpler souls.54
The true facts are that:that relation which the general has to the particular, such a relation has the ousia to the hypostasis.’55
54 Ep. 125, 214, 3.
55. Ibid., 214, 4. (691-92)
Hanson, Search, 691-92
This quotation eliminates any interpretation of Basil’s Trinitarian doctrine as Nicene: it places him firmly in the homoiousian dissent to the Nicene “homoousios” in favor of the Eusebian subordination, whose modification by Basil of Ancyra in 358 left the divinity of the Holy Spirit without support. Hansen, Search, confirms this in a return to this subject at 772-78. The hesitations of Basil of Caesarea over the homoousios of the Spirit remain the same as those of Basil of Ancyra, whose “homoios kat’ousian” (ὅμοιος κατ’οὐσίαν) is a univocal term, applicable solely to the Son.
A more basic issue in Basil of Caesarea’s hermeneutic is his postulate that the Trinitarian substance, whether Aristotelian ousia or Stoic hypokeimenon, subsists in three hypostases:
Basil insists that substance is distinct from hypostasis, and herefore it would be nonsensical or (more precisely) a confusion either of persons or of common and particular to maintain that the divine substance exists in no hypostasis. Rather, the undivided substance subsists in three hypostases.
David G. Robertson, “Stoic and Aristotelian Notions of Substance in Basil of Caesarea, Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 52, No. 4. (Nov., 1998), p. 396.
We have found the same notion used by Victorinus (Kelly, Doctrines, 271), and by Karl Rahner (Trinity, 35). Victorinus is a Neoplatonist; Rahner is an Aristotelian or perhaps, suo modo, a Thomist: caveat emptor. Neither shares Basil’s affinity with Stoicism and its logic, in which the ὑπόκειμένων is abstract, rather in the manner of the Aristotelian δεύτερος οὐσία, (second substance) until it is concretized, not in a species, but in a unique material entity. The Aristotelian first substance is generally identified, like the concretized Stoic hypokeimenon, with the indivdual concrete entity, but Aristotle’s De Anima leaves open the possibility of the application of ousia to the species, which possibility the Stoic metaphysics bars. But in all these cases, there is no question of the subsistence of substance, whether ousia or hypekeimenon, in anything at all, for it subsists of itself, per se, and otherwise does not subsist. Basil’s notion of the divine substance, whether Stoic or Aristotelian, subsisting in three hypostases is unintelligible. Its confusion rests, finally, upon the incoherence of his homoiousion background. Having rejected the Nicene Creed, the only coherent affirmation of the Trinity, Basil is confronted with the impossible task of providing for the possibility of the Trinity on subordinationist gronds, which do not permit the subsistence of Jesus in the Trinity, as implied in the Nicene Creed, defined by the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and by Symbol of Chalcedon. In the end, Basil’s affirmation of the divinity of the Holy Spirit can only be that of Hilary of Poitiers’s binitarianism. The homoiousian heresy permits no alternative. However, Simonetti, cited by A. Martin with approval, affirms Basil of Ancyra’s Trinitarianism:
Cependant, Basile d’Ancyre et Georges de Laodicée, defendant les trois hypostases, y inclaient pleinement le Saint-Esprit, ap. Epiphane, Haer., 73, 16, 2, comme le fait justement remarquer M. Simonetti.
Annik. Martin, Athanase, 550, n. 22,
Evidence of any mention, let alone any defense of the three hypostases by Basil of Ancyra is sadly lacking. George of Laodicea certainly upholds three hypostases in his Letter, but he was not present at the small council which Basil summoned early in 358, in which his Trinitarian doctrine was propounded; it defines the relation of the Son to the Father in subordinationist terms: homoios kat’ ousian, “a single concept of likeness,” which has no application to the Holy Spirit; see endnote 426, supra.
[455] Christian Cochini, S.J., has been assailed for this insolence: see endnote 688 infra.
[456] Feltoe, op. cit., 172, n. 2, and 194, n. 11, citing Harnack with approval. Similarly, Hanson, Search, 71; J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 134.
[457] See “Apostolic Tradition,” The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church; 3rd Ed. Revised), 92a-b. Its apparatus fails to include Marcel Richard’s serious questioning of the received opinion that Hippolytus is the author of this work, for its Greek is Alexandrine, while that of Hippolitus is not: see endnote 179, supra.
[458] Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth. From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. Translated by Adrian J. Walker (New York; London: Doubleday, 2007), at 41.
[459] J. N. D. Kelly’s Creeds, 205-331, supplemented by his Doctrines, passim, provide a concise history of the Council of Nicaea and of the vindication of the Nicene homoousios at the First Council of Constantinople; see also the treatments by Grillmeier in Christian Tradition I, 249-273, by Karl Baus in Church History, II “Part One: Chapters 1 & 2, esp. Chapter 2: “Origin and Course of the Arian Controversy to the eath of Constantine,” 1-31, and by Christopher Beeley in Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity, esp. 44-54 and 319ff. See also Christopher Stead, Divine Substance 1977) and Substance and Illusion in the Christian Fathers: ser. Collected Studies CS224 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1985). A major reliance throughout the present work has been Hanson’s monumental study, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God.
[460] See the map in Oxford Bible Atlas, Third Edition (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1984) [hereafter, Oxford Bible Atlas], The Eastern Mediterranean, at 96.
[461] Karl Baus, op. cit., Part One, Ch. 1, at 25-26; also Aloys Grillmeier, Christian Tradition, 260-61.
[462] Hanson, Search, 247.
[463] The Councils of Sirmium became notorious with the promulgation in 357 of an Arian creed, the so called (by Basil of Ancyra) “Blasphemy of Sirmium.” Germinius, the bishop of Sirmium, was a close associate of Constantius’ theological advisors, the Arian bishhops Valens, of Mursa, and Ursacius, of Singidunum. With them Germinius is a co-author of the homoean, i.e., Arian, creed issued by the Council which in 357 met at Sirmium, where Constantius resided when absent from Constantinople.
[464] See Hanson’s very careful analysis of Basil of Ancyra’s explanation of the “single concept of likeness” in Search, 352-53. In the first place, Basil held it to be necessary to distinguish the relation of the Son to the Father from the relation of a creature to the Father. He went on to assert a similarity of substance indissociable from the Father-Son relation, purged of all that smacks of finitude. Thus understood, the Father-Son distinction vanishes, and the homoios kat’ ousian becomes a Sabellian identity of substance as opposed to a subordinationism. Eusebius of Caesarea had posed the same alternative and opted, as Basil of Ancyra would, for the aforesaid homoios kat’ ousian (similarity according to substance) which, once acquitted of Sabellianism, could not avoid subordinationism.
[465] Hanson, Search, at 358. Here and on the pages following Hanson provides a detailed discussion of the signing by Pope Liberius of a document which has placed in issue the doctrine of papal infallibility. He finds the evidence inconclusive:
The matter must be left open. But there can be no doubt that Liberius condemned Athanasius and signed a formula which his pre-Nicene contemporaries unanimously regarded as unorthodox.
Hanson, Search, at 362. See also T. D. Barnes, “The capitulation of Liberius and Hilary of Poitiers,” From Eusebius to Augustine: Selected Papers, 1982-1993: Variorum Collected Studies Series; CS 438 (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Aldershot, Great Britain, & Brookfield, Vermont, 1994), XVII.
[466] Hanson concludes his discussion of the significance of the homoiousian doctrine in these words:
This important document of the Homoiousian party, along with Basil’s statement listed after the Council of Ancyra in 358, makes it clear that when the Cappadocian theologians began their work of theological construction which was to resolve the Arian controversy; the foundation had already been laid by the Homoiousians. It was by no coincidence that the early associates of Basil of Caesarea were already of this persuasion. The tradition of Trinitarian theology which was destined ultimately to prevail already existed in at least rudimentary form in the minds of Basil of Ancyra and his associates. Some of the vocabulary had already been fixed and the basic structure of their Trinitarian thought was well on the way to being formed. But we must observe that Basil and George (of Laodicaea) were still implicit believers in the subordination of the Son to the Father in a way which we cannot attribute to the Cappadocians. Basil of Caesarea and the two Gregories had still to make important advances of their own.
Hanson, Search, 370-71.
Hanson’s admission of the evident subordinationism underlying the homoiousion doctrine is impossible to reconcile with his assertion that: “The tradition of Trinitarian theology which was destined ultimately to prevail already existed in at least rudimentary form in the minds of Basil of Ancyra and his associates.”
The homoiousian doctrine of “The Third Creed of Sirmium,” composed by Basil of Ancyra in 358, applied “homoiousios” exclusively to the relation of the Son to the Father. The bishop of Ancyra understood its meaning to be Personal solely to the Son, and, in that sense, to be univocal, with the consequence that it could not be applied to the Holy Spirit without abandoning the “single concept of likeness,” homoios kat’ousian, by which alone Basil’s theology understood the Son’s divinity to be sustainable. The document issued by the minor ‘council’ which he called in 358 was not at all concerned with the divinity of the Holy Spirit, for the “single concept of likeness” rested entirely on the Father-Son relation; as a Eusebian and subordinationist, no relation other than that between the creator and the creature was conceivable to him. Were “homoiousios” to be applied to the Holy Spirit as well, its meaning would cease to be single and thus cease to be Personal, and so, in Basil’s view, the “single concept of likeness” would become indistinguishable from the Nicene “homoousion;” whereby, given Basil’s materialist understanding of “homoiousios,” it would denote either a Sabellian merger of the Son with the Father, or a material division of the Godhead. Cf. Sozomen’s commentary on this point, cited by Hanson, Search, at 356, remarking that for the homoiousians only material substances could be consubstantial, as members of the same category, whether species or hypekeimenon. whereas spiritual substances, being personal, could not..
There can be no doubt whatever that the attribution of a “Cappadocian Development” of Trinitarian theology under the leadershiop of Basil of Caesarea has no foundation. A “Cappadocian Development” assumes a doctrinal comity between Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzen which had ceased to exist well before Basil’s 38th Letter (dated 369-370 by Courtonne).
Basil and Gregory had been acquainted from their youth, when they entered upon primary and secondary studies in Cappadocia.. , and became close friends during the ten years when both were students at Athens. Nearly of the same age, they belonged to the same wealthy and privileged social stratum; they shared the same spiritual bent toward monasticism. Their personalities were quite different. Gregory was the better scholar; Norris reports that he was offered a faculty position when he completed his studies in Athens, this five years after Basil had returned to Cappadocia. Gregory did not reject the honor, for he taught for some time , doubtless because of its incompatibility with his monastic vocation.
It is not easy to date Gregory of Nazianzen’s rejection of Basil’s subordinationism, as Beeley, in Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity, has shown. Beeley’s analysis is confirmed by F. W. Norris, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: Introduction, 1-53, In the first place, many of the pro-Nicene statements of Gregory of Nazianzen were made during his two years of residence in Constantinople, from 379 to 381, during which time he was intent upon persuading the anti-Arian minority of the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit; he had thus occupied in Cappadocia since 372, as the recognized leader of the neo-Nicene movement to that goal. After Theodosius summoned the Council of Chalcedon in 381, when Gregory had been elected to succeed Melitius as the president of the Council, he came under fire from Alexandrine bishops who challenged his presence in Constantinople as in violation of Canon 15 of the Council of Nicaea forbidding a bishops moving from one See to another. Knowing the debate to be useless, he resigned his presidency of the Council, and his appointment to the See of Constantinople by Emperor Theodosius, and returned to the parish church in Natianzus.
Gregory’s praise of Athanasius (rests solely on the latter’s Letter to Jovian; he appears to have read nothing else of Athanasius’ works.
Gregory’s relation to Basil of Caesarea began with their studying together in Cappodocia, then in Caesarea and Alexandria. Years later, ca 350, they met again in Athens, where they spent most of a decade together studying the Greek rhetorical tradition and its largely Platonic philosophical counterpart, Basil finished his studies and left Athens well before Gregory; he taught rhetoric briefly in Caesarea in 360. Norris, op. cit., at 5, note 29, citing Gregory’s autobiography, reorts that at the conclusion of his studies, he was offered a prestigioous faculty position in the Academy (but see McGuckin, Gregory of Nazianzus, at 87: “Having lost his cnance of a golden Chair in Athens . . . .” Inasmuch as he taught there briefly, he appears to have accepted, but only for a short time: he returned to In any case he returned to Cappadocia in 360 to be baptized by his father. There he resumed his friendly association with Basil, who in 359 was already a deacon (Hanson, Search, 381; McGuckin does not mention this), which was hardly consistent with his commintment to monasticism. In any event, their friendship soon began to show strains. When living together, they soon became impatient with each other. Here Gregory presents an enigma. He wished to be let alone to live an untroubled, studious, monastic existence; at the same time, he was not by nature a solitary; he relied on his friendship with Basil, perhaps to excess; McGuckin notes that he loved Basil more than Basil loved him (op. cit., at 203). Basil had a much more independent and even agressive personality; he lacked Gregory’s need for friendship. Gregory’s rather vacillating, even timid personality, contrasted sharply with Basil’s. Basil needed to control whatever situation in which he found himself, and was entirely capable of using his friends and acquaintances to further that ambition. He was a born leader; disciples gathered around him spontaneouslywherever he settled; a group of monks joined him at Annesi, a remnant of the family estate where after returning from a pilgrimage to cenobitic centers in Egypt and expending his heritage for the benefit of the poor, Basil chose to settle. The submitted themselves to his oversight. and submitted themselves to his oversight. Gregory joined him there some years later, when they drew up the summary of Origen’s theology called the Philocalia, and drew up the two sets of Rules for cenobitic monks; these entered into the canon law of the Eastern Church.
He was a born leader; he drew disciples wherever he settled; a group of monks gathered around him at Annesi, a part if the family estate where after returning from a pilgrimage to cenobitic centers in Egypt and expending his heritage for the benefit of the poor, Basil chose to settle. , and submitted themselves to his oversight. Gregory joined him there and apparently worked with him to compose the Philocalia, and to assist Basil in drawing up two sets of rules for cenobitic monks; these would become normative in the Eastern Church (but see Norris, op. cit., 6, note 31, citing Marguerite Harl, who finds slight evidence for associating Basil and Gregory with the writing of the Philocalia). Within a few months of his return to Cappadocia Basil sold his estate and with the proceeds established several monasteries, hospitals, and other facilities for the benefit of the poor.
But Gregory was incapable of subordination to anyone, even Basil after became his local ordinary, which made a peaceful association between them difficult. Basil’s extraordinary pastoral activity had caught the attention of the bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius, who persuaded Basil to become a priest, and ordained him in 374. Basil soon become very nearly the voice of his bishop. When Eusebius died in 370, Basil succeeded him as the bishop of Caesarea, and thereby the Metropolitan of Cappodocia, albeit not without controversy. Gregory, after after an intial disillusionment caused by Basil’s volte-face from devotion to the monastic life to a sudden desire for the episcopacy, Gregory and his father gave hi loyal and effective support.
In 371, a year after Basil had become the Bishop of Caesarea, the metropolitan of the province of Cappodocia, the Emperor Valens decided to divide the Province of Cappadocia into Cappadocia Prima (in which Basil’s city of Caesarea was located) and Cappadocia Secunda, (in which its largest city, Tyana, was the See of Basil’s suffragan bishop, Anthimos of Tyana. Anthimos considered himself delivered by this division from Basil’s oversight, and went on to assert and exercise an independent episcopal jurisdiction over Tyana, the largest city in Cappadocia Secunda. Caesarea and Tyana were the only cities in Cappadocia large enough to be considerd for metropolitan standing (McGuckin, Gregory of Nazianzus, 187). This division, at once political and ecclesial, halved Basil’s jurisdiction. He took steps to counteract the loss by appointing his brother Gregory to the newly designated episcopal city of Nyssa, and decided also to designate as an episcopal See the tiny village of Sasima in Cappadocia Scunda. without consulting him he appointed Gregory of Nazianzen to be its bishop and appointed other suffragan bishops in Cappadocia Secunda in a similar challenge to Anthimos’ presumption of episcopal authority. Gregory was appalled by his appointment to Sasima,, and bitterly resisted it, but finally was prevailed upon to accept it, though he never ceased to resent the insult he knew it represented. Basil looked upom Sasima as a strategic outpost in Cappadocia Secunda from which valuable intelligence might be gathered to counter Anthimos’ wiles. Gregory refused even to visit Sasima, for any attempt to exercise his authority as its bishop would immediately involve him in open warfare with Anthimos, to whom he felt no animosity (see McGuckin, Gregory of Nazianzus, 197-203). Basil nonetheless arranged a formal and quite high-handed entry into Sasima to celebrate Gregory’s installation as its bishop, deliberately ignoring Anthimos, who forestalled it with violence; Gregory’s installation was postponed to another day.
The event did give Gregory an opportunity to assume the leadership of a burgeoning “neo-Nicene” drive to recognize the Personal consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit to be integral with the faith of the Church. Harnack’s description as “Neo-Nicene” of the attempt by Miletus of Antioch to meld the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousios of the Son with the Father, with the homoiousian compromise with the Arian homoenism of the 357 Council of Sirmium, has imposed an ambiguity on “neo-Nicene” to the confusion of our understanding of Gregory’s campaign to teach the Personal consubstiality of the Holy Spirit sixteen centuries before Harnack’s error muddied the waters.
McGuckin understands Gregory’s assertion of neo-Nicene leadership to have brushed aside whatever title or ambition Basil had to be himself the leader of the “neo-Nicene” party. This event,in 371 is the first indication of the growing doctrinal breach between them. Basil’s version of the neo-Nicene doctrine waited upon the publication of his De Spiritu Sancto in 375. That work did not include the Personal divinity, the consubstantiality, of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. (McGuckin, Gregory of Nazianzus, 218). Between the winter and spring of 372-373, while occupying the parish church which his father had built, and which upon his father’s death in 374 he would inherited as his personal property, Gregory preached four episcopal orations in which he resumed the traditional role of the bishop as mystogogue, the authoritative voice of the Holy Spirit addressed to his flock. This was a public expression of his leadership of the neo-Nicene drive to identify the homoousion of the Holy Spirit with the faith of the Church. Athanasius had understood the Church’s faith in the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit to be included in the Nicene Creed’s “and the Holy Spirit” (καὶ εἰς τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμα) Cf. A. Martin, Athanase, 557. However, the binitarian implication of the homoiousian subordinationism had put in issue the meaning of the “treis hypostaseis,” as Athansius’ Tome to the Antiochenes had noted.
Gregory had already been consecrated a bishop by Basil’s appointment of him to Sassima, but Gregory had never taken possession of this village, and considered his appointment to it a nullity, as also he considered also his consecration by Basil as a bishop. He regarded himself as a monk, not as a cleric under the authority of a hierarchical superior, even Basil’s.
Basil was not the only difficulty with which Gregory had to contend. Gregory’s father, Gregory the elder, had long been the bishop of the town of Nazianzus. He had built the parish church at his own expense, with the result that it was far more impressive than otherwise it would have been He had baptized Gregory there upon his return from Athens in 360, but had since grown old, and his parish was in difficulties. He badly needed his Gregory to accept ordination and assist him in his old age, but. Gregory did want to be a priest and fled that prospect and his father’s parish for the next ten months, living the while with Basil in Annesi. While there Basil persuaded him to return and accept his clear responsibility to assist his father at Nazianzus. In 362 accepted ordination to the priesthood by his father, and undertook the priestly service of the diocese of Nazianzus. His services were needed; his father had been accused by local monks of teaching heresy; in his eyes, this was no small aggravation, for he was already ill and needed to retire. Gregory served his father as a priest until he died in 374. Upon his death, Gregory refused the desire of local bishops and laity that he succeed his father as bishop of Nazianzus. Instead he appointed to this office his cousin, Eulalius, who had been an adjunct bishop of Nazianzus before Gregory’s return to Nazianzus; he had served the diocese for years. Gregory chose him to succeed to the See of Nazianzus.
Helladius of Caesarea, who had succeeded Basil in that See in 381, in that capacity challenged the election of Eulalius as invalid and charged with heresy a priest, Bosporius of Colonia in Cappadocia Secunda, he had been conspicuous in support of the election of Eulalius. Gregory defended Eulalius with vigor in his Letter CLXXXIII, nominally addressed to the bishop who had become his friend, Theodore ot Tyana, the successor of Anthimus whom Norris, op. cit., 7, mistakenly describes as Arian. Theodore, together with Amphilocius, had accompanied Gregory to Constantinople in 379. When the Council which met at Parnassus in 383 to try Bosporius, Gregory was ill, unable to attend, and asked his cousin Amphilocius to defend Bosporius in his stead. Helladius was unable to overcome Amphilocius’ defense of Bosporius orthodoxy, and dropped the attempt. He died in 387. Long before succeeding Basil to the See of Caesarea, Helladius he had been a trouble-maker as a bishop, particularly inimical to Gregory of Nyssa and to Gregory of Nazianaen. His attack on Bosporius was quite in character: see Re-reading Gregory of Nazianzus: essays on history, theology, and culture; ser. Catholic University of America Studies in E●●arly Christology (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2012) edited by Christopher Beeley, pp. 162ff.
The courteous communication between Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea did not break down until early in 372, when Gregory wrote his Letter 48 to Basil, evidently in reply to letters from Basil which are now lost.. For the text of the letter, see Brian E Daley, Gregory of Nazianzen; ser. The Early Church Fathers 15 (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York: 2006), p. 176. The Letter to Basil is an angry letter, as its opening sentences make clear.
Do leave off speaking of me as an ill-educated and uncouth and unfriendly man, not even worthy to live, because I have ventured to be conscious of the way in which I have been treated. You yourself would admit that I have not done wrong in any other respect, and my own conscience does not reproach me with having been unkind to you in either great or small matters; and I hope it never may. I only know that I saw that I had been deceived - too late indeed, but I saw it - and I throw the blame on your throne, as having on a sudden lifted you above yourself; and I am weary of being blamed for faults of yours, and of having to make excuses for them to people who know both our former and our present relations. For of all that I have to endure this is the most ridiculous or most pitiable thing, that the same person should have both to suffer the wrong and to bear the blame, and this is my present case.
Its further exegesis requires an acquaintance with the doctrinal tension which had been developing between since Basil’s succeeding to the See of Caesarea. It had been sparked by Basil’s famous encounter with the emperor Valens; see endnote 474, infra. Basil was a homoiousian and a long-time friend of Miletus of Antioch who in 363 called a Council endorsing the Nicene homoousion of the Son by way of assimilating it to the homoiousian subordinationism to which Basil subscribed. In Letter 48, Gregory made clear his impatience with Basil’s equivocation over the divinity of the Holy Spirit;
it was evident that he could make no contribution to a “Cappadocian Settlement” in the sense of a doctrine of the Holy Spirit inspired by Basil. After succeeding to Meletius’ presidency of the First Council of Constntinople, Gregory attempted to to persuade the homoiousian faction, led by Gregory of Nyssa and Diodore of Tarsus, to accept the homoousion of the Holy Spirit, but failed to do so. Loyal to Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto, neither Gregory nor Diodore could accept the Personal homoousion of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son..
The binitarian subordinationism common to the bishops who had met in council with Basil at Ancyra in 358, notably Macedonius of Constantinople, Eugenius of Nicaea, and Eustathius of Sebaste, would finally lead their left wing, the “Spirit-fighters,” to reject the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Eusebius of Caesarea’s subordinationism required the Sabelliian interpretation of the Nicene homoousios; so also, as his disciples, had the homoiousians, as well as the more clearly Arian “homoean” bishops who had produced the “blasphemy of Sirmium” in 357. The homoiousian inability to account for, and so to recognize, the divinity of the Holy Spirit prompted the “Macedonans” or “Spirit fighters” to reduce the Holy Spirit to the status of a creature, as Arius had reduced the Son. Their doctrine was condemned by the First Council of Constantinple on the basis of the Nicene Creed, which had by implication at least defined the Spirit’s full divinity by including the Holy Spirit within the object of the Church’s worship. The binitarian doctrine of the homoiousians,which affirmed the divinity ot the Holy Spirit, remained binitarian by failing to recognize the Holy Spirit’s divinity to include a hypostatic, i.e., Personal, distinction from the Father and the Son. The logic of their rejection of the Nicene Creed was Eusebian; it could not but find entirely irrational the Creed’s inclusion of the Holy Spirit within the object of the faith of the Church as distinct from the Father and the Son Hanson, in Search, devotes ten pages, 762-72, to their doctrine, unquestionably implicit in Basil’s “single concept of likeness. See also Annick Martin’s summary of their theology in Athanase, at 533.
No theological rationale yet existed adequate to this defined doctrine of the divinity of the Spirit, in the sense of rendering the Trinitarian faith of the Church theologically discussable. A. Martin, Athanase, at 549-50, and Hanson, Search, at 753, have remarked upon Athanasius’ conviction that the divinity of the Spirit was affirmed in the Nicene inclusion of the Holy Spirit in the Trinitarian object of the Church’s faith. This conviction was set out with clarity in the Tome to the Antiochenes; it makes no concession to the homoiousian reading of the “three hypostases;” Athanasius knew it to be incompatible with the Nicene doctrine of the substantial unity of the Trinity.
Basil of Caesarea, in his Ninth Letter, doubtfully influenced by Apollinarius, expressed a qualified preference for “homoousios” to the alternative “homoiousios,” The reason given for the preference was its supposed clarification of the “homoiousion” of the Son by making it to be eternal, evidence that he did not then understand these terms to be mutually exclusive, as Nicaea and Athanasius did.
It is further clear that Basil did not then (ca. 330-331) recognize, in the Nicene definition of the “homoousios” of the Son with the Father, its corollary: the flat rejection of subordinationism. Fifteen years later, in the De Spiritu Sancto, Basil would affirm the divinity of the Holy Spirit, (whom he does not call ‘God,’) while also failing to attribute that divinity to the Holy Spirit’s consubstantiality with the Father and the Son. This leaves Basil’s attribution of divinity to the Holy Spirit unexplained other than as a binitarian identification of the Holy Spirit with the impersonal divine substance. There is no evidence that Basil ever fully grasped the radical rejection of the Eusebian subordinationism inseparable from the Nicene homoousios, and the weight of evidence puts it in doubt. After the death of Athanasius in 373, Basil would persuade the majority of the homoiousion party of Meletius to defend the doctrine of Nicaea, but his close epistolary association with Meletius, his approval of Meletius’ fusion of “homoousios” and “homoiousios” at the Synod of Antioch in 363 and thereafter his persecution of the pro-Nicene Eustathian party in Antioch as Sabellian, clarifies his interpretation of the Nicene homoousios: it is interchangeable with the homoiousios. His Ninth Letter, written in 361 0r 362 (Courtonne I, 37), well before the Synod of Antioch, understood the Nicene homoousion to be in essential conformity with the homoiousian doctrine, homoios kat’ousian, asserting the Son’s similarity in being to the Father. This similarity would be taught by the Synod of Antioch in 363, and signed by Acacius, a warrantable Arian, despite its affirmation of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which was to be defined at I Constantinople without the affirmation of the Holy Spirit’s homoousion with the Father, for which Gregory of Nazianzen had struggled,
The followers of Paulinus rejected Meletius’ Synod of Antioch as Arian, while the anti-Nicene homoiousians supported its melding of the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homousion of the Son with the Father, with their homoiousian doctrine of the Son’s substantial similarity to the Father: homoios kat’ousian. Their acceptance of this absurdity ended Athanasius’ hopes for ecclesial communion with them. Despite Basil’s repeated solicitation, Athanasius never accepted communion with Meletius, nor did Pope Damasus approve Basil’s selection of Meletius as a center of orthodoxy around whom the Orient might unite union with Rome. Basil’s effort to negotiate a doctrinal unity were doomed from the outset, as had been Hilary’s before him. He died in 379, well before the First Council of Constantinople met in 381.
The surviving Cappadocians, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzen, were incapable of agreement upon a ”Cappadocian Settlement.” The application of the Nicene homoousion to the Holy Spirit had become inescapable with the affirmation of his Personal divinity in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which incorporated the Nicene Creed. Gregory of Nazianzen had long upheld the homoousion of the Holy Spirit, perhaps influenced by Athanasius, while Gregory of Nyssa opposed it at I Constantinople, and retained thereafter his elder brother’s abstract concept of the Trinity The Cappadocian development of Trinitarian doctrine was the achievement of Gregory of Nazianzen, who, alone among them, had accepted the Nicene definition of the substantial unity of the Trinity, and the consequent consubstantial subsistences of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, as Origen had taught: see Crouzel, Origen, at 200:
[467] Hanson, Search, at 375-76, citing Athanasius’ De synodis, which evidently was written in 361, two years after the Council of Seleucia. By that time, Athanasius had heard from the few pro-Nicene Egyptian bishops who had attended it and there found themselves in an ad hoc alliance with the Alexandrine (schismatic Melitian) homoiousians against the Arian homoeans. Athanasius saw in this momentary and limited concord the possibility of a full doctrinal reconciliation based upon the conversion of the anti-Arian homoiousians in Antioch to the Nicene Creed; to this end he called the Council of Alexandria immediately upon his return from exile to Alexandria early in 362. They read his Tome to the Antiochenes as a political document inviting their subordination and of course refused They were unable to conceive of a free Christian Church which the emperor could not control. They were not the first so to conceive the relation of the Church to the potestas regalis nor, as lately is all to clear, the last.
[468] The devices by which the bishops at Rimini were persuaded to sign Constantius’ homoean formula are summarized by D. H. Williams in the course of his reply to a review of his Ambrose of Milan and the end of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995):
There is a mixed record among the ancient sources about the primary factors which caused the bishops at Ariminum to accept the final version of that council's homoean creed. Sulpicius Severus emphasizes the political coercion levied by the presence of the praetorian prefect Taurus (Chron. II.41), whereas Jerome testifies to the infamous success of Valens' theological deception (Adv Lucif. 18-19). I argue that both factors are true, but that the matter of fraus is the point most emphasized in the documents written soon after the council as in the letter from the synod of Paris (Ambrose, 30-31). But a key feature about the conclusion of the council which Kaufman's review completely overlooks is that it ended in ostensible unity, as Jerome reports, "everyone returned with gladness to their own provinces" (echoed in Augustine, Contra Maximinum II.3). Even "diehard" pro-Nicenes, such as Phoebadius of Agen, caved in to Valens' machinations on the understanding that orthodoxy was being preserved by the new homoean creed. Only afterwards was the fraus perpetrated at the council exposed for what it was and deeply regretted by most of the attending bishops.
D. H. Williams, “Politically Correct In Milan: A Reply To "Diehard Homoeans And The Election Of Ambrose",” Journal of Early Christian Studies 53 (1997) 441-446, at 442.
[469] Annick Martin, Athanase, at 550, n. 22, asserts and defends a homoiousian affirmation of the divinity of the three hypostases, and thus the homoiousian acceptance of the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit, citing Basil of Ancyra and George of Laodicea. We have seen this to have been Hanson’s view as well, but it is put in doubt by his later commentary: Search, 788, n. 269. The Letter of George of Laodicea, who had not been present at the Council of Ancyra, clearly affirms the divinity of the Spirit. However, the affirmation in his Letter of the distinct, i.e., Personal, subsistence of the Holy Spirit finds no counterpart in Basil’s record of that council, whose theology knows only one principle supportive of a divine subsistence distinct from the Father’s: viz., the unique homoiousion of the Son qua Son, homoios kat’ousian, which can have no application to the Spirit. This carries an inescapable implication of binitarianism. The ‘Macedonian’ denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, prompted by by Eustathius of Sebaste, is merely the recognition and acceptance of that implication. The inability of the homoiousian theology to provide for the hypostatic distinction of the Spirit led Hilary of Poitiers simply to identify the Holy Spirit with the Godhead. The homoiousian doctrine taught him by his mentor, Basil of Ancyra, had foreclosed any alternative, and Hilary never found one necessary. However, in the De synodis, in the Tome to the Antiochenes, and in his Letter to Jovian, Athanasius recognized in the homoiousion party in Antioch at least an approach to the faith of Nicaea, as A. Martin has shown. He did not lump them with the Arian homoeanism favored by Constantius and by imposed by him on the Empire at the Council of Constantinople in 360. Melitius, the exiled bishop of Antioch, briefly returned to Antioch in 362, had accepted the imperial homoeanism, but he was soon seen by Constantius to have recanted: this in a homily preached before the emperor, that smacked of homoiousianism, for which Constantius briefly him.
It appears that George of Laodicaea’s Letter, which ignores the unique application of homoios kat’ousian to the Son, together with its binitarian implication, expresses the faith of the homoiousian party after the Council of Constantinople, when that party affirmed the impersonal divinity of the Holy Spirit. Basil of Ancyra’s personal influence had ceased with his deposition and exile in 360. He ded in 362 or 363, after the Julian’s succession to the throne 361. He is among the Christians martyred by Julian during his brief reign. Nonetheless, the homoiousians persisted in their uncritical association of the Nicene homoousion with their own ultimately subordinationist homoiousion doctrine, as is evident in the refusal by Basil the Great to admit the homoousion of the Holy Spirit in his De Spiritu Sancto. This, had its echo even in the First Council of Constantinople, whose doctrine concerning the Holy Spirit is limited to the simple assertion of his divinity. The efforts of Gregory of Nazianzen, while President of the Council, to persuade its members to affirm the homoousion of the Holy Spirit failed to override the influence of Basil, lately dead, but still effective in the presence at the Council of his brother Gregory of Nyssa, in alliance with Diodore of Tours. Their refussal to admit the Nicene doctrine of the Personal consubstantiality of the Spirit with the Father undercut any possibility of their contributing to a “Cappadocian Settlement,” i.e., an assertion of a Trinitarian faith compatible with the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
[470] Basil's use of "prosōpon" is disputed; see endnote 776, supra.
[471] Hanson, Search, devotes a section, pp. 436-59, of its second chapter, "The Early Supporters of Arius," to Eusebius of Caesarea, whose Christology, apart from the clear subordination of the Son to the Father, is at best unreflective, not least with respect to whether or not Jesus' humanity is ensouled. Eusebius does not appear to have recognized the problems inherent in this cosmologically-posed question, which had been refused by the Council of Nicaea by reason of the conciliar focus upon Jesus the Christ, whose historical human Name barred Eusebius’ cosmological concern for its prior possibility. Hanson oberves that in Eusebius’ time few had yet voiced that concern. Eustathius of Antioch might appear to be an exception had he not been a major voice at Nicaea and a bitter critic of Eusebius at the Council of Antioch early in 325, and again at the Council of Nicaea. In the event, from about 336 Eusebius and his Arian allies ignored idiosyncratic assertion by Eustathius of the humanity of Christ the better to pursue the “Sabellianism” they supposed to be implicit in his witness to the Nicene Creed.
[472] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 159, thinks likely that much of the Christology attributed to Malchion is taken from fragments of Apollinarius. The similarity is evident, but Malchion belongs to the third century, not the latter half of the fourth, and faced quite different questions: cf. endnote 438, supra.
[473] Jovian’s brief reign is of permanent interest due to his correspondence with Athanasius, from whom Jovian sought an account of his faith, prompting the latter’s Letter to Jovian (P. G. 26: 813-20) which A. Martin, Athanase, at 582, thinks to constitute “un document capital pour comprendre le schisme d’Antioch et la nature des relations – sil’on peut ainsi parler – entre Mélèce et Athanase.” Athanasius later referred to Jovian's response (P. G. 26: 813A1-4), which confirmed Athanasius' exercise of episcopal authority over the See of Alexandria, as an “imperial warrant” for his governance of the See of Alexandria (Annick Martin, Athanase, 573, n. 108 574, n. 113).
[474] Thus Hanson, Search, at 696, basing his opinion of the correspondence between Basil of Caesarea and Apollinarius, concludes that Apollinarius persuaded Basil of the correctness of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son, and so led him to drop his previous adherence to homoiousion doctrine of Basil of Ancyra. Sed contra,: see A. Martin, Athanase, at. 578, n. 130, who points out that the authenticity of the Apollinarius-Basil of Caesarea correspondence is still undecided. In any case, although Apollinarius was affirmed the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son, Basil did not, as is evident from his endorsement of the decision by Meletius at his Council of Antioch (363) to equate it with the homoiousion; see Basil’s Letter 57, written eight years after that council. Although they had not yet met, in this letter Basil lavishes praise upon Meletius’ wisdom and sanctity; Courtonne, Lettres I, Lettre LVII, at 144-5.
Apollinarius' developed Christology appears to to have understood the Nicene doctrine of the Personal homoousion of the Son with the Father to have only an “immanent Trinitarian” application, inasmuch as the role given the Son in that Christology has precisely the subordinationist consequence which its Antiochene critics observed. In making the “immanent” Son to be the hegemonikon or governing principle of a theanthropic physis constituted by his composition with the “flesh,” the Son is inevitably submitted to the immanent cosmological necessities inseparable from physis and so ceases to be divine. Correlatively, with the Son’s displacement of his soul, Jesus’ humanity ceases to be human. The delegates of Paulinus, the leader of the Eustathian remnant in Antioch, raised this point at the Council of Alexandria; cf. Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 349, who considers their efforts insufficient, but on grounds amounting to a petitio principii.
[475] Basil of Caesarea’s famous defiance of the Arian Emperor Valens ca 371 may appear to present an exception. It is much admired; e.g., by Hanson, who often describes Basil as pro-Nicene, as in Search, at 681. The reality is rather different. Valens did not find in Basil another Athanasius, another implacable obstacle to his exercise of an imperial dominion over the Christians in his empire. Valens divided the Christians between the Nicenes who condemned his Arianism and consequently denied his imperial authority, and the Eusebians who had condemned the decrees and denied the authority of the Council of Nicaea, and in consequence must look finally to the emperor for ecclesial unity. Valens pursued the Nicenes relentlessly, and not least Athanasius, while of course leaving untroubled the Arians, as well as those others who also rejected the Nicene doctrine, among them the homoiousion followers of Basil of Ancyra, including Basil of Caesarea. Athanasius understood their homoiousian doctrine: quite simply, he knew that the single alternative to the Nicene homoousios is the Eunomian heteroousios. The homoiousian rejection of the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea meant that they chose instead to look to the Emperor for the resolution of their intra-ecclesial disputes, seeking political decisions from the imperial potestas regalis rather than the doctrinal decisions warranted by the auctoritas sacrata, i.e., the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea, whose condemnation of Arianism Athanasius had always upheld and upon which he relied. Basil’s Eusebian interpretation of the Nicene "homoousios" was simply an affirmation of Valens’ imperial authority. Those Christians who denied the authority of the Council of Nicaea were not Valens’ enemies: they were subject to his discipline, as he had reminded Basil, but their existence did not threaten the religio-political unity of his empire, and therefore he did not persecute them. Athanasius was quite another matter, having rejected Valens’ ecclesial authority, he was a traitor to the realm, and was to be persecuted as such.
Basil of Caesarea's homoiousian background, whether the cause or the product of his long-term friendship with Meletius of Antioch (Hanson, Search, at 682), enlisted him in an anti-Nicene posture for all his adult life. Having never understood the Nicene definition of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father to be rooted in that touchstone of Nicene orthodoxy, the substantial unity, mia hypostasis, mia ousia, of the Trinitarian deitas, the Trinitarian Godhead, he could not accept the orthodoxy of the Eustathians in Antioch, which he well knew Athanasius to have affirmed long since. Neither could Basil understand Athanasius’ resistance, which Pope Damasus endorsed, to his own political choice of Meletius as a prospective center and defender of orthodoxy. Lucifer of Cagliari’s consecration of Paulinus as a bishop in 362 had made Paulinus an adversary of Meletius’ exercise of authority over the See of Antioch. Meletius’ responded by asserting his episcopal authority over Antioch. He called a Council of Antioch in 363, where he affirmed Basil’s homoiousian interpretation of the Nicene homoousion. In Basil’s eyes, Meletius’ decisive action vested in him an authority around whom the anti-Arian Antiochenes might unite, once the intransigency of the Eustathian minority in Antioch had been suppressed as Sabellian. In thus condemning the Eustathians’s long-tested loyalty to the Council of Nicaea, Basil had accepted their indictment by Eusebius of Caesarea thirty years earlier. Eusebius’s cosmological commitment to anti-Trinitarian subordinationism barred any interpretation other than as Sabellian of Eustathius’ vigorous support of the Nicene mia ousia, the substantial unity of the Trinity. It was thus that Eusebius had read the Nicene Creed, and to this he had thereafter persuaded the bulk of the Oriental bishops to agree, not so much as impressed by his doubtful theological competence as pleased by his provision of an alternative, viz., the plenary political authority of the emperor, to the ecclesial authority of Council of Nicaea.
Basil’s hope to persuade Athanasius to subscribe to this prospect of a negotiated pax ecclesiae lacked all foundation. Athanasius had never considered the faith of the Church to be open to negotiation. His view of Meletius as ultimately an Arian had been confirmed by his melding of the Nicene homoiousian with the Eusebian homoiousion at a council attended by Acacius, Athanasius’ ancient enemy. Athanasius had no longer anything to discuss with Basil.
Basil presupposed his own orthodoxy; he was not given to self-scrutiny, still less to self-doubt. He shared the doctrinal confusion of Hilary of Poitiers, who also had never seen a significant difference between the Nicene definition of the Personal homoousion of the Son, and the substantial homoiousion taught by Basil of Ancyra. Thus, while Basil’s bland assertion of his episcopal dignity may have angered Valens, it could not alarm him. Valens’ decision in 372 to divide the Province of Cappadocia into the two Provinces of Cappadocia Prima and Cappadocia Secunda halved the area of Basil’s diocese, which had been the entire Province of Cappadocia, whose metropolitan See had been Caesarea. Valens may have had no thought of disciplining him; there was already an ample raison d’état for the division. Certainly the division of Cappadocia disturbed Basil, for the halving of the area of his diocese also halved not only the range of his episcopal authority, but also diminished its weight, but there is no reason to think that Valens intended to punish him. However, the effect of the political division was also ecclesial. Basil’s suffragan, Bishop Anthimus of Tyana, refused to recognize Basil’s metropolitan authority over the new Province, Cappadocia Secunda, reasoning that ecclesiastical divisions, i.e., dioceses, are controlled by political divisions, leaving Anthimus, the bishop Bishop of Tyana, the leading city of Cappadocia Secunda, with a claim, under at least the color of law, to metropolitam authority over Cappadocia Secunda. His own suffragans were quite willing to free themselves from Basil’s oversight.
Basil responded to this situation by creating new dioceses within his Province of Cappadocia Prima. He appointed his brother Gregory to the new See of Nyssa, and appointed Gregory of Nazianzen to another See which he had created, the town of Sasima, which had a strategic location near the border of Cappadocia Secunda, but was of no ecclesial significance. Gregory of Nazianzen simply refused the appointment, although its canonical reality haunted him thereafter, since the Nicene canons forbade his becoming the bishop of any other See. This broke their friendship, which had been under considerable strain since Basil had abandoned his commitment (which was also d Gregory’s) to the philosophical life, and had gone so far as to seek the support of Gregory and his father, the Bishop of Nazianzen, in his campaign to become the bishop of Caesarea, much to Gregory’s disgust.
●●●
Athanasius’ outright rejection of Valens’ imperial authority over the Church made him at least an enemy of the emperor and in the last analysis his rival, for the imperial authority was in principle universal and indivisible, intolerant of any unprivileged exercise of personal responsibility. The epochal assertion by Pope Gelasius I that “there are two by which the world is ruled” was more than a century in the future. For forty-five crucial years Athanasius held the fort: his unwavering resistance to imperial assertions of authority over the Church, a resistance underwritten by every martyr since the first imperial persecution under Nero to the last under Valens, makes his exercise of episcopal authority and responsibility a model for all bishops during all the centuries since.
[476] The Manhattan Declaration of 20 November, 2009, a joint statement of Catholic, Evangelical and Orthodox Christians, set this out with utter clarity this determination of the free society to live in freedom, under the rule of law. Its summary paragraph is addressed to civil government as such:
We will not be intimidated into silence or acquiescence or the violation of our consciences by any power on earth, be it cultural or political, regardless of the consequences to ourselves.
And, immediately afterward:
We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's.
[477] Antonio Gramsci is the leading theorist of the programmatic institution of the administered world, the dirigiste utopia:
The Transition from the War of Manoeuvre (Frontal Attack) to the War of Position—in the Political Field as well.
This seems to me to be the most important question of political theory that the post-war period has posed, and the most difficult to solve correctly. It is related to the problems raised by Bronstein [Trotsky], who in one way or another can be considered the political theorist of frontal attack in a period in which it only leads to defeats. This transition in political science is only indirectly (mediately) related to that which took place in the military field, although certainly a relation exists and an essential one. The war of position demands enormous sacrifices by infinite masses of people. So an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is necessary, and hence a more ‘interventionist’ government, which will take the offensive more openly against the oppositionists and organize permanently the ‘impossibility’ of internal disintegration—with controls of every kind, political, administrative, etc., reinforcement of the hegemonic ‘positions’ of the dominant group, etc. All this indicates that we have entered a culminating phase in the political-historical situation, since in politics the ‘war of position’ once won, is decisive definitively.
Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman Private Ltd, 1996), 238-39. The “post-war period” to which Gramsci refers is that subsequent to the First World War.
Cf. George Orwell’s assessment of that world by its protagonist, “O’Brian”:
Imagine a boot stamping a human face―forever.
Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 3. 3.
Gramsci’s program for the permanent subjugation of human society as such inspires the European Union’s inflexible imposition of radical secularization upon the people of Europe. It has powerful advocates in the United States, as well as in what remains of political freedom in the rest of the world.
[478] A. Martin, Athanase, 570, 572.
[479] A. Martin, Athanse, 577-84.
[480] Alois Grillmeier considers the Council of Alexandria’s condemnation of Apollinarius to have failed, Christian Tradition I at 320ff. His critique presumes the presence if Apollinarians at that council, as well as the normative standing of the Apollinarian Logos-sarx Christology, which rejects a priori the apostolic Spirit Christology of Alexander of Alexandria and, yet more obviously, of Athanasius, who upheld it throughout the forty-five years of his episcopate. Annick Martin has uncovered persuasive grounds for denying the presence of Apollinarians at the Council of Alexandria, and has dismissed the application of the Logos-sarx anthropology to Athanasius: see Athanase, 543-45.
480 The Eusebian purge of the pro-Nicene Oriental bishops may have begun a year before Athanasius’ succession, with the deposition of Eustathius, in 327, if A. Martin’s discussable dating of that event is correct. Apart from Athanasius and his loyal suffragans, the purge was complete in the Orient with the deposition of Marcellus of Ancyra in 336. The Eusebian atempt to persuade Constantine to depose Athanasius at the Synod of Tyr had failed, and the later imperial efforts to suborn his diocese by way of intruding Arian usurpers met an indefeasible resistance from his people: see A. Martin, Athanase, Introduction, at 10ff.
[482]Had Athanasius been willing to compromise the Nicene homoousios, to accept the homoiousion equivocation of Basil of Ancyra, as set out in the decisions of the Council of Antioach in 363 and approved by Basil of Caesarea, who continually urged this merger of the homoousian and homoiusian Christology upon Athanasius from 371 and later upon Pope Damasus, but to no avail. Were he to have accempted this compromise, Athanasius might have become the authoritative voice of the Oriental Church. However, refusing the homoiousians’ impossible meld of homoousios with the homoiousios which inhis De synodis, he had identified with the heteroousios of Aetius and Eunomius, and concerned for truth rather than for a negotiated peace, he held to the letter of the Nicene Creed and was effectively ignored in the Orient for the rest of his life, having in turn ignored the solicitation of Basil of Caesarea to recognize in Meletius a bishop who might unite the Oriental Church (Annick Martin, Athanase, 589). His influence had long been felt in Rome, to the point of Pope Damasus’ refusal to endorse Basil’s doctrine, and to the recognizeing Paulinus, whom Lucifer had consecrated as the authentic bishop of Antioch and thereby recognizing the orthodoxy of the Eustathian community in Antioch which Paulinus led.
[483] Upon his return to Alexandria, after the Council of Tyre-Constantinople, John Arkaph prompted a civic disturbance for which Constantine exiled him, without objection from Eusebius of Nicomedia, John’s quondam ally. Nothing further is known of John: see A. Martin, Athanase, at 344, 386; and Hanson, Search, at 259-60; 262.
[484] See H. M. Gwatkin, The Arian Controversy (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908) at 156.
[485] Ibid., 341-42.
[486] See A Martin, Athanase, at 341-2, n. 2. Contra, Hanson, Search, at 210..
[487] J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 274.
[488]Annick. Martin, Athanase, 386.
[489]Oskar Skarsaune has written of Eusebius that
One of the most conservative and faithful disciples of Origen of his time present at the Council was Eusebius of Caesarea. He was perhaps the most reflected three-hypostases theologian of his time.
“A Neglected Detail in the Creed of Nicaea,” Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Mar., 1987, 34-54, at48.
Whatever Scarsaune intends by “the most reflected three-hypostases theologian of his time,” he clearly regards Eusebius’ subordinationist reading of Origen’s “three hypostases” as authentic whereas in fact, Eusebius imposed that subordinationist distortion upon Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine of mia ousia, treis hypostaseis, from which misreading it has only recently begun to recover. See Henri Crouzel, whose classic study, Origène, defends Origen’s Trinitarian application of ‘ousia’ to the Trinity and ‘treis hypostaseis’ to the Father, Son, and Spirit, as anticipating the doctrine propounded a century later by the Council of Nicaea.
[490] See Eusebius’ Contra Marcellum, which indicts Marcellus’ attack upon Asterius the sophist is Sabellian, and his Theologia Ecclesiastica, in which that charge is more fully stated. See endnote 625 infra for a defense of Marcellus against Eusebius’ attack upon Marcellus’ Spirit Christology, which affirmed the primordial Jesus to be the agent and subject of his own Incarnation.
[491] A. Martin, Athanase, at 410.
[492] T. D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius, Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, MA & London, Harvard University Press, 1993) [hereafter, Athanasius and Constantius], thinks it likely that Athanasius, in a little remarked visit to Constantinople in 337 on his return to Alexandria from his first exile, was one of the bishops who consecrated the pro-Nicene Paul as the bishop of Constantinople. See Barnes’ account of Paul’s election, ibid., 36ff., of its immediate rejection by Constantius, and his installation of Eusebius of Nicomedia in that office.
[493] Luis F. Ladaria, S.J., while a professor of theology at the Gregorian University, presented a careful study of Hilary’s Christology. There he explored Hilary’s recognition of the pre-existence of Jesus in the epiphanies of the O.T. and of the nexus of those epiphanies with the economy of salvation and thereby with the Incarnation. He has shown that despite this concern for the pre-history of the Incarnation, Hilary understood the subject of the Incarnation, e.g., the “man from heaven,” to be the eternal Son, the Word, who assumes humanity, and thus does not understand the subject of the Incarnation to be the historical Jesus the Lord:
La cencepción virginal y el nacimiento de Cristo consituyen las primeras etapas de la vida de Jesús, Hijo de Dios encarnado, in su desarrollo histórico. Completamos con el breve estudio de esta cuestión el recorrido por los diferentes aspectos del misterio de la incarnación y de la asunción de la humanidad por parte del Verbo.
La Cristologia de Hilario de Poitiers; ser. Analecta Gregoriana, Vol. 255 (Roma: Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 1989), at 81 (underlineation added).
[494] Kelly, Doctrines, at 334-335.
[495] Alois Grillmeier, Christ in the Christian Tradition, Volume I,.297-99.
[496] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 283.
[497] Michel Spanneut, Recherches sur les écrits d’Eustathe d’Antioch: avec une édition nouvelle des fragments dogmatiques et exégétiques. R. Memoires et Travaux publiés par des professeurs des Facultés Catholiques de Lille 55, 1948. [hereafter, Recherches]. See especially the fragments (64, 68, 70, pp. 114, 116, and 118 of Spanneut’s Recherches, cited by J. N. D. Kelly in support of Eustathius’ adherence to the apostolic tradition of the Personal unity of Jesus the Christ. In those early and probably pre-Nicene texts Kelly finds clear evidence of Eustathius’ recognition of the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord, which eliminates the anticipation of the diophysism of the fifth century Antiochene tradition that Grillmeier attributes to him.
[498] Spanneut, op. cit., 15.
[499] Ettlinger, Eranistes: Theodoret of Cyrus. Critical text and prolegomena (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975) [hereafter Eranistes: critical ed.], Later he made this meticulously comprehensive work accessible to a broader audience by publishing its translation, Theodoret of Cyrus: Eranistes. A New Translation; col. The Fathers of the Church v. 106 (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003) hereafter, Eranistes: A New Translation]. The twenty-six fragments from the Eranistes which Spanneut and Ettlinger agree in ascribing to Eustathius appear on pages 73-75, 139-41, and 225-29 of the Eranistes. A New Translation.
[500] Spanneut’s text of the « Conclusion » of the Recherches.
Voici comment s’établissent les résultats de cette second enquête avec leur part d’acquis et leur part d’hypothèse.
Eustathe est l’auteur de deux traités au moins, les deux œuvres qui Jérôme a citées, Sur la Pythonisse et Sur l’âme. Par la façon dont l’historien les mentionne, comme par leur contenu, ces deux écrits nous paraissent antérieurs aux luttes ariennes.
Parmi les autres œuvres, nous connaissons tout particuliérement cinq discours mentionné par Theodoret : Sur les titres des psaumes d’inscription, Sur l’âme, Sur Prov. 8, 22, Sur les titres des psaumes des montées, Sur le Psaume 92. Puisque l’éveque de Cyr les cite toujours dans le même ordre, il les tient assemblées dans un recueil, qui, d’après les titres, pourrait bien être un homiliaire. Quel est le rapport entre cet homiliaire et le Contra arianos que Théodoret a cité exclusivement dans le florilège gélasien ? On serait tenté de les confondre, mais nous sommes plutôt porté à voir dans le Contre arianos un traité antiarien d’Eustathe, divisé en huit livres, qui serait indépendant et des discours cités avec leur titre dans l’Eranistes, et des discours Contra arianos cités par d’autre témoins. Ces deux séries des discours, en revanche, pourraient se confondre. Nous avouons pourtant que cette hypothèse, si elle nous parait expliquer mieux que d’autres les faits constatés, ne s’impose absolument.
Nos certitudes ne sont pas plus grandes pour le reste de l’œuvre. Sûrement Eustathe a composé d’autres homélies, mais il en existe peu de chose, peut-être rien. Il est peu probable qu’il ait composé des commentaires suivis de l’Écriture, en tout cas il n’est pas l’auteur du commentaire sur l’Hexaemeron qu’on lui imputa au xviie siècle. Nous restons défiant à l’égard des tentatives modernes qui cherchent à grossir par des restitutions de la patrimoine littéraire d’Eustathe.
Nous avons ainsi examiné l’héritage eustathien, d’après la qualité de ses témoins et la nature de son contenu. En ce travaille difficile, nous avons laissé une large part à l’hypothèse, mais c’est là le premier pas de la science. Nous nous croyons donc autorisé à présenter au lecteur l’œuvre de l’évêque d’Antioch dans une édition nouvelle.
Mieux que nos discussions de détail, elle montre la varieté de l’œuvre Eustathienne. Les écrits sont d’abord sans rapport avec l’actualité. Ils deviennent ensuite des machines de guerre contre l’héresie. Les idées, malgré le choix partial des florilèges, sont diverses, et les considérer toutes systématiquement comme coulées dans le même moule, le moule antiochien par exemple, c’est une grave erreur. Une étude approfondie de la doctrine de Eustathe doit tenir compte des différentes aspects de cette personnalité forte et vivante.
Michel Spanneut, Recherches , 90-91.
[501] Spanneut’s text:
Les idées trinitaires
On ne peut prouver, semble-t-il, qu’Eustathe ait conçu la Trinité en termes physico-économiques. Négligeons ce qui concernele Saint Esprit : il en est très peu question2 et cette considération entraînerait d’autres difficultés sans rien résoudre. Notre examen portera uniquement sur les relations du Père et du Verbe, Sur ce point la terminologie de notre évêque n’offre rien d’étrange. Evidemment en parlant de l’activité du Logos, l’auteur utilise les termes ἀρετῇ, ἐνεργείᾳ δυνάμει; mais jamais il n’appelle le Verbe ἀρετῇ or ἐνεργείᾳ ; l’emploi qu’il fait de ces derniers mots est purement classique et dépouillé de toute distinction technique ou philosophique. En revanche, δύναμος σοφία ou πνεῦμα, désigne bien le Verbe, du moins dans les écrits antiariens; mais il en est de même à traverse la théologie de l’époque et chez les Ariens en particulier.1
De plus cet usage s’appuye sur le Bible (cf. i Cor. i. 25 ou Luc i. 35), parfois soumise à une exégèse particulière. On ne peut donc en tirer qu’Eustathe vit dans le Verbe un simple attribut de Dieu unipersonnel,
Nous constatons, en sens opposé, qu’il emploie souvent des termes impliquant, entre Dieu et le Verbe, une relation de Père à Fils (υἱός, παῖς, πατήρ, τοκεύς, γεννήτωρ, genitor) autant dans l’opuscule sur la Pythonisse d’Endor que dans les fragments. Quelquefois même en commentant des textes bibliques qui comportent le mot Logos, il introduit l’idée de filiation. Il n’a donc aucune prévention contre cette théologie. Au contraire, l’idée de génération revient très souvent. Le Verbe du Père est Dieu, lui qui en est engendré (F. 33 ; cf F. 35), d’une génération inénarrable (F. 67; cf. F. 44). Il est manifestement Dieu par nature, engendré de Dieu (F. 35 ; cf. F. 19), authentique Fils de Dieu par nature (O. x = Kl. 31, 1 = 633B) et Eustathe lui applique même les lois de l’hérédité (F. 21 ; cf. F. 44). Est-il possible de douter qu’il n’y voie ce qu’il appelle lui-même une réele théogonie ((). xxiv = Kl. 54, 5 = 663 A) ?
2. Dans l’opuscule le Saint-Esprit est nommé clairement quatre fois et l’auteur lui attribue l’inspiration des Écritures. Les fragments posent une délicate question de terminologie que nous non pouvons aborder ici. Quant au passages où il est parlé de dyade, le context exégétique ou l’objét de la discussion en fournissent la justification. Il reste que le Saint Esprit est à l’arrière-planes pré-occupations d’Eustathe. L’époque y est pour quelque chose, mais n’explique pas tous.
Spanneut, art. cit. 221-22.
[502] Spanneut’s text:
Le Verbe est-il pour autant une personne ? Il ne s’agit pas de chercher dans la terminologie d’Eustathe un précision d’un autre âge. Il ne faut pas davantage dégager les termes utilisés de leur contexte historique. Notre évêque dit bien que l’hypostase de la divinité est unique (F. 38) mais cette affirmation n’est inquétante qu’aux yeux des modernes, puisque le synod d’Alexandrie en 362 permittait encore de parler d’une ou de trois hypostases en Dieu, D’ailleurs dans le même fragment l’auteur exclut le Sabellianisme en proclamant avec insistance la dualité dans la singularite. Au cours du traité sur la Pythonisse, commentant assez étrangement quelques versets du Deutéronome qui s’achèvent par ces mots : « Le Seigneur votre Dieu vous tente pour savoir si vous aimez le Seigneur votre Dieu’ (xiii, 2). Il dit de l’auteur sacré : Ici présentant la dyade du Père et du Fils Monogène, il a nommé l’un le Seigneur qui tente et un autre que lui le Seigneur Dieu bien-aimé, de manière à montrer, à partir de la dyade, l’unique divinité et la réele théogonie (O. xxiv = Kl. 54, 11-5 = 664a ; cf. F. 50). Il ne rien qui ressemble moins à une conception économique de la Trinité ; nous en sommes presque à la précision scolastique.
1. Thalie II et XVIII, cf. G. Bardy, St. Lucien d’Antioche et son école (Paris, 1936), pp. 256 et 273.
Spanneut, art. cit., 222.
[503] Spanneut’s text:
Les idées christologiques
Nous nous contenterons de deux remarques sur le Christ. La première porte sur le mécanisme de l’Incarnation, l’autre sur la nature humaine dans l’être qui résulte.
Pour accomplir sa mission sotériologique, fin de l’Incarnation (F. 14, 23, 43, 49), le Verbe, toujours impassible (F. 15, 30, 31, 46, 47 . . .), se bâtit un temple (F. 20 ; cf. F. 35, 44, 48) ; en traversant le sein maternel, il porta le membres corporels (F. 18 ; cf F. 30)1, il assuma (ἀναλαμβών) un instrument humain (F. 23) Le terme assumer revient encore (adsumere) (F. 41; ἀναλαμβáνομαι, F. 14) et l’Incarnation aux yeux d’Eustathe est bien l’assomption d’un homme par le verbe.2
1. Ceci d’après une exégèse connue de Luc i. 35.
2 D’autres fragments se rapprochent davantage du Verbum caro factum de St. Jean, mais ils sont moins fréquents et légèrement douteux (F. 64 et 70).
Cet homme, dans le Christ, est généralement mis en face du Verbe, comme sur pied d’égalité. Eustathe l’appelle sept fois l’homme du Christ, expression curieuse que la tradition n’a pas adoptée.3 Il insiste étonnament sur l’intégrité de cette nature humane et, détail tout à fait remarquable, il lui attribue explicitement une âme. Alors que les Pères de l’époque, même un saint Athanase,4 à en juger du moins par leurs écrits survivants, se taisent sur l’âme du Christ, malgré la négation expresse des Ariens, Eustathe s’écrie au sujet des hérétiques : pourquoi jugent’ils si important de montre que le Christ assuma un corps sans âme ?(F. 15). Par cette clairvoyance unique, il attaquait l’hérésie en son point faible et sauvait l’intégrité des natures dans le Christ. (a misprint in this paragraph « jugersu » has been corrected to read »juger du » ut supra. )
Puisque le Christ est humainement complet, faut-il admettre que cet homme est une personne ? La tendance exagérément dualiste est évident chez Eustathe. Cependent ne donnons pas au terme πρόσωπον qu’il applique parfois à la nature humaine du Christ une valeur qu’il n’avait pas.5 Souvent en effet l’évêque d’Antioche affirme ailleurs l’unité du Sauveur. C’est le même Christ qui a deux naissances (F. 67), qui est dans le sein du Père et séjourne sur la terre (O. xviii = Kl. 46, 7-8 = 652cd). Malgré son ardeur à distinguer le propre de chaque nature, il dit de notre Dieu : Quand donc fut’il élevé avec des hommes, si ce n’est lorsqu’il naquit parmi eux d’une Vierge et parmi eux vécut en enfant et grandit et but et mangea kc. ? (F. 88). Ne va-t-il pas jusqu’à parler de divini Verbi commistio (F. 53) ?
3. Seul le Sermo Major de Fide offre des expressions très proches, en particulier le fameux κῦριακός ἅνθρωπoς que Msgr Lebon a cependant retrοuvé dans une œuvre de St. Athanase.
4. M. Richard, ‘Saint Athanase et la Psychologie du Christ selon les Ariens’, dans les Mélanges des Science Religieuse (Lille, 1947), IVe année, Cahier 1, pp. 5-54.
5. M. Richard, ‘L’Introduction du mot « hypostase » dans la théologie de l’Incarnation’, dans les Mélanges des Science Religieuse (Lille, 1945), II année, pp.5-32 et 243-70.
Spanneut, art. cit., 222-233.
[504] Spanneut’s text :
Puisque l’insistance dualiste n’apparait que dans les fragments, généralement anti-ariens, tout laisse croire que Eustathe fut amené par la polémique. Contre eux qui diminuaient tour à tour dans le Christ l’humain et le divin, il eut à montrer la perfection réciproque de l’homme et du Verbe. Eustathe, en ce sense, ne serait pas né antiochien.
Eustathe d’Antioch nous parait donc peu fondé à servir de témoin pour attester la continuité d’une tradition antiochienne. Ses idées trinitaires ne portent aucune marque spéciale. Elles sont même fortement bibliques. Sa Christologie, très affirmative sur l’unité du Sauveur, ne doit peut-être son dualisme exageré qu’aux circonstances. Mais ces affirmations, grosses de consequences, exigeraient une argumentation plus détaillé et des autres développments. Elles ont permis au moins quelques remarques, à notre sens opportunes, sur la doctrine d’Eustathe d’Antioche.
Spanneut, ibid. 223-224.
[505]. Socrates, H.E 1, 23 (P.G. 67, 144) J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 129. But see Spanneut, Recherches, 78 where, defending the Eustathian provenance of a fragment which refers to Mary as Dei genetricem, remarks:
Le mot θεοτόκος n’étonne pas dans la bouche d’un antiarien. La preuve en est qu’Alexandre d’Alexandrie, le dénunciateur d’hérésie et le correspondant d’Eustathe, l’employait.4 Il est fréquent chez les écrivains d’influence alexandrine, comme Athanase, Eusèbe de Caesarée, ou Didyme.
4. Lettre à Alexandre de Constantinople (?) dans H. Opitz, Athanasius Werke, t. III, 1re part, 1re livraison, Berlin-Leipzig, 1935, p. 28. Cf. Pitra, Analecta Sacra, p. 200 ; fragm. Syr. VII et VIII.
Spanneut intimates that Eusebius of Cesarea is an anti-Arian, and that he is under Alexandrine influence ; he is mistaken on both counts. Eusebius is certainly not anti-Arian. He was condemned and excommunicated by the Council of Antioch in the spring of 325, and a few months later by the Council of Nicaea, for his Arian proclivities as a convincd subordinationist. Until his death he was closely allied with the Arian Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia who led the anti-Nicene “Eusebian” faction characterized by its submission of authority over the faith of the Church to a series of Arianizing emperors. He raised no objection to his the conspiracy of his namesake, Eusebius of Nicomedia, with the Melitian schismatics who invented the absurd criminal charges brought against Athanasius at the Synods of Tyre and Constantinople in 335. Quasten, Patrology III, 337, notes that Eusebius follows Origen in his exegesis of the Old Testament, and in that sense refers him to the Alexandrine tradition. However, in the fourth century, the great representatives of the Alexandrine tradition were those loyal to the Church’s authority over her doctrine: the bishops of Alexandria, Alexander and his successor, Athanasius. While uninterested in New Testament exegesis. Eusebius doubtless followed Origen’s allegorical exegesis of the Old Testament, Although accepting Origen’s authority as an exegete, Eusebius refused to accept his doctrine of the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son, a doctrine which above all else typified the Alexandrine tradition during Eusebius’ quarter-century in the episcopacy; At Nicaea, Alexander of Alexandria endorsed the condemnation and excommunication of Eusebius by the Council of Antioch for his support of Arianism. Athanasius, whose activity as Alexander’s secretary and deacon embittered Eusebius against him thereafter, understood, as few had, the strategic efficacy, at once anti-Arian and anti-Eusebian, of the Nicene “mia hypostasis, mia ousia,” and made it into a battle-cry, aimed at Eusebius’ subordinationist perversion of the foundation of the Alexandrine tradition, viz., Origen’s defense of the Trinity as mia ousia, treis hypostaseis. In brief, Eusebius of Caesarea denied and fought the Alexandrine tradition from his refusal of Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine as Bishop of Caesarea ca. 313-14, and his consequent condemnations by the Council of Antioch and the Council of Nicaea in 325. until his death in 339.
[506] Hanson, Search, 208.
[507] Ibid., 148.
[508] J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds (1971), 208-10, offers an account of the Council which met at Antioch in 325; Hanson, Search (1988), 146-51, provides a more detailed report, noting particularly the affinity of the council’s credal statement with theology of Alexander of Alexandria, who did not attend the Council, but obviously influenced it, probably by way of Ossius, who presided over it and who, according to Philostorgius, had met with Alexander just prior to the Council of Nicaea.
[509] Ibid. 212-13; Kelly also notes that Eustathius is one of the three members of the Nicene Council to have left records of its proceedings; the others are Eusebius of Caesarea, via his letter to his people at Caesarea, and Athanasius, in De decretis, written during the early 350s, and Ep. ad Afr. Episc., written fifteen years later. Cf. Jedin-Dolan, Church History II, 30.
[510] Hanson, Search, 244.
[511] Photius, Epitome of the Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius. [hereafter, Epitome]. Tr. Edward Walford (London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1855), book 2, chapter 7.
Apart from its condensation in the Epitome, Philostorgius’ Church History exists only in fragments. Some of these have been edited by Joseph Bidez, Friedhelm Winkelmann, Kirchengeschichte; Philostorgius; GCS 21 (Berlin: Acadamie Verlag, 1981). Philip R. Amidon has recently edited and translated the fragments with a detailed commentary: see Atlanta, GA : Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), pp. 50-56.
512 See The Ecclesiasticall (sic) History of Theodoret, 1612. Ser. English Recusant Literature, 1558-1640, v. 287: a facsimile edition of a copy in the Cambridge University Library, with the permission of the Syndics (London: The Scholar Press, Ltd., 1976) Book I, ch. XXI, 81-84. The catalog record of the electronic book edition of this work includes the information that the original English translation of Theodoret’s Ecclesiastical History (Εκκλησιαστικησ ιστοριασ), published by the Jesuit press in St. Omer in 1612 as Historia Ecclesiastica, was the work of Roger Cadwallador, who is there reported there to have been born in 1568 and died in 1610.
Further inquiry uncovered a reference to a Roger Cadwallader in a brief summary entitled “The History of Leominster,” a town in Herefordshire:
Leominster in 1610 saw a brutal example of Protestant authority when a Catholic Priest, Roger Cadwallader, was tried there, then hung (sic), drawn and quartered.”
See “ http://www.information-britain.co.uk/history/town/Leominster23/ ”
The martyred Roger Cadwallader is certainly the translator of the Historia Ecclesiastica, and author of its “The Preface of the Translator to the judicious and indifferent reader.” His unusual name, the date of his death, his knowledge of Greek and finally his earlier translation of Theodoret’s Philotheus, coincide too neatly with the facts of the execution of “Roger Cadwallader” to be ignored. Fr. Cadwallador’s priesthood was suffficient to constitute the ‘treason’ for which he was so savagely executed, but his earlier translation of Theodoret’s Philotheus, and his quite recent translation of Theodoret’s Ecclesiasticall History, which in 1610 was about to be published by the Jesuit press then located in St. Omer in France, certainly prompted the angry search for him by the prosecuting Protestant bishop Bennet which Bishop Challoner records: Memoirs of Missionary Priests (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 19241742), 299-306, at 300. The Blessed Fr. Roger Cadwallador was hanged, drawn and quartered in Leominster in 1610 for the high treason of being a Catholic priest. Beatified by John Paul II in 1987, he is beyond doubt the translator of the .Ecclesiasticall History His unusual name, the date and place of his death, his Greek expertise and his familiarity with Theodoret’s works are conclusive.
[513] See the recent French translation,of Theodoret’s Ecclesiastical History, T. 1. Livres I-II -- T. 2. Livres III-V. Series: Sources chrétiennes, ISSN0750-1978 ; no. 501, 530 (Paris : Cerf, 2006) [hereafter, Histoire Ecclésiastique], Tome 1, 282, note 2, citing Simonetti, La crisi ariani, p. 104-09. Cf. The Oxford Dictionary of The Christian Church (2005) s.v. ”Eustathius of Antioch,” 579B.
[514] Spanneut, Recherches, 20.
[515] Spanneut, Recherches, Frag. 68, 116; Frag. 70, 118.
[516] Socrates criticized Theodoret for his ignorance of Origen, and charges Eustathius with the same ignorance; Annick Martin, “Introduction,” 8-9. note 19, citing Socrates’ Ecclesiastical History.
[517] Photius, Epitome, book 2, chapter 7,
[518] The “Annotations” of the Greek text and its translation in the Ecclesiasticall History offers a persuasive explanation of Theodoret’s failure to mention the Sabellian element of Eustathius’ indictment and condemnation by the Eusebians: see Tome I, Book 1, ch. 21, note 1, 84-85.
[519] Ibid.
[521] W. A. Jurgens, referring to the Letters of Cyril of Alexandria, has written:
The Letters of Cyril of fAlexandria have a considerable importance for the history of his times and especially for the Nestorian controversy.
Letter no. 39, the third of the so-called ecumenical letters, was addressed to John of Antioch in the spring of 433 A. D. to consolidate the newly established peace between the patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria. The creed appended to the end of the letter was sent to Cyril by the Antiochene bishops for his subscription, and was probably written by Theodoret. It is better known as the Creed of Union or the Creed of Ephesus, and was given formal recognition at Chalcedon in 451 A. D.
Jurgens, Early Fathers III, 206.
[522] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 302, Quasten, Patrology III, at 397.
[523] Christopher Beeley has noted Diodore’s impact upon Meletius; op. cit., 33, 46.
[524] Simonetti has well summarized the doctrine of this Council.
363. In the anti-Arian reaction that followed Constantius’s death (362), Meletius convened a score of homoeousian and homoean bishops from Syria and Palestine, incl. Acacius of Caesarea and Basil’s great friend Eusebius of Samosata. They accepted, pro bono pacis, the Nicene creed of 325 but, in the letter communicating this decision to the emp. Jovian, they gave the term homoousios a wide interpretation, in the sense that the Son, generated from the Father’s ousia, is like him in ousia. In this way, homoousios was taken in the sense of homoiousios.
Manlio Simonetti, “Antioch,” The Encyclopedia of the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), vol. 1, at.49a.
[525] This cosmological interpretation of Jn. 1:14 is the greatest of all the “ironies of history.” John the Evangelist had encountered the primitive “docetist gnosticism which on dualist grounds reduced the Incarnation to a non-historical “appearance” which is to say, to subjectivity. He of course condemned it, particularly in I John 4:2 - 3; and II John 7, as a radical denial of the historical faith in the historical Jesus the Christ, the Lord of history , its Beginning and its End.
However, during the rapid expansion of the Church after the great persecutions ended with the reign of Constantine, well-educated men, members of the patrician class, entered the clergy in increasing numbers. From these bishops were often selected, many of whom (e.g., Diodore, the Cappadocians) had been educated in the classic tradition, particularly in Athens, where they were taught by scholars deeply immersed in the pagan philosophies, notably Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and the eclectic ‘middle Platonism’ culturally dominant in the Orient during the fourth century. Trained in this mentality, which sought to discover the meaning of the habitable universe, the ‘cosmos,’ in terms of its antecedently necessary intelligibility, its immanent causes.
This essentially pagan mentality provided the criteria for the Christian theologians’ effort to understand the faith of the Church throughout the fourth century and half-way into the fifth. They proceeded to seek out the raison d’être of the Christian revelation in the cosmological terms of its antecedent causes, failing to recognize that it has none. The classic expressions of Catholic theology have continued so to do, to the point of submitting the historical tradition to the non-historical criteria native to the quaerens intellectum of the Aristototelians, the Stoics, the Platonists. In the succeeding centuries, they levied upon more current cosmologies to the same end, i.e., an ever more explicit docetist-gnostic denial of the historicity of Lord of History, Jesus the Christ, who continues to be its Beginning and its End and apart from whom history has no intrinsic meaning; as every paganism has assumed without question.
[526] See J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 301-03; A. Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, at 352-60.
[527] This needs qualification, for the Spirit Christology was still alive and well in those quarters whose bishops had proven immune to the subordinationist influence of Eusebius of Caesarea, namely, those who maintained the Nicene “mia hypostasis.” These were chiefly the loyal suffragans of Athanasius in Alexandria and Egypt, along with a few other persecuted Nicene loyalists in the rest of the Orient, such as Paul of Constantinople, Marcellus, and the “Eustathians,” under Paulinus, whose fidelity to the last orthodox bishop of Antioch allied them to Athanasius, as Eustathius had been. Inasmuch as the Spirit Christology lacked any systematic expression (Origen’s mia ousia , treis hypostaseis having been rendered unusable by the Eusebians), nothing prevented reading it into the Logos-sarx vocabulary. Athanasius did this, but his reading of the Logos-sarx was simply its conversion to historicity, which is to say, to the faith of Nicaea that Jesus Christ, not the ‘immanent Son’, is the Lord. Athanasius’ importation of orthodoxy into the Logos-sarx idiom has led to a confusion among historians which Annick Martin has done much to clarify.
[528] J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings and Controversies (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 58.
[529] Quasten, Patrology II, 20; Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 320; Hanson, Search, 246-247, A. Martin, Athanase, 329.
[530] The abbot Anthony was born about 250, and is thought to haved died something more than a century later, ca 356. A. Martin, Athanase, 481-85, provides an exhaustive account of the textual history of The Life of Anthony; concluding that while its Athanasian authorship is established, Athanasius cannot be considered, on the basis of the text, to have been a disciple of Anthony; op. cit., at 481, note 112. Prof. Martin considers Anthony’s influence upon Athanasius, particularly upon his Christology, to have been profound: op. cit., 485-87. Contra, T. D. Barnes has denied Athanasius’ authorship of the Life of Anthony; see his Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, MA & London, Harvard University Press, 1993), at 240, note 64.
[531] At least from the late second century, i.e., with the episcopacy of Demetrius, all the Christian bishops in Egypt and Libya were suffragans of the Bishop of Alexandria. His traditional authority over all of Egypt was confirmed by the Council of Nicaea. It had been challenged by the Melitian schism from the first decade of the fourth century, to the point that when, in 428, Athanasius succeeded to the episcopacy of Alexandria, two thirds of the total number of bishops in his diocese were Melitian schismatics. However, A. Martin, Athanase, 317, 502. has observed that the schism itself, initially grounded not in doctrine but in resistance to the authority of the Bishop of Alexandria, relied upon the monks, most of whom were Melitians: Athanasius’ effective leadership of his people over the forty-five years of his episcopacy, seventeen of them in exile, as concretely demonstrated by their loyalty to the Nicene Creed against all the persecutions and seductions of those years. is thus the more remarkable. It is in fact unexampled.
[532] A. Martin, op. cit., 70-71, and esp. 117-29; see the maps at 27, 125; 139 and 751 among those listed on p. 893. Cf. the Oxford Bible Atlas, “The Near East; Archeological Sites,” at 92.
[533] Eusebius of Caesarea, in Historia Ecclesiastica, 7, 32, 29, reports that Dionysius was succeeded by Maximus, who was succeeded by Theonas, whom Peter succeeded in 300. A. Martin, op. cit., at pp. 177-78, nn. 240-241, refers to the 3rd century Coptic-Arab list of bishops (Synaxaire copte-arabe), whose value was first recognized by Eusebius. At p. 339 Prof. Martin provides a chart of the archbishops of Alexandria from Demetrius to Cyril. The Coptic-Arab list formulated in the third century to defend the authentic Christian tradition against its Gnostic corruption, names Demetrius the eleventh bishop of Egypt: A. Martin, Athanase, 177, nn. 140, 141. Information given Eusebius by the Chronique of “Jules the African, appears in three places in the Ecclesiastical History: 5, 9; 5, 22, and 6, 2.2. It is much more relied upon in Eusebius’ Chronicle
[534] A. Martin, Athanase, 4, countering a literal reading of Gregory of Nazianzen’s recollection (Or. 1, 26) that Athanasius “gave little time to study, only enough not to seem ignorant,” observes that the statement is to be read as a rhetorical assertion of Athanasius’ recognition of the inferiority of wisdom imparted by the Greek paidaea to that of the Christian faith.
[535] Annick Martin, Athanase, 321, has linked to Alexander’s already published choice of Athanasius to succeed him, the supreme confidence with which Athanasius, only a deacon, supported Alexander’s condemnation of Arius against bishops as powerful as Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia, earning the perduring enmity of the “Eusebians” whose denial of the Nicene definition of the substantial unity of the Trinity, backed by imperial authority, persuaded most of the bishops of Phrygia, Cappadocia, Syria and Palestine to prefer the imperial authority over doctrine to the ecclesial authority of the Council of Nicaea, and marginalized the rest. Athanasius and his Nicene suffragans refused this servility, and paid the price: his exile, and their persecution by the Arian usurpers of the See. Not many survived it.
Athanasian scholarship was revived by German historians who, early in the twentieth century, applied a secular philological criticism to the study of the historical record. This prevented them from recognizing the legitimacy of the public exercise by a bishop of his ecclesiastical responsibility for and authority over his diocese except insofar as that exercise is rationalized into the exercise of a finally coercive administration. This academic stance is in sharp contrast to that of the earlier patristic scholarship, which had looked with favor upon Athanasius’ unwavering support of the Nicene Creed. The change in atmosphere is such as to permit T. D. Barnes to liken Athanasius’ administration of his diocese to that of a “gangster:” (A. Martin, Athanase, 4, citing Barnes’ Constantine and Eusebius (1981), p. 230. While Barnes did make this comparison, a few pages earlier, at 207, he had written, “For half a century after Alexander died, Athanasius was to be a resolute, stalwart and effective champion of orthodoxy against both Melitians and Arians,” which is high praise. Barnes is often critical of Athanasius in that work, but displays no animus against him. A dozen years later, in Athanasius and Constantius (1993), he is less even-handed.
Prof. Martin’s discussion of this transition in historical method, which Hurtado has also has noted, op. cit., 520-21, approves its dissociation of history from the hagiography tempting the earlier patristic scholarship, and accordingly ignores Athanasius’ personal character except as it emerges from her extraordinarily detailed examination of his episcopacy.
[536] A Martin, ibid., 57-59.
[537] T. D. Barnes provides a succinct account of the Diocletian persecution in the East: see “The Constantinian Settlement,” From Eusebius to Augustine: Selected Papers from 1982-1993. Ser. Variorum Collected Studies Series CS 438 (VARIORUM: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Aldershot, Great Britain, & Brookfield, Vermont, 1994), at, 635-57, esp. 639-43.
[538] A. Martin, Athanase, 225, identifies the martyred bishops as Hesychios, Pakhomios, Theodoros and Phileas.
[539] A. Martin, ibid., 220-286, has provided an exhaustively researched survey of the two conflicting traditions of the origin of the Melitian schism. One, the Alexandrine, rests on the writings of Athanasius; the other, on the report of Epiphanius of Salamis. Her incisive resolution of their contradictions in favor of the greater credibility of the Athanasian evidence, followed here, fills the next dozen pages, 286-298.
[540] A. Martin, Athanase, 130. Elsewhere, Prof. Martin finds in the Melitian Church a socio-political expression of this resentment:
Les motivations et les critères d’appartenance à cette Eglise nous échappent en grande partie, sinon qu’elle refuse, par definition, de tenir l’évêque d’Alexandrie pour le chef légitime de l’Eglise d’Egypte. En ce sense, le schisme mélitien continue, à sa manière, de refléter l’opposition latente entre Alexandrie et le reste du pays.
Ibid., 297.
[541] Eusebius reports that Bishop Peter -
. . . was seized for no reason at all and quite unexpectedly; and then immediately and unaccountably beheaded, as if by Maximin’s command.
Historia ecclesiastica 9, 6, 1; ET, J. E. L. Oulton, Eusebius: The Ecclesiastical History, Vol. II (Cambridge, MA; London, England: The Harvard University Press, 2000), at 341,
[542] A. Martin, Athanase. 303, 317.
[543] A. Martin, Athanase, 637-763, presents an exhaustive treatment of Athanasius’ impact upon a Christianity already in place in Egypt centuries before him. Page 637 introduces this enormous theme; pages 658, 662, 671, 681, 694, 698, and 670 offer no more than examples of its content; at best they may encourage the reader to read the chapter in its entirety, together with its appendices,
[544] The obvious instance is Alois Grillmeier’s exegesis of the Letter to the Antiochenes in terms of its his supposition of its reliance upon the two-stage rationale underlying the Logos-sarx Christological analysis: see Christian Tradition I at 323ff. Annix Martin has replied to this mistake; see Athanase, at 555-56. However, she also is inclined to regard Athanasius in this light; e.g.:
La Christologie développée ici (i.e., in the Tome) par Athanase reste dans la ligne de la tradition alexandrine du Logos-sarx, également diffuse en Orient. Ce qui donne vie à la nature humaine du Christ, c’est le Logos, et c’est le Logos lui-même qui assure le salut de l’homme.
A. Martin, Athanase, at 553:
The diffusion of the Logos-sarx Christological analysis in the Orient is simply that of the Eusebian cosmology and its consequent subordinationism, whose Arian version Alexander condemned, and which Athanasius fought throughout his episcopate, for nearly forty-five years, albeit using the Logos-sarx vocabulary. His early refusal of the treis hypostaseis was a refusal of that Eusebian subordinationism, which had corrupted the original meaning of the consubstantial treis hypostaseis as taught by Origen, who certainly insisted upon the indivisible unity of the Trinity and the eternal existence of the Son.
Much of this critical confusion is the consequence of supposing that inasmuch as in his controversial anti-Arian works, Athanasius used “Logos” to designate the ‘immanent Son,’ distinguishing what is “sarx” in Jesus from the Personal unity of the “Logos” which by implication is the dehistoricization of the Logos. With that distinction in hand, he could assign death to the humanity of Jesus, his divinity being immune to death, and having done so, may be thought to have accepted thereafter its implicit dehistoricization of the Logos whom he knows to be the Christ. But he does not, as Origen did not. Both speak of the salvific death of Christ, not of the humanity of Jesus. The fifth-century Alexandrine tradition certainly accepted the proposition that “Logos” names the ‘immanent Son,’, but the reading of the denial of the humanity of Christ into the Christology of Origen or Athanasius is without justification; both speak historically of the death of Christ, of his resurrection, his ascension to the right hand of the Father. This emphasis upon the historical union of God and man in Jesus the Lord is only the obvious implication of the historical communication of idioms in him, which the Logos-sarx analysis cannot support, but upon which Athanasius’ Spirit Christology insists. Athanasius has no interest in the analytical dissection of the Lord upon which the Logos-sarx Christology is intent. Prof. Martin has replied to those who would read him otherwise:
La question de la réalité de l’âme humaine du Christ ne s’était tout simplement pas posée à Athanase. De plus, en le coupant ainsi du reste du Tome, c’est la cohérence de la démonstration voulue par Athanase qui se trouve détruite.
Ibid, at 555.
At 557, note 39, Prof. Martin cites with approval A. Stülchen’s assertion that in Athanasius’ Christology sōma (sῶma), sarx (sάrξ),and anthrōpos (ἀnthrωπos) are used as equivalents. This further confirms his historical use of these terms, not the analytical use upon which the formal Logos-sarx Christology relies. Origen, insistent upon the communication of idioms, nonetheless occasionally assigned immortality to the Logos: see his Homily in Jeremiah XIV, 6, cited by Crouzel to this effect in Origen, at 237, note 9. Taken literally, this tenet would contradict the foundation of Christianity, viz., the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ the Lord by which all creation is redeemed. Origen’s Christology presupposes the fall, and proposes its remedy in the Henōsis, Jesus the Lord. Similarly, for Athanasius, humanity is fallen, whether viewed as sōma (σῶμα), sarx (σάρχ) or anthrōpos (ἀνθρωπος). The Nicene recitation of the Incarnation warrants this equivalence: καὶ σαρκωθέντα, ἐνανθροπήσαντα -- i.e., became flesh, became Personally historical, as a man in man’s fallen history. As Origen refers all the actions of Jesus to his unique agency, i.e., to his hypostasis, the Lord, so also does Athanasius; see Martin, Athanase, at 552.
[545] Ibid., at 820.
[546] Athanasius may seem to falter in his emphasis upon the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord when, in his polemics against the Arians, he ascribes Jesus’ death to his humanity, reasoning that the divine Word is immortal, incapable of death, but it is not possible to derive Athanasius’ Christology from his refutations of Arianism, where he is attacking the Arian project of ascribing the kenōsis to Jesus’ divinity. Thus also Origen, who nonetheless was similarly intent upon the communication of idioms: see his Homily in Jeremiah XIV, 6, cited by Crouzel to this effect in Origen, at 237, note 9. Were it taken seriously, this cosmological tenet of the immunity of divinity to death would contradict the foundation of Christianity, viz., the sacrificial death of Jesus the Lord by which all creation is redeemed.
However, Athanasius refers all the actions of Jesus to his unique agency, i.e., to his Person, Christ the Lord. whether theose actions which e ascribes to his humanity, or those he ascribes to divinity. So also had Origen who, like Athanasius was nonetheless intent upon the communication of idioms in Jesus the Lord: see his Homily in Jeremiah XIV, 6, cited by Crouzel to this effect in Origen, at 237, note 9. Taken seriously, this tenet would contradict the foundation of Christianity, viz., the sacrificial death of Jesus the Lord by which all creation is redeemed.
Fort de la reflexion christlogique opérée dans les Discours contre les Ariens, spécialement dans le troisième qui’l vient peut-être d’achever, Athanase insiste sur l’union de l’homme et de Dieu dans le Fils. « C’est pourquoi autre n’était pas le Fils de Dieu avant Abraham, et autre celui (venu) après Abraham ; ni autre celui qui ressuscita Lazare, et autre celui qui interrogea à son sujet ; mais c’est le même qui, comme homme a dit : « où repose Lazare ? », et qui, comme Dieu, le ressuscita (cf. ep. ad Maximum, 3) ; le même était celui qui, corporalement, comme homme, crachait, et divinement, comme Fils de Dieu, ouvrait les yeux de l’aveugle de naissance ; et ayant souffert dans le chair, comme a dit Pierre (le même) a, divinement, ouvert les tombeaux et ressuscité les morts »37. N’avait-il pas déjà affirmé dans le Troisième Discours précisement, que « si nous voyons et pensons que ces deux sortes d’actes » (ceux qu’il a produits comme Dieu et ceux quil a produits comme homme) »ont été faits par un seul, notre croyance est droites » ? Ou encore ceci, qu’«en devenant homme, il n’a pas cessé pour autant d’être Dieu, pas plus qu’en étant Dieu, il ne fuit l’humanite ; bien au contraire ! et davantage, étant Dieu, il a assumé la chair, et étant dans la chair, il a divinisé la chair. »38.
37 7, 3, p. 326 (= 805, A1, 10)….
38 III, 35, PG 26, 397 B13-14,….
Annick Martin, Athanase, 556. The full text of the notes has been reduced to their references to the texts cited; they are too extensive for further inclusion here.
[547] The French text of the translated excerpt:
L’importance particulière que devait revêtir une telle doctrine réside précisement dans sa construction centrale tout entière fondée sur l’unite du Logos et de la chair dans le Christ, une unité non tant d’ordre intellectuel que liée à une intuition de type plutôt mystique dont la formule élaborée à Chalcédoine se souviendra. Nourrie de l’Ecriture et de l’image traditionelle de l’économie du salut, elle a pris corps dans la formule de Jn, 1, 14, « et le Verbe s’est fait chair », qu’elle a developpée dans le même sens et dans un langage simple tout a long de son œuvre théologique, comme « affirmation christologique fondamentale »327 pour l’évêque et le pasteur. Celui-ci laissera à d’autres, plus philosophes et théologiens que lui 328, le soin de résoudre le mystère de la relation conceptionnelle du Dieu et de l’homme en Christ.
327 A. Grillmeier, Le Christ dans la tradition chrétienne, I, trad. fse, 1973, p. 253-256, Sur Jn 1, 14, on rapprochera Or.c. Ar. III, 30, Tomos, 7, Ep. ad Adelph. 2, ad Epict., 8 et 11, et ad Max, 2 et 3. Sur l’importance de l’exégèse johannique chez Athanase, v. T.E. Pollard, Johannine Christology and the Early Church, Cambridge, 1970, chap. 7, p. 184-245, uniquement consecré à l’analyse des 3 Or . c. Ar.
328 J. Lebon, art. cité, p. 746, n. 1; A. Grillmeier, o.c., p. 257-272; et le jugement d’ensemble positif porte par R.P.C. Hanson sur la théologie athanasienne, dans The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, p. 446-458.
Annick Martin, Athanase, 635.
[549] Evans, Against Praxeas, 89-93, 130-34 (Adversus Praxean 1-4), text and translation of Tertullian’s presentation of his polemical theological project against the Monarchian, Praxeas. For further discussion, cf. the section devoted to the exposition of Tertullian’s theology, supra. Tertullian upholds the apostolic Spirit Christology; he contributed to its final statement at Chalcedon.
[550] J. N. D. Kelley, Doctrines, 158ff., 282, considers Malchion to have ignored the soul of Jesus, and so to have presented a Christological monophysism anticipating that of Apollinarius. but the auhors cited in endnotes 708 and 783 would absolve Malchion of this charge.
[551] Hanson, Search, 447-57. Hanson does not consider there to have been schools of theology distinguishable as between Logos-sarx and Logos-anthrōpos before the second half of the fourth century: J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 302-07, is unwilling to assign a clearly Logos-anthrōpos Christology to the mid-fourth century theologian Diodore, the disciple of Meletius of Antioch whom he appointed the bishop of Tarsus in 378. While Diodore’s emphasis on the full humanity of Christ entails a diophysism, Kelly reserves the foundation of the Logos-anthrōpos Christology to Theodore of Mopsuestia at the end of the fourth century. However, Origen’s commitment to the communication of divine and human Names in Christ mediated the apostolic Spirit Christology of the East and the West to the Council of Nicaea via Alexander of Alexandria and his deacon-secretary, Athanasius. Athanasius’ Christology, following the Alexandrine tradition, was soteriologically normed; that is, he endorsed Origen’s historical a priori, the foundational doctrine of the communication of idioms in the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord. Athanasius had long been familiar with the futility of the Eusebian cosmological speculation when he came to write his critique of their councils in the De synodis (361); this accounts for his acceptance, in the Tome to the Antiochenes, of the Trinitarian use of treis hypostaseis by the Antiochene homoousians whom he hoped to convert to the Nicene Creed for, in that doctrinal context, the affirmation of treis hypostaseis threatens neither the unity of the divine substance, nor the homoousion of Jesus with the Father, whereas, in the subordinationist context of the Eusebian theology, the subordinationist reading of the treis hypostaseis denies both. This was early borne in upon Athanasius, hence his adamantine insistence upon the mia hypostasis of the Trinity from the outset of his episcopacy, and his postponement of a stress upon the homoousios of the Son with the Father for some twenty-five years, for in upholding the substantial unity of the Trinity, he upheld its revelation in Jesus of his consubstantiality with the Father, as defined at Nicaea. He resisted the appeals of Basil of Caesarea simply on the non-negotiable ground of the mia hypostasis of the Trinity. Basil had charged the Eustathians with Sabellianism for stressing the same doctrine. In doing so, he lost communion with Athanasius.
Annick Martin, Athanasius, at 551, is less than clear on this point:. she supposes the homoiousians to be responsible for the orthodox development of the three Trinitarian hypostases emphasized by Eusebius of Caesarea, although Eusebius had been condemned by the Council of Antioch and the Council of Nicaea for holding precisely that quasi-Arian subordinationism. The homoiousian opposition to Arianism still relied upon the Eusebian subordinationism of Basil of Ancyra, whose restriction of the “homoiousios” to the Son was inherently binitarian, for it barred distinct divine hypostases other than the Son and the Father. George of Laodicea, although affirming the three Trinitarian hypostases in the Letter which has been thought to summarize the doctrine of Basil’s Council of Ancyra (358), had no basis for that affirmation, for the Eusebian subordinationism upon which Basil of Ancyra relied, the reservation of the substantial similarity (homoios kat’ousian) to the Son, could not provide it. George apparently relied upon the condemnation of Paul of Samosata’s use of homoousios to support Basil’s orthodoxy. J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 247, thinks George’s Letter to have revived interest in a term which had been forgotten, but Hanson, Search, 217, finds Marcellus to have been twice condemned in 335, by Councils held in Jerusalem and in Constantinople, “for favoring the ideas of Paul of Samosata;” more than twenty years before George of Laodicea wrote his Letter ca. 359. In any case, it is in fact by way of George’s Letter that the condemnation of Paul of Samosata’s adoptionism re-entered theological discourse. Nonetheless, it provided no support for the homoiousian cause, for it was by reason of his loyalty to the Eusebian subordinationism that Basil of Ancyra’ council rejected out of hand the Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father. The Eusebian dissent did not rely on Paul of Samosata. Eusebius of Caesarea thought his subordinationism to be the single alternative to Sabellianism, and the condemnations of Marcellus as a follower of Paul of Samosata only repeated Eusebian doctrine which ten yeaers earlier had been twice condemned.
Only the Nicene emphasis upon the absolute and unqualified substantial unity of the Triune God, together with equally unconditioned affirmation of the homoousios of the Son, provides the basis for that development of Trinitarian doctrine. Origen had made the substantial unity and hypostatic plurality of the Trinity available to the Orient in his Peri Archon, but.this insight of genius was lost when the subordinationism imposed on it by the Eusebian “Origenism” was accepted as authoritative. Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine was reaffimed by the Fathers at Nicaea, to be lost again due to Constantine’s support of the Eusebian interpretation of Origen as a subordinationist.
From ca. 327 to 381, the Orient was anti-Nicene, apart from the lonely and courageous commitment to the Nicene Creed that marks the episcopacy of Athanasius. Joseph Lienhard, in his “Two Friends of Athanasius,” cited at endnote 625 infra, has pointed out the pro-Nicene Apollinarius’ anticipation, in ἡ κατα μερος πιστις, of the formula, μία θεότης, τρία πρόσωπα (one divinity, three Persons) that constitutes the so-called “Cappadocian Settlement.” But Basil of Caesarea, in accepting Meletius’ melding of the Nicene homoousios with Eusebian homoiousios at the Council of Antioch in 363, ignored the indispensable, therefore nonnegotiable foundation of the “homoousios” in the Nicene Creed, and thus ignored the manifest failure of that “Cappadocian Settlement,” to conform to Meletius’ melding of the Nicene Trinitarianism with the homoiousian subordinationism. In these circumstances, it is idle to speak of a “Cappadocian settlement,” for without the subscription of the eminently pro-Nicene Athanasius, which Basil solicited but could never obtain, it had no validity. Neither Basil of Ancyra nor Basil of Caesarea could accept that foundational doctrine of the Council of Nicaea, the substantial unity, mia hypostasis, mia ousia, of the Trinity. Athanasius upheld this doctrine at Nicaea and continued to do so all his life. He endured the consequent imperial persecution, ignored Basil’s exhortations, and died in peace in 373.
[552] Its last patristic representative is St. John Damascene, whose Aristotelian approach to Christology so distinguishes the Person of the Logos from his humanity within the one hypostasis as to permit a perichōresis between them. It is possible that St. Thomas’ notion of the Christ as a persona composita (S. T. iiia, q. 2, a. 4, c.) is due to St. John’s influence. See Jurgens, Early Fathers 3, at 346, esp. note 4.
[553] J. N. D. Kelley, Doctrines, 158ff., 282.
[554] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 95-104, has summarized the Apologists’ development of Trinitarian doctrine with his customary clarity and insight: particularly he acquits them of the anachronistic charge of subordinationism. It was not possible for them to write of the Father, Son, and Spirit except within the context of a Platonic or Stoic emanationism, latently subordinationist no doubt, but whose dualist implications they ignored in their construction of what Kelly has termed “the lineaments of Trinitarian doctrine.” Their signal accomplishment is a refusal to suborn their faith to the cosmological impossibility of the triadic God of the Church’s liturgical tradition and her apostolic preaching.
[555] DS *126: “. . . ἤ εξ ἑτέρας ὑποστάσεως ἤ οὐσίας ( vel ex alia substantia aut essentia). Not incidentally, the Nicene use of ‘hypostasis” and “ousia ” indifferently to designate what is one in God, the Trinity, also underwrites Athanasius’ insistence that the single alternative to the Nicene proclamation of the homoousion of the Son with the Father can only be the Arian assertion of the Son’s “heteroousion” with respect to the Father: viz., the attribution to Son of the substantial differentiation from the Father that reduces him to a creature: the Council of Nicaea thus understood the Arian heresy, which was renewed twenty-five years later by Aetius and Eunomius, who affirmed precisely the heteroousion of the Son.
[556] E.g., Bihlmeyer-Tüchle, Church History; tr. from 13th German edition by Victor E. Mills, O.F.M., Volume One: Christian Antiquity (Westminster, MD, The Newman Press, 1968), at 188; Quasten, Patrology II, 77-79, mentions that historians have read Origen’s Trinitarianism as subordinationist, with which he expresses no disagreement; Kelly, Doctrines, at 131, is explicit: Origen is a subordinationist, while Hanson, treating the subject in the context of Origen’s influence upon Arius, rejects the charge as incompatible with Origen’s upholding the Father’s eternal generation of the Son, although his conviction that Origen denied the substantial identity (homoousios) of the Son with the Father implies Origen’s subordinationism: Search, 62-70. Crouzel, Origen, 187-88, denies any subordinationism in Origen, asserting his Trinitarian doctrine to have directly anticipated the Nicene homoousios.
[557]Crouzel, ibid., 169-179, esp. 172-74. The condemnation of Origenism as adoptionist at II Constantinople (553) has been confused with a condemnation of Origen, but Origen himself disavowed that imposition of cosmological speculation upon the apostolic tradition. In this he has been vindicated by the first four ecumenical councils, which met precisely to reject the consequences of the submission of the doctrinal tradition to the cosmological postulates of the contemporary speculation: viz., by Arius, condemned at Nicaea, by the Pneumatomachians and by Apollinarius, condemned at I Constantinople, by Nestorius, condemned at Ephesus, and by Eutyches, condemned at Chalcedon. Doubtless the rationalization of Origen’s genius by lesser talents immersed in the cosmological determinism of the Greek philosophical tradition was inevitable: it is thus that his supposed Trinitarian subordinationism has been regarded as the source of Arianism, and of the Christological errors induced by the rationalization of the fire-iron imagery of the Henōsis of divinity and humanity in Christ: even in fact, of all heresies (thus Epiphanius, Haer. 51, 3; 54). Origen’s work provides no basis for such condemnation. Crouzel has covered this ground with great care.
[559] Annick. Martin, Athanase,clearly and carefully distinguishes Asterius of Arabia from Asterio of Petra: see Athanase, 426, n. 169, 427, 428, n. 174 (referring to “Aréios de Petra et Astérios d’Arabie) Both bishops were condemned by their Oriental peers for having joined the Western bishops at the Council of Serdica, and were exiled by Constantius to thebaid. Prof. Martin, ibid., at 542, notes that Asterius of Arabia joined the Western bishops, Eusebius of Vercelli and Lucifer of Cagliari, whom Constantius had exiled for their support of Athanasius. She reports nothing more of Asterius of Petra, but on p. 543 we learn of an Aréios of Palestine: viz.: “Astérios d’Arabie rejoint les Occidentaux à Sardique avec Aréios de Palestine…”. On the other hand, as we have seen, Hanson, Search, 640, assigns the See of Petra to Asterius; he has nothing to say of an “Aerius” but earlier (ibid., 295) noted that “Arius of a Palestinian and Asterius of an Arabian See, managed to change sides and join the Western bishops.” Hanson’s Arius must be the Aérius of Petra in Prof. Martin’s account.
[560] Athanasius provided a final statement of his criticism of all proposed alternatives to the homoousion of the Son with the Father is his Letter to Jovian (De fide); see A. Martin, Athanase, 582 and 583, n. 149.
[561] Hanson, Search, 382-84.
[562] Hanson is highly critical of the Athanasius’ dismissal, in the Tome, of the doctrinal standing of the Council of Serdica:
Next, the Letter makes an important statement about the utterance of the Western bishops at Serdica, nineteen years before. It says that ‘the pamphlet (πιττάκιον) about the faith alleged to have been drawn up by the Council of Serdica had no authority, because the Council did not make any such doctrinal statement. No one is to circulate it because it only causes dissension.5 The statement about the Council of Serdica is a direct untruth, and Athanasius must have known that it is untrue.6
5 (800-1)
6 See above, pp. 244-5.
Hanson, Search., at 640.
The text to which Hanson’s note 6, supra, refers includes the following statement:
Athanasius was probably the only person present at the Council of Alexandria who was also present at the Council of Serdica in 343, and he must have known that this statement was untrue. (i.e., Athanasius’ denial that the Council of Serdica made a credal statement.)
However, Hanson, Search, 295, reports that two Oriental bishops attended Serdica, one of them, Asterius from an Arabian See, changed sides at Serdica to join the Western bishops. On p. 640, Hanson includes Asterius, the Bishop of Petra in Arabia among the addressees of the Tome to the Antiochenes.
`Hanson’s citation of his earlier pages, 244-45 raises further issues. Given that Asterius was present at the Councils of Serdica and of Alexandria, it is possible, though unlikely, that Eusebius of Vercelli was also present at both councils. The pertinent article in the Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Eusebius,” has him consecrated by Pope Julius on 15 December, 340, but provides no documentation. His consecration by the Pope in 340 would effectively ensure his presence at Serdica. On the other hand, V. De Clercq, “Eusèbe de Verceil,” Dictionnaire d’histoire et géographie ecclesiastique xvi (1963), 1477-83, thinks this unlikely, believing Eusebius to have been made Bishop of Vercelli a year or two after the Council of Serdica. Ordained to the diaconate by Julius and resident in Rome during the same period as Athanasius and Marcellus, he would have been in close association with Athanasius had he attended the Council as the first Bishop of Vercelli, but there is no record of his having been there. On the other hand, De Clercq admits at the outset that some authorities date his consecration as the Bishop of Vercelli earlier, and that it is not possible to determine its exact date; it may be supposed thaat the authorities who date the consecration earlier are those upon which The Catholic Encyclopedia relied. Nonetheless, De Clercq’s argument against the presence of Eusebius of Vercelli at Serdica is convincing. It is corraborated ex silentio by Gustav Bardy who, in “Sardique, (Concile de),” DTC 14/1, 1109-14, makes no mention of Eusebius of Vercelli. The Liturgy of the Hours IV, 1266, (1975) simply dates his ordination in 345 and doubtless is correct in doing so.
Granted Eusebius of Vercelli’s absence from the Council of Serdica, there is little basis for supposing him to have the animus against the Eustathians attending the Council of Alexandria which Annick Martin, (Atha;nase. 556. n. 36) has read into his endorsement of the Tome to the Antiochenes. Eusebius would have known that the Eustathians had signed the Tome to the Antiochenes without demur. Eusebius had been deposed and exiled from his See for his own insistence upon the authority of the Nicene Creed at the Council of Milan in 355 ; it is very unlikely that he would have found the Eustathian’s similarly pro-Nicene obstinacy suspect of Sabellianism, nor would he have interpreted Athanasius’ explicit denial, in the Tome, of the promulgation of any doctrinal statement by the Council of Serdica. Prof. Martin refers frequently to the Council of Serdica in her exposition of the Tome, esp. Ch. 7, §3., (Athanase,422-36), and again at 556, where she deals critically with that Council’s supposed doctrinal statement. In her discussion of Athanasius’ presence at Serdica she asserts (pp. 432-40) that the Council did in fact produce a formula of faith, and offers an explanation of Athanasius’ subsequent disavowal of its authority as an official document:
Une formule de foi, proposée par Ossius et Protogène, fut également jointe, plus développée que celle de Nicée, « pour empêcher que les Ariens ne tirent avantage de la brièveté de celle de Nicée pour tromper les simples, » comme s’en expliquent les deux évêques dans une lettre personnelle à Jules de Rome.196 Si, vingt ans plus tard, Athanase prétend le contraire, à savoir que le concile a rejeté cette « nouvelle » formule que « certains » proposaient, estimant que celle de Nicée se suffisait à elle même, c’est parce qu’alors, le synode d’Alexandrie s’efforçait de regrouper le maximum d’Églises en Orient autour précisément du symbole de Nicée.197 Comme à Nicée, on statua aussi sur la Pâque: un décrit fut pris pour cinquante ans stipulant que « Romains et Alexandrins feraient connaître celle-ci partout selon la coutume. »198 Allant dans le sens de l’unité recherchée entre les Églises, ce compromis permettait de s’entendre sur le jour de la fête – ce qui n’avait pas été le cas par exemple en 343 – malgré les différences du comput.199
196 Conservé en latin sous le titre Definitiones apud Sardicam dans le Codex Veronensis LX, doc. n° 85. fol. 80b-81a, Turner, p. 644, resumée par Sozomène, H.E., III, 12, 5. La profession elle-même se trouve au fol. 88a, p. 653, et, dans une version grecque differente de celle dont le texte précedent est la traduction, dans Théodoret, H.E., II, 8, 39-52, à la suite de la synodale, v. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, p. 278-279. Sur cette profession de foi, v. F. Loofs, Das Glaubensbekenmtnis der Homousianer von Sardica, dans Ahandlungen der kgl. preuss. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1909. V. De Clercq, Ossius of Cordova, p. 362-376, ne croit pas qu’il s’agisse d’un document officiel du concile, v. déjà en ce sense, L. Duchesne, Histoire de l’Eglise, II, p. 221-223.
197 Tome aux Antiochiens, 5, PG 26, 800c; v. Lietzmann, Histoire de l’Église, 3, p. 276-278; H. Hess, The canons of Sardica, p. 13.
198 Index des LF (343), SC 317, p. 143 et le commentaire, p. 291-292, n. 47, et p. 295, n. 61.
199 27 Mars à Alexandrie, 3 Avril à Rome qui vient d’abandonner l’ancien comput par octaéteris pour adopter le cycle de 84 `ans, v . B. Krusch, Studien Zur Christlichmittelalterlicher Chronologie. Der 84 jährige Osterzyclus und seine Quellen, Leipzig, 1880.
Martin, Athanase, 432-33.
Prof. Martin understands the Tome’s rejection of the authority of the Western Creed of the Council of Serdica to rest upon Athanasius’ assertion that the “nouvelle formule” proposed by Ossius and Protogenes at Serdica was rejected because the Council held the Nicene formula to be sufficient. She considers Athanasius’ interpretation of Serdica in the Tome, made almost twenty years after that Council, to reflect his calling the Synod of Alexandria in order to assemble as many of the Oriental bishops as possible around a common affirmation of the Nicene Creed. It is of course true that he called the Council of Alexandria to summon support for the Nicene Creed, but this hardly renders merely opportune his denial in the Tome of the doctrinal authority of the personal letter of the two bishops, Ossius and Protogenes, which letter is in fact the supposed “Une formule de foi, proposée par Ossius et Protogène,“
Her explanation is of course credible; however, Prof. Martin then proceeds to link Athanasius’ disavowal of the authority of the Creed of Serdica to the dating of Easter by the Council of Serdica: thus: “ce compromis permettait de s’entendre sur le jour de la fête.” The pertinence of this proposition may become more clear with recourse to the material cited in its support by Martin (op. cit., at 433, note 198), quoted here in extenso:
47. Le concile de Nicée avait tenté d’établir l’unité à ce sujet entre l’Orient et l’Occident; cf. la synodale à l’Égl. d’Alex, et aux Églises d’Égypte, ap. Socrates, I, 9, et la lettre de Constantin aux Églises, ap. Eusèbe, Vita Const., III 17 (éd. Opitz, Athanasius Werke III, urk. 23, 12 et 26, 11). D’après Cyrille d’Alexandrie, Prologus paschalis, l’Église d’Alex., à cause de sa science en la matière, aurait été chargée d’annoncer la date de Pâques à l’Église de Rome, laquelle devait la faire savoir aux autres Églises, cf. S. Léon, ep. 121 (à l’emp. Marcien), PL 54, 1055 (Héfélé-Lelercq, Hist. des conciles, I, 1, p. 465-466). Mais chacune des deux Églises continua d’employer son propre cycle. En 343, Rome vient d’abandonner l’ancien comput par octaétéris pour adopter le cycle de 84 ans (parfois appelé, à tort, « cycle romain de 84 ans ») connu de l’Église latine depuis la fin du iiie siècle, ce qui explique la divergence de date pour la célébration pascale entre les deux sièges, 27 Mars à Alexandrie, 3 avril à Rome, v. B. Krusch, Studien Zur christlich-mittelalterlicher Chronologie, Der 84 jahrige Osterzyclus und seine Quellen, Leipzig 1880. Selon l’Index lui-même, ad a. 349, le décret de Sardique établissait que les dates de la fête seraient comprises entre le 30e de phamenôth (26 mars) et le 26e de pharmouthi (21 avril), conformément a la supputatio romana en vigueur à Rome au ive s., le calendrier julien fixant l’équinoxe au 25 mars, le 21 avril à la fête du Natalis Romae. (Dans le cycle alexandrin, la fourchette se situait entre le 23 mars, lendemain de l’équinoxe, et le 20 avril, cf. supra, n. 37). Alexandrie s’est pliée à l’accord en 346, en décidant que Pâques serait le 30 mars au lieu du 23 conforme au comput local, selon l’indication de la 18e lettre festale d’Athanase (PG 26, 1423), de même en 349, en préférant le 26 mars du calendrier romain au 23 avril jugé sans doute trop tardif également par les Alexandrins. On note une divergence en 350, où le comput alexandrin fixe la fête le 8 avril (15e lunae) tandis que Rome, qui répugne traditionnellement à le faire avant le 16e lunae, l’a reportée au dimanche suivant, 15 avril. En 357 et 360, l’évêque arien Georges fixe la fête selon le comput alexandrin, sans tenir compte de l’accord avec Rome, aux 23 mars et 23 avril (30 mars et 16 avril à Rome). Sur cette question, qui est loin d’être totalement éclaircie, v. V. Grumel, Chronologie, p. 188, et « Le problème de la date pascale aux iiie et ive s. » dans Rev. Et. Byz., 18, 1960, p. 163-178; M. Richard, « Le comput pascal par octaétéris », dans Le Muséon, 87, 1974, p. 307-339, plus particulièrement, p. 327-333. Achevant de consacrer la scission entre les deux parties de l’empire, les évêques orientaux, de leur côté, fixèrent un cycle pascal pour trente ans, cf. Codex Veronensis LX, nos 13-14, éd. Turner, EOMJA, LX, 2, 3, p. 641.
A. Martin et M. Albert; Histoire « acéphale » et Index syriaque des Lettres festales d’Athanase d’Alexandrie; ser. Sources Chrétiennes 317 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1985), 291-92.
61. Selon le comput alexandrin, la date de Pâques est le 28e de pharmouthi (23 avril), le 19e Lunae, en effet ; il faut donc comprendre le texte ainsi : le dimanche de Pâques était le 30e de phamenôth (26 mars) – et non le 28e de pharmouthi, le 19e de la lune – parce que les Romains avaient fait opposition. Le rédacteur, par une sorte de lapsus, n’a conservé du comput alexandrin que le jour de la lune, qu’il corrige ensuite, conformément au comput romain, en 21e lunae, cf. supra, n. 47 et Appendice III.
Ibid., 295. “Appendice III” appears on pp. 310-312 of SC 317; its purely technical content is irrelevant to this discussion.
Prof. Martin’s assimilation of Athanasius’ assertion that the Council of Serdica’s dismissed the credal formula produced by Ossius and Protogenes, to the “compromis” at Serdica between the diverse Alexandrine and the Roman dating of Easter, is not persuasive. Each Church over the same thirty years had gone her own way despite a traditional arrangement between them in which Alexandria would determine the date of Easter and inform Rome of it, in order that this determination be then passed on from Rome to the other Western sees.
Prof. Martin further supposes that Athanasius' denial of doctrinal weight to the Western Creed of the Council of Serdica was due to its “relent marcellien;” with which she believes Athanasius to have had little sympathy. She associates Sabellianism too easily with Eustathius of Antioch and his followers, led by Paulinus. The Tome to the Antiochenes does not display this antipathy. Neither did Prof. Martin in her introduction to Athanasius’ attempt to reconcile the homoiousians of Antioch to the faith of Nicaea:
L’enjeu était rien moins que de rallier la masse des fidèles qui avait refusé de reconnaître l’arien Euzoios comme évêque officiel, après l’exile de Mélèce, et de l’unir à la petite Eglise eustathienne demeurée en communion avec l’Alexandrin, nicéen, depuis son passage dans la ville en 346.3
3. Rufin, H.E., I, 20 ; Sozomène, H.E. III, 20 ; Théodoret, H.E., II, 12 ; v. SC 317, p. 63, n. 4.
Martin, Athanase, 541-42.
In Athanase, 432, note 196, Prof. Martin cites J. N. D. Kelly’s rather more satisfactory treatment of the doctrinal statement of the Council of Serdica (Creeds, 277-79). There Kelly remarks of “the creed of the council” that “the general opinion has been that the synod never in fact stamped it with its official approval.” (p. 278) This view corresponds to Athanasius’ dismissal of its doctrinal authority, but on the other hand, Kelly remarks that Athanasius’ Tome is the sole authority for the Council’s failure to approve its creed. However, in his Doctrines (1971), at 341, Kelly had observed that ”Writing almost twenty years later, Athanasius might find it convenient to disown the Serdican manifesto; in fact its main theses, though expressed in old-fashioned terminology, coincided very closely with his own.” This is to beg the question: Aathanasius did not dispute the content, but the standing, as a “credal statement,” of the document written by Ossius and Protogenes, their letter to which Kelly considers to be set out in “theses,” but which was in fact their letter to Julius I in Rome.
In sum, either Athanasius told the truth in § 4 of the Tome, or he did not. Hanson’s assertion, echoed by Martin, and finally by Kelley as well (Creeds, at 279), that he did not tell the truth, may be defensible, but it smacks rather too much of the personal animus Hanson displays in Chapter Nine of Search, “The Behavior of Athanasius,” to be persuasive; certainly it fails of that apodictic certitude which Hanson claims for it. Present at Serdica as an utterly authoritative defender of the doctrine of Nicaea, Athanasius could hardly avoid recognizing, in the quasi-credal statement of Ossius and Protogenes, formulae inevitably competitive with the Nicene Creed, and on that ground, he would certainly have opposed it, and his opposition would have been confirmed by the Council. In the same note in which Prof. Martin has cited Kelly and Hanson, she has also cited V. De Clerq, Ossius of Cordoba, 362-376, who does not consider the letter of Ossius and Protogenes to Julius to have been an official document of the Council ; she cites as well Louis Duchesne who, in Histoire de l’Eglise II, 221-223, is of the same opinion. While neither work adds significantly to the evidence at hand, Duchesne’s refusal to rule against the testimony of Athanasius in the Tome to the Antiochenes cannot be disregarded.
J. N. D. Kelly interprets the document sent by Bishops Ossius and Protogenes to Pope Julius as an apology, and it may well have been one. However, its long formula, had it been presented to and rejected by the Synod of Western bishops at Serdica, could scarcely be considered to have been the purely private matter suggested by Kelly. Had its credal formula in fact been approved at Serdica by a Synod which included representatives of the Pope, the need to respond to a suspicion of its authors’ disloyalty to Nicaea could not have arisen. That such a need was felt by Ossius and Protogenes can be explained only by the agreement of the Synod with Athanasius’ objections to their document as competitive with the Nicene Creed, and the Synod’s consequent rejection of it. The notion that his Tome to the Antiochenes represents at best an awkward retreat from his doctrinal position at Serduca is refuted by the facts. Immediately upon his return in 346 from his second exile, three years after Serdica, Athanasius called a local council to acquaint his suffragans with the decisions made at Serdica; which eighty four of his suffragan bishops approved. They had been prevented from attending the Council at Serdica by the usurper George of Cappadocia, who was then ill and who died in 345. Annick Martin, Athanase, 451, 452, n.5, discusssing this “Synod de 346”, does not suggest that the doctrinal consensus exhibited at the Synod entailed any departure from the Nicene Creed.
Further, Kelly notes in Doctrines, at 276, that the Council of Serdica joined to its emphasis upon the “one hypostasis” a caveat against any (modal or Sabellian) identification of the Son with the Father. However, as Kelly also observes, the emphasis upon “one hypostasis” of the document drawn up by Ossius and Protogenes at Serdica and its condemnation of the “three hypostases,” conflicts with the Tome’s willingness to accept the Nicene usage of ousia as the equivalent of hypostasis, and of course, conflicts with its acceptance of an orthodox sense of the three hypostases whose use, prior to his De synodis in 359, Athanasius had regarded as implicitly subordinationist; the corruption by Eusebius of Caesarea of Origen’s mia ousia, treis hypostaseis having been widely accepted in the Orient well before the Council of Serdica . It must follow that whatever be considered the source of an alleged Eustathian modalism, it is not the so-called Western Creed of the Council of Serdica, whatever its “relent marcellien.” In fact, Prof. Martin appears to agree: she looks rather to Eustathius of Antioch as the source of Paulinus’ “Sabellian” stress upon the “one hypostasis” doctrine, as of course it was for his Eustathian followers also. But the notion that Eustathius of Antioch was a Sabellian has only the exceedingly dubious authority of the Eusebian rejection, as Sabellian, of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father. The fragments of his works so carefully edited by Michel Spanneut, op. cit., do not bar Eustathius’ Nicene orthodoxy. Theodoret’s diophysite interpretation of them apart, they offer insufficient ground for suspicion of his departure from the Nicene Creed; see Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 207-09.
The failure at Serdica to provide an explanation of the Father-Son distinction, which Kelly notes, is also a failure of Athanasius, as it will be a failure of the Cappadocians, but the failure is theological, not doctrinal. The doctrinal tradition understands the Father and the Son to be distinct as liturgically Named: i.e., as Father and Son are distinct. (See Kelly, Creeds, at 278). “Names’ denote Persons, but of this Kelley is not persuaded, for he adds: “But the way in which they are separate Persons in any comprehensible sense is not made clear.” In the polemical setting of the Council of Serdica, the substantial meaning which Origen had attached to ousia, and the personal meaning which he had attached to hypostasis, had long been lost, due to the unflagging Eusebian reading of Origen as a subordinationist. The Western bishops at Serdica were clear on the Nicene definition of the substantial unity of the Trinity, while the Oriental bishops had been taught by Eusebius of Caesarea to condemn that docrine as Sabellian, particularly as represented by Eustathius and Marcellus. Athanasius met this opposition by insisting upon the Nicene doctrine which his Oriental opponents had rejected, the substantial unity, “mia hypostasis,” of the Triune God. He had no interest in discussing doctrine with opponents of the Nicene Creed. Athanasius knew the inescapable corollary of his stress upon the mia hypostasis of the Trinity to be the Personal homoousion of the Son and of the Holy Spirit with the Father, and consequently with each other. So also did the Eusebians, who could not conceive of that consubstantiality as other than as Sabellian.
It is the task of Councils such as Serdica to proclaim the truth of the faith; they have no theological responsibility or interest. Not only are they are not required to explain the mystery of Personal distinctions in the Trinity, whose reality and truth they proclaim, but further, any attempt to do so would be a retrogression from teaching the faith to an inherently debatable rational extrapolation. By definition, mystery is not explicable; rather, it is foundational. Councils defend the inexhaustible truth of that mystery by developing its intrinsic truth, as the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon developed the intrinsic truth, taught at Nicaea, of homoousion of the Son with the Father, in stating the ineluctable implication of the unity of humanity and divinity in his Person, by reason of which Personal unity he is Personally consubstantial not only with the Father, but with us as well, for He is so as our head, and would not otherwise be Jesus our Lord. .
[563] A. Martin, Athanase, at 557-58.
[564] Ibid., 561-62, 820. Martin considers the Eustathians to have been close to Sabellianism; she understands Athanasius’ denial, in the Tome, of the doctrinal authority of the Council of Serdica to counter the Eustathians’ enthusiasm for that Council’s heavy stress upon the divine unity (her stress on its ‘relent marcellien’ ignores the accompanying condemnation of Sabellianism), in which they would have heard an echo of Eustathius’ insistence upon the Nicene mia ousia. He had been condemned as Sabellian for that pro-Nicene posture by the two Eusebii, who found Sabellianism wherever they did not find agreement with their own subordinationist reading of the treis hypostaseis. From Prof. Martin’s stance, the Tome’s denial of the authority of Serdica is aimed simply at the Eustathians, inasmuch as the homoiousian resistance to Nicaea was rather subordinationist than Sabellian.
25 En commençant par rejeter, au début du § 5, la formule de Sardique – il l’avait, du reste, lui-même omise de l’encyclique rapportée dans l’Apol. c. ar., 42-47 (= PG 25 :44-50) – Athanase prend ses distances avec Marcel d’Ancyre, présent, comme lui, à Sardique, ainsi qu’avec Paulin, le disciple d’Eustathe.
A. Martin, Athanase, 551, n. 25 (emphasis added).
This account leaves unexplained the compliments Athanasius paid the “Paulinians” in the Tome, the full assent the Tome Paulinus’ delegates to the Council of Alexandria, Paulinus’ subsequent subscription to the Tome when the opportunity arose in 363 upon Athanasius’ visit to Antioch in that year, and Athanasius’ recognition, during that visit, of the authenticity of Paulinus’ episcopal consecration by Lucifer of Cagliari, despite Eusebius of Vercelli’s disapproval of it as “irregular” a year earlier. His basis for this judgment can only be the legitimacy of Meletius claim to the See of Antioch, well acquainted with the Tome to the Antiochenes, heknew Athanasius to deny.
It is evident that Athanasius considered the Antiochene schism a product of the Arian rejection of the Nicene homoousion of the Son with the Father. Therefore he was convinced that a return to full confessional unity could be predicated only upon an unqualified profession of the Nicene Creed, for which there could be no substitute. Prof. Martin recognizes that Athanasius would admit no “new formula”, whether in the Western Creed of Serdica or in the Tome. Consistent with this conviction, Athanasius read the concluding clause of the Nicene Creed, “and in the Holy Spirit,” the Creed’s explicit inclusion of the Holy Spirit within the object of the Church’s Trinitarian faith, as an affirmation of the divinity of the Spirit, and thus of the identity of the Spirit’s substance with the substance of the Father and the Son. He was careful in the Tome not to go beyond the doctrinal content of the Creed, and so left the homoousion of the Spirit implicit in the Tome’s assertion of the Spirit’s divinity: this entailed an identity of substance with the Son, who is homoousios with the Father.
Annick Martin considers Athanasius’ inclusion of the doctrine of the divinity of the Holy Spirit in the Nicene Creed to be a concession to the inadequacy of the Creed itself (Athanase, 558). She is of course correct in that no assertion of the faith of the Church is adequate in the sense of exhausting the content of its inexhaustible object, the mysterium Christi. Even the Pauline summary of that faith, “Jesus Christ is Lord,” which affirms it in toto, does not pretend to comprehend it: the Mysterium fidei invites a free inquiry into truth which never ceases to be a free inquiry, for its object is inexhaustible. Magisterial definitions do not foreclose that inquiry; rather, they protect and sustain it. The question posed by the supposed inadequacy of the Nicene Creed is reducible to whether the Tome’s inclusion of the divinity of the Holy Spirit in the Nicene Creed should be regarded as a development of the Nicene doctrine rather than the doctrine itself, taught by the Council in its Creed. A doctrinal development would be difficult to substantiate: e.g., the denials of the Holy Spirit’s divinity by the Tropici and the Pneumatomachians were immediately perceived by the pro-Nicene to be Arian, as condemned a priori by the Nicene Creed, if not by the baptismal formula of the Church’s liturgy, and by the sign of the Cross by which Christians recognized each other. The difficulties posed to theologians by the Nicene Creed cannot be read into the Creed, which is a liturgical and consequently doctrinal affirmation of the faith of the Church, an utterance of her worship in truth, not a theological proposition open to theological debate and needing theological “reception.”
In the end, it is fairly clear that Athanasius’ objection to reliance upon the doctrine of Serdica is in function of his conviction of the indispensability of the Nicene Creed as the uniquely authoritative statement of the Catholic faith, consensus with which is the only possible remedy for the Antiochene schism: there can be no substitute. Athanasius had no use for the homoiousian compromise between homoean Arianism and the doctrine of Nicaea: he had long insisted that the one alternative to the Nicene homoousion is the Neo-Arian heteroousion. This alone accounts for his resistance to Basil of Caesarea’s effort to persuade him to look upon Meletius as an orthodox bishop capable of resolving the Antiochene schism by negotiation and compromise. Meletius’ melding of the Nicene homoousion with the homoiousion doctrine at the Council of Antioch over which he presided in 363 was precisely such a political rejection of the Church’s magisterial authority as the Eusebians had long approved. This could not but be radically unacceptable to Athanasius, not only in its evasion of the dogmatic clarity of the Nicene Creed, as Martin has shown (Athanase, at 583-87), but also because its willingness to confuse issues rather than resolve them was the hallmark of the Arian heresy, whose single alternative is the faith of Nicaea. The Antiochenes political decision to read the Nicene homoousion as compatible with the Eusebian homoiousion had been anticipated by Hilary of Poitiers, with the binitarian consequences examined heretofore, and accepted by Basil of Caesarea, whose letters thereafter Athanasis did not answer.
[565] Curiously, Prof. Martin, Athanase, at 10, follows F. L. Cross in supposing Athanasius’ commitment to the Nicene “homoousios” to be a rupture with the Alexandrine tradition and with Origen, citing in this connection Cross’ The Study of St. Athanasius. An inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford, 1 December, 1944. (Oxford, 1945). Crouzel, a more reliable authority on Origen, has established the interdependence of Origen’s designation of the Father, the Son and the Spirit as distinct hypostases intrinsic to the divine substance, with the unity of that substance, which Origen terms “ousia,” The Nicene condemnation of Arius designates the divine substantial unity indifferently as “mia ousia ” and “mia hypostasis,” although the Creed speaks of its corollary, the “homoousios” of the Son. We may suppose Alexander, whom Athanasius supported vigorously at Nicaea, to be an exponent of the Alexandrine tradition, and his selection of Athanasius to succeed him to have been consistent with his own responsibility for that tradition. Clearly, Athanasius’ use of “mia hypostasis” to refer to the substantial unity of God, together with his commitment to the Nicene “homoousios,” constitute no rupture with Origen nor with the Alexandrine tradition. Athanasius’ adherence to the “mia hypostasis” is the corollary of his adherence to the Nicene doctrine of the homoousion of the Son with the Father, a doctrine anticipated by Origen. Athanasius was indifferent to the word “hyopostasis” itself as long as its surrogate was understood to denote the absolute unity of the divine Substance. His opposition to the Eusebian “treis hypostaseis” was the corollary of his refusal of the Eusebians’ subordinationist qualification of the substantial unity of the Trinity―again, he was indifferent to the words themselves, whether ousia or hypsotasis, when, as in his Tome, they are understood to denote the consubstantial Members of the Trinity.
[566] Hanson cites the pithy insight of the historian Sozomenus into the homoiousian development of the subordinationist rationale:
Sozomenus (HE III:18) remarks percipiently that to the Homoiousians spiritual substances could not be homoousios; only material substances could be that,38 And this may well explain the precise difference between the views of Basil of Ancyra and those of the champions of the homoousios.
38 J. N. Steenson, Basil of Ancyra and the Course of Nicene Orthodoxy (unpublished manuscript presented to the University of Oxford, 1983) calls attention to this at 204-05.
Hanson, Search, at 356.
The universal cosmological identification of the divine substance as monadic and consequently as an absolute Monas was overruled at Nicaea, by the doctrinal affirmation of the Personal consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, whose corollaries are that the Father is a member of the Trinity, and that Jesus is the Lord. The Council offered no speculative apologia for its affirmation of the faith of the Church that Jesus, the Son of the Father, is of the same substance as the Father, whether that unity be expressed as mia ousia or as mia hypostasis: in the event the Creed affirmed Origen’s usage by defining the homoousion of the Son with the Father. A century and a quarter would be required before its full Christological and Trinitarian import would be defined at Chalcedon. Contemporary theology, still Eusebian, still locked in cosmological rationality, has yet to “receive” that definition.
Sozomen’s insight into homoiousian critique of the Nicene homoousios is consistent with Basil of Caesarea’s rather generic understanding of ousia relative to hypostasis in the Trinity: see Hanson, Search, at 697-98: A generic interpretation of ousia, i.e., of substantial unity connotes a merely nominal unity, no longer a reality “indivisum in se, divisum ab omni alio,” but an indeterminate member of a category, which can only be labeled and numbered, a Person who, as beyond all categories, must be Named to be identified, whether the Name be divine or human.
However, the “precise difference” between Basil of Ancyra’s homoiousian variant of the Eusebian subordinationism and the Nicene homoousion is revealed by the Pneumatomachian development of the denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit that is implicit in the Basil’s restriction of “homoiousios,” “the single concept of likeness” to the Son. Basil of Caesarea rejected this denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit out of hand: see Lienhard, “Ps-Athanasius, Contra Sabellianos, and Basil of Caesarea, Contra Sabellianos et Arium et Anomoeos: An Analysis and Comparison” Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1986) pp. 365-389, at 372. However, in his De Spiritu Sancto, Basil carefully refrains from attributing any hypostatatic standing to the Holy Spirit. His acceptance of the Meletian melding of the Nicene homoousion with the homoiousian “homoios kat’ousian” could not but repel Athanasius as false to the Nicene Creed: see A. Martin, Athanase, 583.
[567] A. Martin, Athanase, at 555. Replying to the criticism, particularly by A. Grillmeier, bearing upon the supposed minor role of the soul of Christ in Athanasius’ Christology as set out in the Tome, she observes:
La question de la réalité de l’âme humaine du Christ ne s’était tout simplement pas posée à Athanase. De plus, en le coupant ainsi du reste du Tome, c’est la cohérence de la démonstration voulue par Athanase qui se trouve détruite. Soucieux de faire accepter unanimement le Nicaenum à ceux qu’il cherche à unir en Orient, celui-ci a parfaitement compris le danger représenté par les Eustathiens qui brandissaient la formule de Sardique pour justifier une doctrine proche de celle de Marcel d’Ancyre, blanchi par ce même concile Considérée comme source de disputes sans fin précisément à cause de son fort relent marcellien, une telle formule ne pouvait qu’être écartée car elle faisait obstacle à la unité recherché. L’ensemble du Tome, y compris le paragraphe 7, doit donc bien être lu comme un réponse à la formule des Occidentaux à Sardique, très proche de ce que M. Simonetti a si justement appelé le monarchianisme moderé35, et cette réponse est tout entière continue dans l’affirmation de la foi de Nicée, ici précisée, que la formule de Sardique, en s’abstenant d’en reprendre les termes, semblait remettre en cause. C’est, du reste, ce qu’indique fort clairement à la fin du Tome, la souscription d’Eusèbe de Verceil, qui, après avoir confirmé son accord sur les hypostases et l’Incarnation, s’achève sur la reconnaissance de la seule foi de Nicée, à l’exclusion explicite de «°La lettre de Sardique.°».36
35 Sabellio e il sabellianismo, dans Studi storico religiosi, 4, 1980, p. 7-28.
36 10, 3. p. 328 (= 808 C) «et puisque la lettre de Sardique est exclue pour ne pas avoir été produite à coté de la foi de Nicée, moi aussi je donne mon accord.»
A. Martin, Athanase, 555-56. Cf. J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 277-79,
Prof. Martin’s language here is
overwrought. Marcellus’ orthodoxy had been accepted by Pope Julius well before
his presence at the Council of Serdica; he had no need to be “blanchi”
(bleached, i.e., whitewashed) by that Council. Joseph Lienhard has published a
more positive analysis of the relation between Marcellus and Athanasius; see
endnote 675, supra.
[568] Ibid., citing Martin, Athanase, 551, n. 23.
[570] The very few loyal Nicene bishops who had been able to attend the Council of Seleucia in 359 had informed Athanasius, then in exile, of their joinder with the homoiousian party of the schismatic Egyptian bishops in opposition to the homoean document presented to them there for their signatures. At this time, the Egyptian bishops, apart from the few Nicenes who had survived thirty years of persecution, were divided between a homoiousian majority and an Eunomian i.e., Acacian, minority, Annick Martin has concisely summarized their situation:
Ainsi, parmi le quelque cent-soixante évêques d’Orient réunis à Séleucie, la présence de deux groupes d’Egyptiens, les uns du côté des Acaciens, les autres avec les Homéousiens, manifestait la profonde division de l’Eglise d’Egypte et le anéantissement des Nicéens. Toutefois, ces rares Nicéens, contraints de faire bloque avec les Homéousiens, furent à les origine, par les informations qu’ils rapportérent, de l’évolution stratégique d’Athanase. Le concile devait se séparer le 1er octobre sur un constat de désaccord total entre les partis, les uns soutenant la foi d’Acace, les autres tenant celle confirmée à Antioche par les pères en 341.
Athanase, at 522.
The concluding reference to Antioch is to the Second Creed of Antioch, the “Dedication Creed;” Hanson, Search, 286, has provided an English translation. It affirms the three hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit, which Hanson considers consistent with the Eusebian subordinationism but hardly with Arianism. He describes the creed rather as anti-Sabellian than deliberately anti-Marcellian, probably intending support of the Eusebian interpretation of the Nicene homoousion as Sabellian.
[571] A. Martin, Athanase, 541-42 .
[572] Hanson, Search, 382-84.
[573] Theodoret’s Historia ecclesiastica, 1. 3 uses this expression, as does the Tome, to designate the church, already ancient, which had been restored by Bishop Vitalis in the early fourth century: see Histoire Ecclesiastique: Theodoret de Cyr. Col. Sources chrétiennes 501 (Paris, Cerf, 2006) at 150.
[574] The doctrinal confusion manifest in and furthered by these Councils is the subject of his De synodis, published in 359 and in a revision in 361.
[575] Thus A. Martin:
L’objectif principal du Tome aura donc été de resserrer les rangs autour de la foi de Nicée avec insistance en référence à chacun des points discutés.40 Et c’est a partir d’elle, et d’elle seule, qu’est proposée l’union.
40 Tomos, 3 (deux fois citée, 4 (ibid.), 5 (quatre fois), 6, 8, et 9 ; de manière implicite en 7, v. supra.
Athanase, 557.
[576] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 246, notes that Athanasius had used homoios kat’ousian in his early works, but dropped it by 350 when the subordinationist import of the phrase became evident.
[577] However powerfully influenced by Origen, the Alexandrine tradition includes criticism of him by the martyred archbishop Peter, who objected to Origen’s hypothesis of ‘the pre-existence of souls’ (Crouzel, Origen, at 209) and to his theology of the resurrected body. The latter criticism, according to Crouzel, rests upon a misunderstanding (ibid., at 249). Peter’s works are available only in fragments; see Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 259-61.
[579] Anathasius’ theology of the Holy Spirit, developed in his letters to Serapion of Thmuis prior to the Council of Alexandria, clearly affirms the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father and of the Spirit with the Father and the Son. This goes beyond what the Tome’s affirmation of the divinity of the Spirit, and his unity of substance with the Son, which Athanasius considers to be taught explicitly by the Nicene Creed by way of the Spirit’s inclusion within the Trinitarian object of the faith of the Church. See Athanasius: Lettres à Sérapion sur la divinité du Saint-Esprit. Introduction et traduction de Joseph Lebon ; ser. Sources Chrétiennes 15 (Paris : Editions du Cerf, 1947). Lebon’s reference to Theognostus is in error: cf. endnote 603, supra.
[580] Basil of Caesarea’s supposed resolution of the Trinitarian enigma of coincident unity and plurality posed by the doctrine of three divine hypostases and one divine Substance (tres hypostaseis, mia ousia) had not only made no advance upon Athanasius, in that it offered no formula for differentiating the hypostases within the unity of the divine substance, but it was made impossible by Basil’s subscription to the homoiousian version of the Eusebian subordinationism, as became clear in the Council of Antioch in 363. This entailed Basil’s rejection of the Nicene doctrine of the substantial unity of the Trinity affirmed by Athanasius as it had been affirmed by had Tertullian and Origen long before him, viz., three divine Persons and one divine Substance. Beyond insisting upon the absolute indivisibility of the divine Substance, as the corollary of the Son’s homoousios with the Father, and upon the divinity of the Holy Spirit, Athanasius had no interest in a theological elaboration of the Nicene Creed, for he found in such efforts a source of confusion and discord. It sufficed to affirm that “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” Name distinct hypostases within the unqualified substantial unity of the Trinity. To go further is unnecessary, even impossible. This opens him to the charge that he has not explained what is three and what is one in the Trinity, but to do so is to use abstraction to explain the concrete mystery of the Trinity, in short, to confuse theology with cosmology.
[581] A. Martin, Athanase, at 547, n. 12, cites Athanasius’ Letter to Rufianus (P. G. 26:1181B, 3-9), written in 362, stating the qualifications he required of any bishop for consideration as capable of becoming the center of Nicene orthodoxy at Antioch. Prof. Martin then proceeds (548-58) to provide an account and assessment of the content, addressees, and intended audience of the Tome to the Antiochenes. See also Hanson, Search, at 639ff. On the following page, Hanson summarized the Tome’s doctrinal demands:
The only demands for restoring communion with these Christians of Antioch which the Letter makes are:
(i) to condemn the Arian heresy
(ii) to accept N(icaea)
(iii) to condemn those who say that the Holy Spirit is a creature and separated from the ousia of Christ
(iv) to condemn the heresies of Sabellius and Paul of Samosata and Valentinus and Basilides and that of the Manichaeans
Hanson, Search, at 640,
Athanasius’ insistence, in the Tome, upon the acceptance of Nicaea, as A. Martin emphasizes, requires that it be recognized as the unique foundation of the anticipated doctrinal accord, but adds cautelae which, in Martin’s view, amount to a tacit admission of the insufficiency of the Nicene Creed apart from the “gloss” upon its final phrase, “and in the Holy Spirit,” which she believes to have been provided` by the Tome.
Pour que les antiariens l’acceptent, il fallait donc faire sauter les obstacles, en apportant les éclaircissements nécessaires sur l’hypostasis, sur le saint-Esprit, sur la réalité de l’Incarnation, en marquant nettement a chaque fois les distances par rapport au Sabellianisme, mais sans toutefois aller jusqu’à proposer, comme tant d’autres, y compris les Occidentaux à Sardique, une nouvelle formule. C’eut été laisser croire celle de Nicée « imparfaite » ou « incomplète »,42 et contraire au but recherche. C’est pourquoi l’évêque s’excuse, pour finir, d’avoir du procéder a une recherche pour en faire accepter les termes. C’était aussi de sa part un aveu implicite de son insuffisance.
42 5, 1, p.323 (= 800 C5) )
A. Martin, Athanase, 557-58 (emphasis added).
On the other hand, in the Tome Athanasius understands the Church’s faith in divinity of the Holy Spirit to be included within the Nicene Creed by its last phrase (“and in the Holy Spirit”) which he reads as the Creed’s inclusion of the Holy Spirit within the object of the Church’s Trinitarian faith and thus as entailing the consubstantiality of the Spirit with the Son. Athanasius’ commentary on this phrase constitutes the “gloss” to which Prof. Martin refers as Athanasius’ implicit admission of the inadequacy of the Creed itself. As a scholarly judgement her inference may stand. Insofar as “implicite” connotes a vacillation in Athanasius’ conviction of the entire adequacy and consequent indispensability of the Nicene Creed, it cannot.
Prof. Martin further believes the Tome’s stress upon Nicaea, the indispensable foundation of Athanasius’ prospective confessional unity with the Meletians, to require the Eustathians explicitly affor, exclusive adherence to the Nicene doctrine as a pre-condition of their undertaking their missionary project of converting the Meletian homoiousians to the faith of Nicaea. Speaking of the Tome to the Antiochenes she remarks:
La lettre, avec ses accommodements dont les évêques présents se portent garants, doit donc servir de bas à la réunion des deux communautés, et, si notre interprétation du text est correcte, c’est d’abord aux Pauliniens que les délegués devront la faire accepter. Après quoi, il sera facile de réunir tout le peuple. « Ceux qui réunissent à la Palée sont prêts – Athanase veut le croire – à répondre aux propositions faites par les Nicéens, les Pauliniens, au contraire, semblent s’accrocher plus durement à leurs positions. C’est donc bien eux qu’il s’agit de convaincre.
This interpretation of the Tome goes well beyond what its text supports in supposing that Paulinus’ delegates to the Council of Alexandria spoke for him rather than for the Eustathians whom he led, although the delegates, themselves Eustathians, had accepted the Tome without objection to its dismissal of the doctrinal authority of the Council of Serdica. In fact, the Tome takes their assent for granted (Tome, 4). “Les Nicéens” among “les délegués” present at the Council are limited to those of Eusebius of Vercelli and Lucifer of Cagliari; Asterius’ affinity with the West at Serdica would rule him out as pro-Nicene unless Athanasius’ denial of any doctrinal statement by the Council of Serdica is accepted, as it must be if Asterius’ presence at the Council of Alexandria is to make sense. Lucifer obviously held the same high opinion of Paulinus, and presumably of his followers, as did Athanasius. The only support for supposing the doctrinal obstinacy of the Eustathians to have been recognized as an obstacle to be overcome, before the conversion of the homoiousians might be addressed, is Eusebius of Vercelli’s subscription to the Tome.
C’est, du reste, ce qu’indique fort clairementà la fin du Tome, la souscription d »Eusèbe de Verceil, qui, après avoir confirmé son accord sur les hypostases et l’Incarnation, s’achève sur la reconnaissance de la seule foi de Nicée, à l’exclusion explicite de la lettre de Sardique.36
36. 10, 3 p. 328 = 808 C) “ » « et puisque la lettre de Sardique est exclue pour ne pas paraître avoir été produite à coté de la foi de Nicée, moi aussi je donne mon accord. »
Eusebius of Vercelli’s subscription can be read, as by Prof. Martin, to interpret Athanasius’ dismissal of the authority of Serdica as implying a reliance of the Eustathians upon it. However, given that Athanasius welcomedof Paulinus’ delegates to the Council of Alexandria―whom he had probably invited, since Paulinus, only a priest, is unlikely to have sent delegates to the Council without an antecedent assurance of their welcome―the unqualified subscription of Paulinus’ delegates to the Tome, doubtless in conformity to the wishes of Paulinus whom, as his delegates, they represented, and in conformity also to the Eustathian minority in Antioch, Professor Martin’s interpretation of Eusebius of Vercelli’s subscription to Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes as an attempt to offers slender support for such inference. Cf. endnote 651 supra.
There remains the report by Hilary of Poitiers (Frag. Hist. II, 9, textus narrat., 2, (CSEL 65, p. 146) of a breach between Athanasius and Marcellus at Serdica; Joseph Lienhard’s analysis of this passage in endnote 625, infra, does not support that of Prof. Martin.
[582] As noted supra, endnote 328 supra, Annick Martin displays an unwarranted animus against Paulinus, describing him (Athanase, 551, n. 23), as a “disciple of Eustathius,” from whom Athanasius “kept his distance,” quite as Martin thinks Athanasius o have avoided Marcellus as well. Paulinus was a priest loyal to Eustathius of Antioch, his bishop, and continued that loyalty in refusing to recognize the claims of a succession of Arians to the See of Antioch. Athanasius received Paulinus’ delegates at the Council of Alexandria. The Tome’s project of ecclesial reconciliation; i.e., of the Antiochenes acceptance of the Nicene Creed, failed by reason of Lucifer of Cagliari’s consecration of Paulinus. Nonetheless a year later, when Athanasius travelled to Antioch to meet Jovian, Athanasius recognized Paulinus’ consecration by Lucifer as valid. Paulinus, with Athanasius and Eustathius, affirmed the “mia hypostasis, mia ousia ” of Nicaea and, as with the purported “Western Creed” of Serdica, rejected the subordinationist interpretation of Origen’s "treis hypostaseis" doctrine by the Eusebian Orientals, while condemning Sabellianism. As for Athanasius relations with Marcellus, see Volume III, endnote 625, infra.
Holy [583] It is precisely the incompatibility of the “three hypostases” with the homoiousian doctrine of Basil of Ancyra that fueled the Pneumatomachian denial of the hypostatic or Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit. We have seen Hilary, under the influence of Basil of Ancyra, denying the Personal distinction of the Holy Spirit from the Son. The alternative was the Pneumatomachian reduction of the Spirit to a creature. Hilary’s modalist denial of the third of the “three hypostases” was unknown in the Orient where, apart from adherents to the Pneumatomachian reversion to Arianism. The homoiousian party affirmed the “three hypostases,” following the Letter of George of Laodicea, who probably did not attend the council whose doctrine his letter purports to affirm. The homoiousian subordinationism made George’s assertion of the “three hypostases” George’s Letter affirmation of “three hypostases” deceptive and probably contributed to the belief that Meletius was pro-Nicene, which led to his brief presidency ot the First Council of Constantinople.
[584] A. Martin is insistent upon the presence of this “relent marcellien” in the Western Creed of Serdica and upon the influence of it upon the Eustathians who “brandissaient la formule de Sardique”; Athanase, 555, 820: cf. endnote 372, 910, and 927, supra. Evidence of this Eustathian ‘brandishing” is elusive.
[585] In the pastoral letter sent to his archdiocese during the Council, Eusebius of Caesarea attempted to compromise his subordinationism with the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son with the Father; see Kelly, Creeds, at 212-15.
[586] A. Martin, Athanase, at 559.
[587] In Athanase, at 545, n. 8, Martin cites Athanasius’ recognition of this situation in his Catholic Letter, addressed in 361, while still in exile, to the few orthodox bishops of Egypt―about fifteen―who, with him, had survived three decades of imperial persecution, and were by this time nearly alone in their loyalty to the doctrine of Nicaea. On the page following (546, n. 9), Martin provides an account of these Alexandrine bishops, Libyan and Egyptian, with their dioceses insofar as known. Three of the names of the bishops persecuted by the Arian usurper of Athanasius’ See during his third exile, the George of Cappadocia whom Constantius had named bishop of Alexandria, and who held that usurped post, as George, bishop of Alexandria, until killed by a pagan mob in 361. Those who were officially restored to their sees by Athanasius upon his return from exile in 362, cannot be identified. Five of the surviving nineteen were not among the fourteen whose presence with Athanasius at the Council of Alexandria is witnessed by their subscription to the Tome. It is striking that Serapion of Thmuis did not attend the Council: the only possible explanation of his absence is his inability to attend it. The date of his death is not known, but there is no evidence of his return to Thmuis when Julian allowed the bishops exiled by Constantius to return to their sees. His last letter to Athanasius therefore cannot be dated later than 362.
[588] J. N. D. Kelly, discussing the Cappadocian stress on the unqualified unity of God set out in Basil’s supposed Letter 38, 4, fails to mention that the Letter’s concept of this unity is not yet that of a Trinity: i.e., it excludes the homoousion of the Son with the Father, and consequently must retain the monadic conception of divine unity proper to the Eusebian theology, with the unavoidably subordinationist implications of its use of the “three hypostases;” see endnote 451, supra. Basil avoids this explicit subordinationism by supposing the divine substance to subsist in three hypostases, hardly an improvement. Substances subsist in themselves. They do not and cannot subsist in other substances, for mode of subistence is proper to accidents.
[589] A. Martin, Athanase, 551, and Hanson both maintain that Basil of Ancyra affirmed the three hypostases of the Trinity. However, Hanson quotes a sentence from the doctrinal statement issued by Basil’s Council of 358 which is incompatible with that orthodoxy. As translated by Hanson, it reads:
There shall be left the single concept of likeness’20.
20μόνη παραλειφθήσεται ἕννοία τοῦ ὁμοίου, [Epiphanius, Panarion 73-4, p. 272 [Holl’s edition].73-4.Ι (272)
Hanson, Search, at 352.
The “single concept of likeness” refers to the doctrine, confected at this council, that the Son is uniquely like his Father at the level of substance, homoios kat’ousian. It is evident that the “single concept of likeness” is unique to the Son; the dogmatic document of the Council as translated by Hanson, reveals no interest in the Personal divinity of the Holy Spirit (see also J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 259). On his next page, 253, Hansen remarks of the doctrine of the “three hypostases” that it is “highly congenial to Basil and his school.” Included in the small number of bishops attending the Council of Ancyra are Macedonius of Constantinople and Eustathius of Sebaste. These bishops signed Basil’s doctrinal statement, and probably contributed to its formulation. It cannot be said that the doctrine of “three hypostases” was congenial to either of them. Eustathius of Sebaste led the Pneumatomachian revolt against the moderate homoiousian accommodation to the divinity of the Holy Spirit although, for whatever reason, the Pneumatomachians later came to be labeled Macedonians. Kelly has neatly summed up the situation:
The Pneumatomachians, as they are more suitably named, harked back to the left-wing Homoiousians whom Athanasius must have had in mind when insisting upon the homoousion of the Spirit at Alexandria. The moderate among them accepted5 the consubstantiality of the Son, but the more radical (led by Eustathius of Sebaste after his rupture with Basil in 373―‘the leader of the sect of the Spirit-fighters’6) preferred7 ‘like in substance” or ‘like in all things.’ The position of both groups is aptly summarized by a statement1 attributed to Eustathius of Sebaste that he did not “choose to call the Spirit God nor presume to call him a creature;” as others expressed it,2 ‘He occupies a middle position, being neither God, nor one of the others [i.e., the creatures].’ …. They also argued5 that, since no relationship was conceivable within the Godhead except that of Father and Son, the Spirit, if God, must be either a coordinate unoriginate principle with the Father, or the Brother of the Son; since neither alternative was acceptable, He could no more be God than the other spirits.
5 Cf. e.g., Gregory Naz., or. 41, 8.
6 Basil, ep. 263,3
7 Basil, ep. 244, 9 ; Sozomen, hist. eccl. 7, 2 ; Pseudo-Athanasius, dial ac. Maced. I, 15
1 Socrates, hist. eccl. 2, 454
2 Didymus, de trin,2, 8
5Cf. Gregory Naz,, or.33. 7f, ; Didymus, de trin. 2, 3 ; Pseudo-Athanasius, dial. c. Maced., I, I.
J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 259-60.
[590] A. Martin, Athanase, 356, note 313.
[591] A. Martin has pointed out that the Tome is not addressed to Meletius, the bishop of Antioch, nor does it even mention his name: in the opinion of Athanasius and of the bishops present at the Council of Alexandria, Meletius was incapable of unifying the Antiochenes around the faith of the Nicene Creed, simply because he did not hold it. Rather, the Tome identifies the unity of the homoiousians, to whom it is indirectly addressed, not by reference to their bishop, but with their place of worship, the ancient archdiocesan church in which they gather, to which the Tome refers as “the Old,” and A. Martin, as "la Palée," an identification no more than nominal. For Athanasius, their unity must be doctrinal: their rejection of Arianism, their prospective recognition of the Nicene Creed.
[592] Hanson, Search, 216-17, denies that the Alexandrine theologians of the early fourth century, including Alexander of Alexandria, can be said to be heirs of Origen. It must be noted that Hansen admits the heavy influence of Origen upon Alexander’ Letter to Alexander of Thessalonica: in Search, 144, he writes: “Alexander, then, was certainly much indebted to Origen.” In this, he follows Simonetti. However, Hanson understands Origen to have taught the eternal pre-existence of the noes (souls), including that of Jesus (ibid., at 65). This erroneous reading of the Peri Archon removes Hanson from serious consideration as an authority on Origen or upon his influence; e.g., he refers to Athanasius’ adoption of the “Origenistic” concept of God’s indivisibility. Origen certainly understood the Trinity to be indivisible, but he was hardly the first to do so: Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine of “una substantia, tres personae,” presupposes it. The indivisibility of the Trinity is inseparable from the Spirit Christology of the Apostolic Fathers, the greatest of whom, Ignatius of Antioch, in his Letter to the Ephesians, 7, wrote “There is one physician, fleshly and spiritual, genetos and agenetos. God and man, true life in death, both from Mary and from God.” Hanson. Search, 433, notes that Athanasius quotes this passage in support of his use of agenetos and genetos.with reference to the Son’s begetting by the Father and his conception by Mary.
Hanson’s supposition that Origen taught the eternal pre-existence of souls renders impossible Origen’s attribution of the Father’s Mission of the Son to Jesus the Lord who, for Origen, is the Henōsis. the primordial Event of the union of the eternal Personal fullness of divinity, i.e., the eternal Logos or Son, with the historical Personal fullness of humanity, Jesus the Lord. Origen does not speak of the Mission of Jesus, but Crouzel has seen that for Origen, Jesus the Christ is the primordial subject of the primordial Mission of the Son from the Father to give the Spiritus Creator, and therefore the primordial Jesus the Lord is the subject of the Incarnation, the kenōsis, whose offering of his One Sfacrifice fulfills his mission from the Father: viz., the outpourin of the Spiritus Creator uon the bridal Church and, through her, upon the world.
This is the apostolic Spirit Christology, whose full expression is found in the Letters of Ignatius Martyr. It clearly identifies Jesus, the Anointed, the promised Messiah, with the subject of the Incarnation and the kenōsis, and recognizes in his One Sacrifice the fulfillment of the prophesy of Malachi (Mal. 1:11) and the institution of the New Covenant promised by Jeremiah (Jer. 31:31-34)d: in sum, as the fulfillment by Jesus the Lord, beyond all expectation, of the Old Testament prophecies of Yahweh’s redemption and renewal of his flock.
Hanson’s dismissal of Origen’s radically historical theology is surprising, given the graceful dedication of his masterwork, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, to Henri Crouzel, the preeminent authority upon Origen’s theology, whom in his dedication Hanson recognizes to have upheld without reservation the focus of Origen’s Christology upon the Personal unity of Jesus the Lord.
Hanson’s exegesis of the excerpt from the De Incarnatione supposes the subject of the Incarnation according to Athanasius to be the eternal Son, the Son sensu negante. In reliance upon that uncritical postulate, Hanson proceeds to dehistoricize Athanasius’ Christology on much the basis he used to distort Origen hypothesis of the pre-existence of the souls:
It would have been unworthy of God to leave man in this condition, condemned to corruption by God’s own law; mere repentance might have stopped man sinning, but it would not have summoned man from a natural condition into one of incurruption. Only the Logos of God could achieve this, could recreate everything, suffer on behalf of everybody and intercede effectively for everybody's Redemption, in fact, must e more than simp;ly moral; it must effect the whole state of human existence. The Logos determined to take to himself a human body in order to effect this recreation. His motives were pity and love of mankind. He appropriated the body and an instrument. (ὄργανον (De Inc., 8:3).
On the next page, Hanson expands upon this conviction:
Next, we must examine the manner in which Athanasius envisages the Incarnation taking place. The Logos takes to himself a body (whose mind or soul, as we shall see, is virtually ignored) as an instrument (organon is the word used more than once by Athanasius) etc.
Athanasius’ Christology is the apostolic Spirit Christology, and thus is radically dependent upon Jn. 1:14: “and the Word was made flesh.” He understands “Word” as the Johannine Prologue does, as a title of Jesus the Lord, the event of whose becoming “flesh” St. Paul, in Phil. 2:7, refers to as the kenōsis of the Lord Jesus Christ. Both apostles take for granted, as does Athanasius in their wake, that the “subject of the Incarnation” is the primordially (not eternally) pre-existent Jesus.
Hanson’s reading of “sarx” as “body” is at one with his programmatic dehistoricization of the apostolic tradition of the Incarnation. Annick Martin, Athanase, 553-57, has replied to this confusion: see endnote 963 infra. Athanasius’ Christology is simply that of the Nicene Creed, confirmed by the Creed of I Constantinople, the Formula of Union summarizing the doctrine of the Council of Ephesus, and by the Symbol of Chalcedon, all of which affirm the apostolic Spirit Christology, taught systematically in the Henōsis of Origen’s Peri Archon, and didactically in Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes.
[594] See Richard A. Layton, Didymus the Blind and His Circle in Late-Antique Alexandria. Virtue and Narrative in Biblical Scholarship (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004); pp. 15-18 provide a summary of Didymus’ role in Alexandria over some fifty years as doctor scholiae ecclesiasticae, approved by Athanasius, if perhaps less so by his successors. Didymus died ca. 385-90. Jerome considered him the finest exegete of the time, having spent a month with him seeking further instruction. After Athanasius’ death in 373, Rufinus studied under Didymus for eight years, and much of what we know of Didymus’ relation to what remained of the Catechetical School is dependent upon Rufinus’ translation and extension, of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History. Layton accepts Rufinus’ testimony to the positive relation between Didymus and Athanasius: Didymus was certainly pro-Nicene, certainly a follower of Origen, and at the same time an independent thinker, rooted at once in the Alexandrine tradition, and in the ascetical tradition of the desert monks. In the following section, pp. 19-26, Layton proceeds to describe the influence upon him of the Abbot Anthony, who visited Alexandria in 337 or 338.
[595] Ibid, at 17.
[596] T. D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius , at 16, considers Athanasius to be the author of the Letter to all the Bishops, an encyclical sent by Alexander to explain the reasons for his condemnation of Arius; see Hanson, Search, 16, for a translation of its pertinent text, the earliest report available of the doctrine of Arius. Supposing Athansasius to be its author, the confidence his bishop had in him is understandable; Athanasius was well equipped to support him at the Council of Nicea, and even to speak for him.
[597] For Barnes, see Constantine and Eusebius (1981), at 207; for Hanson, Search, 422-24ff.; for Martin, Athanase, 635, among many.
[598] Donald F. Winslow, “Christology and Exegesis in the Cappadocians,” Church History, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1971), pp. 389-396, at 391.
[599] The obvious instance of this mistake is Alois Grillmeier exegesis of the Tome to the Antiochenes in terms of its supposed reliance upon the Logos-sarx Christological analysis: op. cit., at 323ff. Annix Martin has replied to this mistake; see Athanase, at 555-56. However, she also is inclined to regard Athanasius in this light, remarking for example that.:
La Christologie développée ici (i.e., in the Tome) par Athanase reste dans la ligne de la tradition alexandrine du Logos-sarx, également diffuse en Orient. Ce qui donne vie à la nature humaine du Christ, c’est le Logos, et c’est le Logos lui-même qui assure le salut de l’homme.
Athanase, at 553:
The first sentence in this quotation is correct, in that the only terminology available to Athanasius, as to the rest of theologians writing in the first half of the fourth century, is the Logos-sarx idiom first used by Malchion. As it is a mistake to impute to Malchion the dehistoricization project proper to the Logos-sarx theology, so also is it a mistake to impute it to Athanasius, who knows the subject of the Incarnation to be Jesus the Christ, as taught at Nicaea. Jesus is the agent of our redemption and not, pace Prof. Martin, « le Logos lui-même. » . Athanasius’s Spirit Christology identifies the Logos of Jn. 1:14 with the Jesus the Lord, and consequently identfies the “sarx egeneto” in that passage with Jesus’ acceptance of Personal immersion in our fallen mortality as our head. The later Alexandrine tradition certainly did not attribute our redemption to Jesus the Lord, but the reading of the Apollinarian monophysism into the Spirit Christology, whether of Malchion, Tertullian, Origen or Athanasius, is without justification, for each of these theologians speaks historically of the Christ, whose Personal unity is the clear implication of the historical communication of idioms in him, which the Logos-sarx analysis cannot support. Athanasius was not intent upon the analytical dissection of the Lord. Prof. Martin is well aware of this: continuing her reply to Grillmeier’s imputation of the debilities of the Logos-sarx Christology to Athanasius, she observes that:
La question de la réalité de l’âme humaine du Christ ne s’était tout simplement pas posée à Athanase. De plus, en le coupant ainsi du reste du Tome, c’est la cohérence de la démonstration voulue par Athanase qui se trouve détruite.
Ibid, at 555.
[600] Annick Martin, Athanase, 633-35, has drawn especial attention to Athanasius’ Letter to Epictetus, which he summarizes his Christology. It is one of the last things he wrote.
[601] Annick. Martin reports Lucifer of Cagliari’s anticipation of Athanasius’ affirmation of the homoousios of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son: Athanase, at 534, n. 302; cf. n. 306 at 535, correcting Hanson, Search, 752, n. 70, where Hanson supposes Athanasius to have used “homoousios” of the Spirit twice in his First Letter to Serapion; Martin insists that “homoousios” occurs only once in that Letter.
[602] DS *126: “. . . ἤ εξ ἑτέρας ὑποστάσεως ἤ οὐσίας―vel ex alia substantia aut essentia. Not incidentally, this Nicene use of ‘hypostasis” and “ousia” indifferently to designate what is one in God, the Trinity, also underwrites Athanasius’ insistence that the single alternative to the Nicene proclamation of the homoousion of the Son with the Father can only be the neo-Arian assertion of the Son’s “heteroousion” with respect to the Father: viz., the attribution to Son of the substantial differentiation from the Father that reduces him to a creature. The Council of Nicaea thus understood the Arian heresy which, as renewed twenty-five years later by Aetius and Eunomius, affirmed precisely the heteroousion of the Son.
[603] Crouzel, Origen, 194.
[604] See Feltoe, op. cit., Δ. The Controversy Between The Two Dionysii, pp. 165-198. The standard criticism of Athanasius’ defense of Dionysius was made by Harnack: Feltoe quotes it on p. 194, note 11:
11.διὰ τὴν σὰρκα] There is much truth in Harnack’s remark (op. ct., p. 92, n. 2), “the attempt of Ahanasius to explain away the doubtful utterances of Dionysius by referring them to the human nature of Christ is a makeshift born of perplexity.”
This remark exhibits a serious confusion, born of a perplexity not shared by Athanasius, who uses σὰρχ historically, as it is used in Jn. 1:14 where ‘”and the word was made flesh (καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγενέτο) refers to the fallen human condition of Jesus, his “taking the “form of a slave” (μορφὴν δούλου λαβών), the kenōsis of Phil. 2:7. He defends Dionysius’ letter to the Libyan Sabellians by pointing out that it is a Christological statement, reproaching them for having no interest in the Christ, and in this Dionysius takes the Personal unity of Christ for granted, refusing that division in the Christ between his divinity and his “human nature,” which Harnack, like the Libyan bishops, confuses with common sense, having uncritically subscribed to a dehistoricized Christology which prevents his understanding Athanasius. Athanasius’ Christology is that of the Nicene Creed, whose subject is not the nonhistorical Logos of Harnack’s Christology, but Jesus the Lord, one and the same Son of the Father and our Lady. Historians of dogma should know better than to trivialize their subject.
[605] E.g., Bihlmeyer-Tüchle, Church History; tr. from 13th German edition by Victor E. Mills, O.F.M., Volume One: Christian Antiquity (Westminster, MD, The Newman Press, 1968), at 188; Quasten, Patrology II, 77-79, wihout evincing any disagreement, mentions that historians have read Origen’s Trinitarianism as subordinationist; Kelly, Doctrines, at 131, is explicit: he considers Origen to be in fact a subordinationist.
Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, at 116, would derive Arius' "extreme subordinationism" from Origen, while Hanson, Search, 62-70, rejects the charge as incompatible with Origen’s upholding the Father’s eternal generation of the Son, although Hanson’s conviction that Origen did not affirm the substantial identity (homoousios) of the Son with the Father is consistent with a subordinationism in Origen’s Trinitarian doctrine. Crouzel, Origen, 187-88, denies any subordinationism in Origen, asserting his Trinitarian doctrine to have directly anticipated the Nicene homoousios.
[606]Crouzel, ibid., 169-179, esp. 172-74. The condemnation of Origenism as adoptionist at II Constantinople (553) has long been taken to be a condemnation of Origen, although Origen had himself disavowed that imposition of abstract speculation upon the apostolic tradition. In this he has been vindicated by the first four ecumenical councils, which met precisely to reject the consequences of the subordination of the doctrinal tradition to the cosmological postulates of the contemporary speculation: viz., by Arius, condemned at Nicaea, by the Pneumatomachians and by Apollinarius, condemned at I Constantinople, by Nestorius, condemned at Ephesus, and by Diodorus and Eutyches, condemned at Chalcedon.
Doubtless the rationalization of Origen’s genius by lesser talents immersed in the cosmological determinism of the Greek philosophical tradition was inevitable: it is thus that his supposed Trinitarian subordinationism has been regarded as the source of Arianism, and of the Christological errors induced by the rationalization of the fire-iron imagery of the Henōsis of divinity and humanity in Christ: even in fact, of all heresies (thus Epiphanius, Haer. 51, 3; 54). Origen’s work provides no basis for such condemnation. Crouzel has covered this ground with great care.
[608] Athanasius’ final statement of this position is his Letter to Jovian; see A. Martin, Athanase, 582. The Eustathian followers of Paulinus condemned Meletius’ Council of Antioch (363) in a Refutatio addressed to Meletius and his chief supporter, Acacius of Caesarea, who had attempted to politicize the Nicene homoousios in the hope of making Antioch the center of Christian unity. Athanasius had foreseen such tactics in his Letter to Jovian: see Annick Martin, Athanase, 582 85, n. 154.
[609] Hanson, Search, 384; A. Martin, Anathase, 541-42.
[610] John McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 22, note. 52.
[611] Hanson, Search, at 424, thinks Athanasius’ early ascription of the “mediating activity,” of the “immanent” Son to the incarnate Son to be “a new and indeed entirely revolutionary theological idea and one entirely consonant with Scripture.” Theological novelty can hardly be ascribed to Athanasius' recognition of the historicity of the Son; in this he simply makes his own the Spirit Christology familiar to Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen and Marcellus. Hanson has in view Athanasius’ refusal to dehistoricize the subject of the Incarnation and therefore the revelation, in conformity with then current Christological speculation in the East and in the West. Athanasius’ refusal of the Eusebian dissent to the Nicene Creed is at one with what Hanson has described as his “grip of a bulldog on its (Scripture’s) main message”, e.g., the faith of the Church. That “message”, that Jesus is Lord, has as its immediate implication the communication of idioms in the Jesus whose Personal unity received at the Council of Ephesus a succinct dogmatic expression, viz., that Mary, his mother, is the Mother of God. This title had long been given Mary by the Alexandrine tradition; see Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Throughout the Centuries, 57-61.
[612] This consideration bars the Platonizing of “spirit” and its derivatives. Within the Catholic tradition, “spirit” has an indefeasible reference to the Eucharistic representation of the victory of Christ over sin and death through his offering of the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed. Catholic spirituality is Eucharistically instituted and sustained. Augustine’s insistence upon a spiritual understanding of the Eucharist―“Spiritualiter intelligite”―demands that we understand the Eucharistic Presence of the Christ to be that of the risen Christ, transcending fallen history as its Eucharistically immanent Lord, its Beginning and its End, and therefore redemptive of it precisely by his Eucharistic immanence within it, by which alone for freedom we are freed, to enter into his Kingdom.
[613] The commonplace theological dehistoricizing of “Logos” has induced an unreflective supposition that the Council of Nicaea affirmed the divinity of the “immanent Son,” which is unfortunate. The bishops assembled at Nicaea met to defend the Church’s faith that Jesus is the Lord, and that he is therefore, as the Creed asserts: “The only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from true God, Begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father: through him all things are made.” Jesus’ consubstantiality is Personal: i.e., with his Father, who sent him to give the Spirit, obedience to which Mission led him to the Cross. The Nicene Creed knows but one Son, Jesus the Lord. This emphasis is continually necessary, and continually to be renewed. The Church’s proclaimation of her faith in Jesus the Lord is not to be dehistoricized to meet whatever prescripttions of cosmologized theology. See endnote 46, supra.
[614] Ibid., at 552-53; contra, Hanson, Search, 424, 645-46; cf. endnote 890, supra.
[615] The date which Jurgens prefers, 318, presents the apparently insurmountable difficulties which Hanson has summarized: see Search, at 417-18.
[616] The unique use of ‘homoousios’ in Athanasius First Discourse is as follows: …very Son of the Father is He; not a creature or work, but an offspring proper to the Father's Wherefore He is very, existing one in (homoousios) with the very Father.
Athanasius, Discourses against the Arians, I: 9. Translated by John Henry Newman and Archibald Robertson. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 4. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1892.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight; see also 1, 15, 24, 29.
[617] In the following excerpts A. Martin has condensed the Nicene Christology of Athanasius’ Tome to the Antiochenes, to which he hoped, vainly in the event, to convert the homoiousian followers of Meletius of Antioch.
1. La où la formule de Sardique distinguait le Verbe de l’homme sans plus analyser les conséquentes d’une telle formulation, le Tome, voulant souligner la réalité de l’Incarnation contre la doctrine du Verbe-créature professée par les Ariens, met l’accent sur l’unité du Verbe et de l’homme. Forte de la réflexion christologique opérée dans les Discours contre les Ariens, spécialement dans le troisième qu’il vient peut-être d’achever, Athanase insiste sur l’union de l’homme et de Dieu dans le Fils. « C’est pourquoi autre n’était pas le Fils de Dieu avant Abraham, et autre celui (venu) après Abraham, ni autre celui qui ressuscita Lazare, et autre celui qui interrogea à son sujet ; mais c’est le même qui, comme homme, a dit : « où repose Lazare ? », et qui, comme Dieu, le ressucita (cf. ep ad Maximum, 3) ; le même était celui qui, corporellement, comme homme, crachait, et divinement, comme Fils de Dieu, ouvrait les yeux de l‘aveugle de naissance, et ayant souffert dans la chair, comme a dit Pierre, (le même) a, divinement, ouvert les tombeaux et ressuscité les morts. » N’avait-il déjà affirmé dans le Troisième Discours précisément, que « si nous voyons et pensons que ces deux sortes d’actes » (ceux qu’il a produits comme Dieu et ceux qu’il a produits comme homme) sont été faites par un seul, notre croyance est droite » ? Ou encore ceci, qu’ « en devenant homme, il n’a pas cessé pour autant d’être Dieu, pas plus qu’en étant Dieu, il ne fuit l’humanité ; bien au contraire ! Et davantage, étant Dieu, il a assumé le chair, et étant dans la chair, il a divinisé la chair ».
Athanase, 556-57.
2. La paragraphe s’achève, comme les précédents, sur l’unanimité de l’opinion réalisée “sur l’Incarnation du Logos et sa venue dans l’homme », περὶ τῆς σαρκώσεως καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσεως τοῦ Λόγου, selon les termes mêmes de la formule de Nicée, σαρκοθέντα ἐνανθρωπήσαντα. Il n’est toujours question ici que d’affirmer la réalité de l’Incarnation.
Ibid., at 557.
[618] E.g., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., in According to Paul (New York: Paulist Press, 1992) at 103, commenting on Phil. 2:6-7-11, supposes the subject of the Son’s pre-existence, whom in v. 5 Paul has named “Christ Jesus,” in v. 10, “Jesus,” and in v. 11 “Jesus Christ” and “Lord,” to be in fact simply Jesus’ dehistoricized eternal Sonship. Fitzmyer then proceeds to identify the Kenōsis of v. 7, whose subject is the “Christ Jesus” of v. 5, as “the humiliation of his incarnation.” In this cosmologically-controlled context, the subject of the Kenōsis is that same abstract divinity, the dehumanized, non-historical eternal Son, sensu negante, for whom the “humiliation of his incarnation” can only be his becoming human, not his becoming flesh―which is quite another matter. Paul knows nothing of an “immanent Son” nor of a “Jesus” who is not the Lord, the Christ, the Son of Mary; in fact that cosmological confection finds no mention in the entire New Testament.
[620] A. Martin, Athanase, 557, quoting Athanasius paraphrase, in Tome to the Antiochenes, of the Nicene doctrine of Incarnation.
[621] Hanson, Search, at 446-58, reads the cosmological confusion of the Logos-sarx analysis into Athanasius’ Christology, although earlier on he has absolved Athanasius from precisely that confusion:
Although Athanasius’ thought is deeply indebted to philosophy and he defends constantly what is a philosophical principle, the ontological unity of the Father and the Son, his philosophical language is all devoted to what is ultimately a Scriptural argument. He is no favourer of Greek philosophy; he decries it in the Contra Gentes , though he can occasionally refer to philosophical doctrines which are apparently like Christian teaching, as when he compares the Stoic doctrine of the Logos dwelling immanent in the whole world to the doctrine of the incarnation.7 but the main and paramount source of his doctrine is the Bible. He can on occasion refer to the practice of baptism,8, but this takes no prominent place in his thought. He was capable, perhaps alone among his contemporaries, of freeing himself from the enticing but damaging tendency to speculation about the relation of the pre-existent Son to the Logos of the philosophers.9
7. De Inc., 4, 1.
8. Or. con. Ar. I,34; De Syn. 36,3 (363); Ep. Ad Serap. I,23, 28, 29-30, 3.6 ; 4.5. He was not the first to do so. Eusebius of Caesarea had preceded him.
9. So Ritter, “Arianismus,” 710-11.
Hanson, Search, at 422 (emphasis added). Hanson’s assumption that the homoousion of the Son with the Father is a “philosophical principle” raises the question of what he might consider to be a doctrinal principle―which need not be pressed here.
However dealt with, we may suppose the confusion to be actual, but not to have threatened his loyalty to Nicaea. A. Martin, op. cit., 557-59, parallels Hanson; after enlisting Athanasius in the Logos-sarx school, she stresses the irrelevance of Grillmeier’s application of it to his Christology.
[622] Hanson, Search, at 356, 370-71, 691, 696-97.
[623] See endnote 834, supra.
[624] Evans, Against Praxeas, at 69, cites two passages in Oratio contra Arianos, iv. 32 & 34 (but see his qualification on p. 13) seemingly witnessing to Athanasius’ subscription to the Spirit Christology. It is now accepted that Athanasius is not the author of the Fourth Oration; e.g., Jurgens, Early Fathers I, at 326, Richard P. C. Hanson, in “The Source and Significance of the Fourth Oratio contra Arianos Attributed to Athanasius,” Vigiliae Christianae 42 (1988) 257-266. The evidence examined by Hansen has led him to suggest it to have been written about 356 or 357 by a second-generation follower of Eustathius of Antioch who, although loyal to the Nicene doctrine and consequently anti-Arian, wrote not so much to oppose Arianism as to refute the Sabellianism he found among the followers of Marcellus of Ancyra. Hanson believes Marcellus to have been the source of their Sabellianism but probably not the direct target of the unknown author’s criticism. Since Basil of Caesarea was at this time charging the Eustathian followers of Paulinus with Sabellianism, Hanson’s proposed authorship of the Fourth Oratio by a follower of Eustathius is the less likely. In any case, the Spirit Christology which Evan has noted in the Fourth Oratio subjects its author to the same charge of Sabellianism that he brings against the followers of Marcellus. Some twenty years earlier, Eusebius of Caesarea’s Contra Marcellum had perssuaded the Cappadocian, Syrian and Palestinian bishops, nemine dissentiente, that Marcellus was of the Sabellian persuasion. Athanasius of Alexandria stood apart from that Oriental unanimity.
Lienhard (“The Cappadocian Settlement”) has noted the doctrinal affinity of both Marcellus and Athanasius with the Eustathians, who upheld the same “mia hypostasis” as had they. This affinity accounts for Athanasius’ ignoring Basil’s efforts, from 371, to persuade him to support Meletius over Paulinus as the bishop of Antioch. Basil considered the confirmation of Meletius’ appointment to that See the only possible solution to the schism in Antioch. Athanasius had no desire so to split with the homoiousion Antiochenes: his Tome to the Antiochenes invited those among them willing to accept the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Christ to recognize their differences as less than doctrinal. The schism between the Eustathians and the Homoiousians in Antioch had been unnegotiable from its outset, as between pro-Nicenes and anti-Nicenes. Its sole possible resolution lay in the extinction of the Eustathian party, already much reduced. It is then anachronistic at best to suppose that the schism became complete, beyond resolution, because of Lucifer of Cagliari’s allegedly irregular consecration of the priest Paulinus, the leader of the Eustathians, whether this took place immediately upon Lucifer’s arrival at Antioch or soon thereafter but, at any rate, before the arrival of Eusebius of Vercelli and Asterius of Arabia, whom the Council of Alexandria had deputed to carry the message of the Tome to the Antiochenes to Antioch. Upon arriving in Antioch, Eusebius and Asterius expected to fulfill their mition of promoting the subscription of the homoiousian clergy in Antioch to the Nicene Creed which Tome presented as the sole means of reuniting the Christians in that city. This would have entailed a clean break with the homoiousian subordinationism in favor of the Creed’s emphatic affirmation of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and its inclusion of the Holy Spirit within the Trinitarian object of the Church's faith.
There is no reason to suppose that this had ever been a possibility. The Antiochenes, apart from the small group of Eustathians led by Paulinus, were homoiousians, which is to say, subordinationists whose refusal of the doctrine of Nicaea had as its corollary the acceptance of imperial authority over the faith of the Church and the consequent politicization of the Church and her doctrinal tradition by its subordination to imperial authority. Inevitably, the Antiochene followers of Meletius read the Tome to the Antiochenes as a political document, an invitation to accept Alexandrine authority over Antioch, and/or the authority of the Church over the Empire. Lucifer, long acquainted with―and despising―this politicization of the Church as a perversity, could not but have recognized it in the Meletians, and seen, accurately, that if the Nicene faith were to be preserved in Antioch, it would be necessary to consecrate Paulinus to validate the Eustathian resistance to the homoiousian heresy, whose leaders all too soon would otherwise be widely regarded as pro-Nicene under the impression that their confusion of the Trinitarian doctrine of the Council of Nicaea with the homoiousian homoios kat’ousian was in fact a conversion to the Nicene Creed:
This wishful persuasion of the Nicene orthodoxy of Meletius finally brought him to the presidency of the First Council of Constantinople, in which office he died before doing any damage. Lucifer’s consecration of Paulinus was a highly impolitic action, but Luther had never had much use for politics. It was also prescient, as Athanasius appears to have come to regard it a year later in recognizing Paulinus as the legitimate bishop of Antioch, and in persuading Pope Damasus to do the same.
At any rate, upon their arrival, learning of the consecration of Paulinus, and recognizing the consequent futility of their mission, Eusebius of Vercelli returned to his diocese in Sicily, and Asterius to his See in Arabia, this in contrast to the two nominally pro-Nicene Syrian bishops, Kymatius of Paltos and Anatolius of Beroia, addressees of the Tome, who were already in place in Antioch, awaiting the emissaries from Alexandria, Not having attended the Council of Alexandria, neither could have signed the Tome to the Antiochenes. Kymatius, like Asterius of Arabia. had been exiled by the Oriental bishops at Serdica for having having allied himself to the West. No more is heard of him, but he was evidently still alive and still pro-Nicene at the time of the composition of the Tome, having been named as one of its addressees. In a list of the bishops present at Meletius’ Council of Antioch a year later (363), Kymatius’ name does not appear. He had been succeeded as bishop of Paltos by Patrikius, who was represented by a priest at that homoiousian Council. Anatolius of Beroia is named in the list of those bishops who attended the Council of Antioch in 363. (A. Martin, Athanase, 559). Nothing is known of Kymatios other than the name of his successor; Anatolius’ pro-Nicene convictions evidently were of that hopeful sort which would promote Meletius to the presidency of I Constantinople.
Julian had exiled Athanasius a year after permitting him to return to Alexandria in 362, but Julian disappeared when his forces were defeated at Adrianople in that same year. He was succeeded by a quite different emperor, Jovian who, if not a pro-Nicene, was certainly a Christian and not anti-Nicene. Assuming his office in Antioch, one of his first acts was to aimed at establishing religious unity in the empire. To this end he required from his residence in Antioch that each of the Oriental bishops provide a formal statement of his doctrinal position. This gave Athanasius an opportunity to outmaneuver his opponents, Arian, homoean, and homoiousian. He traveled post-haste to Antioch from his brief exile in thebaid in order to meet Jovian well before his adversaries, who had been less alert to their new situation. As required by Jovian, Athanasius presented a defense of Nicene orthodoxy which Jovian found entirely persuasive, to the point that then and there he confirmed Athanasius in the See of Alexandria and subsequently, upon hearing the various anti-Nicene emissaries, refused their requests. After having obtained Jovian’s confirmation of his authority as the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius remained a year in Antioch, during which he called upon Paulinus, who then signed Tome to the Antiochenes as his representatives had done the previous year at the close of the Council of Alexandria (A. Martin, op. cit., at 587). It is probable that Paulinus had not seen a copy of it earlier. In any event, Athanasius' visit provided a suitably ceremonial occasion for the signing, especially inasmuch as Athanasius’ recognition during that visit of the validity of Paulinus’ consecration was eo ipso his recognition of Paulinus as the legitimate bishop of Antioch, and his definitive rejection of Meletius’ claim to the See which, with the Eustathians, Athanasius had never accepted. Advised by him, Pope Damasus never accepted it either.
[625] Joseph Lienhard’s culminating study of Marcellus of Ancyra, Contra Marcellum, cited supra in endnote 758, was anticipated in his articles: “Basil of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, and ”Sabellius”,” Church History vol. 58 (1989) 157-67; “"Did Athanasius Reject Marcellus?" Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Conflicts, ed. Michel R. Barnes and Daniel H. Williams, 65-80. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993; "Recent Research on Marcellus of Ancyra." Distributed by Theological Research Exchange Network, Portland, Oregon (1997), “Ousia and Hypostasis: The Cappadocian Settlement, and theology of the “One Hypostasis”, cited supra in endnote 772, and continues in his recent return to the subject, “Two Friends of Athanasius: Marcellus of Ancyra and Apollinaris of Laodicea,” vol. 10 (2006), 56-66, [hereafter “Two Friends of Athanasius,”] where he discusses Hilary of Poitiers’ report of what appears to have been a temporary breach between Athanasius and Marcellus, one open to a variety of interpretations. Lienhard observes of this report that:
In any case, Hilary wrote that Marcellus repented and voluntarily refrained from entering a church.”
He then oserves that: “Considerable evidence exists that Athanasius’ break with Marcellus did not last.” After reviewing that evidence, Lienhard concludes:
What can be said in summary? The evidence shows that, after a temporary break, Athansius and Marcellus returned to communion. Theologically, they agreed on most points. Athanasius did not like the phrase “three hypostases” any more than Marcellus did, and acknowledged it only in the Tome to the Antiochenes. Marcellus, as the years passed, softened the sharp contours of his teaching in the Contra Asterium, except for his insistence on the one hypostasis, so that he and Athanasius were not in serious theological disagreement – separated, perhaps, “only by a smile”20.
20 Epiph., haer. 72,4 (GCS Epiphanius III, 259 Holl/Dummer).
Lienhard, “Two Friends of Athanasius,” at 59, 61.
To the same effect, see Hanson, Search, at 240. Annick Martin, on the other hand, considers the breach between Athanasius and Marcellus to have been of long standing: i.e., to have begun before the Council of Serdica, and to have ended only with the offering, by a diaconal delegate of the Marcellian community, of the Expositio Fidei in response to Athanasius’ request, in 371. Writing within the context of Basil of Caesarea’s effort to enlist Athanasius in his project for the reconciliation of the oriental and occidental bishops, she remarks of Eugenius, the leader of a Marcellian delegation sent to Athanasius ca. 371, that:
Accusé, dés son arrivèe à Alexandrie, de hèterodoxie concernant sa doctrine de l’Incarnation, il dut justifier sa foi et celle des Marcellians par écrit, à la demande d’Athanase (§ 1). Les éveques égyptiens réunis dans sa présence la jugéront suffisamment conformé à orthodoxie pour y souscrire eux-mêmes (§ 5) et communier ainsi avec celui à l’égard duquel l’Alexandrin avait préfére prendre ses distances depuis près de trente ans en dépit de sa réhabilitation à Sardique par les Occidentaux.262 (emphasis added).
Athanase, 616.
The parenthetical references are to sections of the Expositio Fidei presented by Eugenius. The extended footnote, (262), too long for inclusion here, is concerned with establishing the text of that document.
Martin’s repeated assertions of a long alienation of Athanasius from Marcellus, stretching from Serdica in 343 to the Synod of Egypt in 371 (Athanase, 440, 616), rely upon a debatable interpretation of an excerpt from Hilary of Poitiers’ Frag. Hist. II, 9, textus narrat., 2, (CSEL 65, P. 146). Lienhard has dealt with this passage at length and reached a more nuanced conclusion:
Thus Marcellus the man and Marcellus the heretic are distinct. Marcellus the heretic was entered on the lists compiled by heresiologists as the one who taught that Christ’s reign would end. Marcellus the man lived out his life and, as it drew to a close, could still be acknowledged by Athanasius and could keep Athanasius’ support against Basil of Caesarea and others.
Lienhard, Contra Marcellum, 144-65, at 165.
In “Two Friends of Athanasius,” as earlier in his Contra Marcellum, Lienhard refers to a mitigation of the older academic interpretation of Marcellus’ Trinitarian doctrine as at least reductively Sabellian:
Recent scholars have interpreted Marcellus more benignly. Marcellus’ theology was more inadequate than heretical, and his theological metaphysics was primitive. He held that prosōpon, hypostasis, and ousia were, roughly, synonyms. The greatest shortcoming in his theology was his inability to say what is three in God.
Ibid., at 61.
If an amateur may presume to enter these lists, it does not appear necessary to suppose, with the Eusebians, that Marcellus’ use of “Name” to designate what is three in God is mere Sabellianism or, alternatively, that Marcellus was unable to state what is three in God. Evidently Athanasius did not so understand him, having himself the same problem of reducing the divine Names to a term which would not be a category, and the evidence of his approbation of Marcellus is more persuasive of the latter’s orthodoxy than are Eusebius’ diatribes and Basil of Caesarea’s agreement with them persuasive of his Sabellianism. Basil himself had a regrettable tendency to view the Trinity as a species with members. Tertullian’s early equation of “name” and “person,” rooted paradoxically enough in the “name theology” of the primitive Jewish Christianity whose influence he deplored (see endnote 94, supra) and perennially underwritten by the baptismal liturgy recited in Mt. 28:19, had become the Roman standard of Trinitarian orthodoxy sufficiently before Nicaea as to have prompted the suggestion (Hanson, Search, 169, J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 251-53) that, by way of Ossius of Cordoba, this equation is the source of the Nicene doctrine of the homoousios of the Son with the Father. Oskar Skarsaune, “A Neglected Detail in the Creed of Nicaea,” Vigiliae Christianae Vol. 41, No. 1 (Mar., 1987), 34-54, at 50, has offered an interesting variant of this theme.
The Nicene validation of Tertullian’s substantial Trinitas comprising three Personae was familiar doctrine in the West when Pope Julius’ met Athanasius and Marcellus in Rome ca. 340, and it is most unlikely that he would have approved the Trinitarian orthodoxy of Athanasius and Marcellus on any other basis. Like Marcellus, Athanasius had provided no explanation of the distinction between Father, Son and Holy Sporit, nor had anyone else at that time. It was enough affirm the substantial divine unity, mia hypostasis, in the context of the distinction inherent in the liturgical use of their Names, which supposed at once their divinity and their unity. It is then not unreasonable to conclude that the Pope judged the orthodoxy of Marcellus’ use of “Name” to designate what is three in God by that standard, i.e., that ‘Name” denotes “Person,” and, on that account, warranted it. Annick Martin, Athanase, has devoted a section, pp. 410-419, of her exhaustive history of Athanasius’ episcopacy, to the Roman Synod, held in the winter of 340-341, in which Pope Julius vindicated the orthodoxy of Athanasius and Marcellus, as the prelude to the Council of Serdica in 343.
We have noted Prof. Martin’s less than positive appreciation of Marcellus (endnotes 905, 907, 910, 927, supra; see also Athanase, at 440, n. 230, citing Hilary of Poitiers and Epiphanius). She records (op. cit., 614-17,) that as the condition of their reconciliation, Marcellus and the clergy of Ancyra had written the Christological and Trinitarian doctrine of the Tome to the Antiochenes into the Expositio Fidei included in the letter given by them to the deacon, Eugenius, for delivery to Athanasius. It included a condemnation of Sabellianism―but so also had the so-called Western Creed of Serdica, which both Kelly and A. Martin believe owes a good deal to Marcellus (Kelly, Doctrines, at 242; Martin, Athanase, at 551, 555-56, and 820). It follows that Athanasius would hardly have needed reasssurance as to Marcellus’ anti-Sabellian orthodoxy.
For the attack by Eusebius of Caesarea upon Marcellus’s use of λόγος and σάρκα, see his Contra Marcellum, I, CAP. II, (p.g. 24:783-84), “Quae fuerat Marcelli sententia de Verbo in Deo existente.” The Greek text here excerpted is taken from the critical edition of the Contra Marcellum by Klosterman-Hansen.
2 Ἐπισκήψας τοῖς εἰρηκόσιν τὸν υἰὸν θεοῦ ἀληθῶς υἰὸν εἰναι ζῶντα καὶ ὐφεστῶτα, τὴν ἑατοῦ δόξαν φανερὰν καθὶστησιν αὐταῖς συλλαβαῖς γράφων οὕτος.
(Νο. 42) οὔκοῦν πρὸ μὲν τοῦ κατελθεῖν καὶ διὰ τῆς παρθένου τεχθῆναι, λόγος ἦν μόνον. ἐπει τὶ ἑτερον ἦν, πρὸ τοῦ τὴν ἀνθρωπίνην ἀναλαβεῖν σάρκα, τὸ κατελθὸν ‹‹ἐk᾽ ἐσχάτων τῶν ἡμερῶν», ὡς καὶ αὐτὸς γέγραφεv, καὶ (τὸ) γεννηθὲν ἐκ τῆς παρθἑνου; οὐδεν ἕτερον ἦν ἤ λόγος. (Eusebius is here quoting Marcellus, apart from the clause here underlined). ››
Gegen Marcell, Über die kirchliche Theologie ; Die Fragmente Marcells. Herausgegeben von Erich Klostermann. Dritte, ergänzte Auflage durchgegeben von Günther Christian Hansen (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1991), 34-35.
The Migne Latin translation :
2. In eos postquam insultaverat qui Dei Filium vere extitisse vivum arbitrantur, suam ipsius οpinionem profert totidem sullabis in hunc modum comprehensam:
[frag. 42] Quamobrem priusquam descenderet, et de Virgine nasceretur, Verbum erat solummodo. Nam quid aliud erat priusquam nostrum carnem assumeret humanam, id quod descendit in temporibus novissimis, quemadmodum ipse scribit; et id quod de Virgine nascebatur nihil aliud erat praeter quam Verbum?
P.G. 24:783
A reliable English translation.
2. Once he has denounced those who said that the Son of God is truly Son, living and existing [hypostatically], he sets down his clear opinion and writes with these words, thus:
[frag. 42] Accordingly, before he came down and was born through the virgin, he was only Word [Logos]. Then, what else was he before he took on human flesh, the one who came down "in the last days," as he himself wrote, "and was born of the virgin"? He was nothing but Word.
Marcellus’ identification of the Logos with τὴν ἀνθρωπίνην ἀναλαβεῖν σάρκα and with (τὸ) γεννηθὲν ἐκ τῆς παρθἑνου typifies the “Spirit Christology,” which understands “Logos” historically, as a title of Jesus, and never abstractly, as the nonhistorical ‘immanent Son.’ However, Eusebius and those who approve his “common sense” dismissal of the Spirit Christology (Evans, Treatise against Praxean, at 69-70), read “Logos” abstractly, as a title of the nonhistorical ‘immanent Son.”
Eusebius’ criticism of Marcellus’ Christology is rooted in his cosmological interpretation of the “Spirit Christology” explicit in Marcellus’ identification of the historical “quod de Virgine nascebatur” with the historical “Verbum,” Jesus the Lord. This identification of the Verbum with Jesus the Christ, primordially pre-existent as "Spirit," accords with Jn. 1:14 and Phil. 2: 7. It was the usual exegesis of Lk. 1:35 well into the fourth century when, if Evans is correct, it gave way to Eusebius’ “common sense” exegesis. The concretely historical meaning of the biblical “Logos” is evident: it is a title of Jesus. The “Logos sarx egeneto’ (past tense) of Jn. 1:14 recites the same event that Paul ascribes to Jesus as his Kenōsis, his emptying himself and acceptance thereby of the form of a slave. The subject of Jn. 1:14 and Phil. 2:6-7 can only be the primordial Jesus, the “Spirit” of the Spirit Christology.
At bottom, Eusebius disagrees with Marcellus over the subject of the Incarnation, which is to say, the subject of the Mission of the Son. Marcellus takes for granted that subject of the Mission and of the Incarnation of the Son is the primordial Jesus, while Eusebius takes for granted that the subject of the Mission and the Incarnation is in both cases the “immanent” Son, whose pre-existence is not primordial but ab eterno. However, only the Spirit Christology permits Mary to have conceived Jesus the Lord: otherwise she becomes the mother of his abstract human nature. Marcellus’ reading of Lk. 1:35 is therefore correct.
[626] J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, at 269-76.
[627] Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 274-96. Marcellus’ orthodoxy is that of the apostolic tradition mediated by the kerygma, the Church’s preaching of the apostolic faith. Grillmeier supplies the following exerpt from Marcellus’ Epistula ad Liberium:
Therefore our faith is in one God, the Father, the Ruler of all, and in his Son our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. This (= these three) from the unity of one Godhead, the one Dynamis, the one hypostasis, the one substance, the one praise (δοχολογια—doxology), the one rule, the one kingdom, the one image of the triad which is one in substance (μiᾶς εικόνος τῆς τριάδος ὁμοούσιον) ‘by whom everything came into being’.46
46. Marcell. Ancyr., Ep. ad Liber. §§11-12> Tetz, Markell III, 152; commentary ibid. It is difficult to interpret the statement about the eikon. According to Tetz III, 183f., in the Marcelliana, ‘εἰκών is primarily to be understood as the σάρξ/ἄνθρωπος taken by the Logos’. The humanity of Christ is the eikon of the triad on the basis of the following consideration: as man, Christ is the image of the identity of substance of this triad, just as according to Gen. 1, 26 man as such is already the image of God as a ‘small example’ of the realization of the unity of God. Possibly the birth of Christ from the Virgin is to be associated with the eikon in a special way. Cf the passage from De incarn. et ctr. Arian. 8 cited above, and the remarks on the κυριακός ἄνθρωπος below.
Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 281.
During Grillmeier’s very careful analysis of Marcellus’ theology, it becomes evident that when engaged in theological inquiry, Marcellus is trapped in the cosmological rationality that prevents his recognition of the primordial pre-existence of Jesus the Lord presupposed by his a priori adherence to the rule of faith, which is to say, to the Spirit Christology of the apostolic tradition. Thus confused, he supposes the pre-existence of the Son to be ab aeterno, and the Son to the ‘immanent Son, the Son sensu negante. Consequently Marcellus’ theology, Christological and Trinitarian, although rooted in the regula fidei, is confused by the dehistoricization inherent in the Logos-sarx – Logos-anthropōs analyses. Thus trapped by cosmology, Marcellus makes the eternal Son to be the subject of the Incarnation; the Resurrection becomes the return of the eternal Son’s the eternal Father. Marcellus has some difficulty in responding to the question posed to him by his arch-critic, Eusebius of Caesarea, viz., how he would deal with the Son’s humanity, the man Jesus, after the return of the Logos to the Father. Marcellus cannot answer because the regula fidei upon which he relies has provided him with no information on that topic:
….from those who would like to learn from us on the subject, we would say that, following the holy apostle, we know only that we should regard the hidden mysteries as he told us. ‘Now we see, he says, ‘in a glass darkly, but then face to face’ (I Cor 13:12). Therefore do not ask me about what I have not leαrnt clearly from the divine scriptures. Because of that I cannot make any clear statement about the divine flesh which participated in the divine Logos (τῆς τῷ θείῳ λόγῳ κοινωνησάσης σαρκός)101
101 Marcell. Ancyr. frag. 121. Cf Schendel, op. cit., 124.
Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I, 292.
However, when his faith is attacked by Eusebius, rather than his theology questioned, Marcellus replies in terms of the Spirit Christology, as shown in endnote 625, supra.
[628] This sketch of Aphrahat’s Christology is little more than commentary upon Grillmeier’s discussion of “Aphrahat, the Persian Sage,” Christian Tradition I, 214-18, in doctrine and theology, however remote they are in culture and geography. Of particular interest is the affinity of Aphrahat’s Spirit Christology, as presented by Grillmeier, with that of Marcellus. Aphrahat makes no significant contribution to the development of Trinitarian doctrine.
[629] Grillmeier, Christian Tradition I., at 216, n. 207. Grillmeier has summarized and discussed Simonetti’s analysis of Spirit Christology, ibid., at 198; see also endnote 415, supra.
Grillmeier, citing F. Loof’s description of Aphrohat as a witness to early Spirit Christology, defends Aphrohat as a witness to the “biblical economy of salvation:
He (F. Loofs) thinks that Aphrohat does not know of the deity of Christ as a divine hypostasis. In fact, there are statements which indicate a marked Spirit Christology.208 It should be noted that the spirit which dwells in Christ has also been given to us. We surely have in part a complex of statements which coincide with the communication of the spirit to Christ and believers in the biblical economy of salvation.
208Cf. Dem. VI, 14: PSyr I, 201/4; and on this the observations by Parisot, ibid., LVI-LVII; I. Ortiz de Urbina, op. cit., 124-38. We cannot go into Aphrohat’s difficult doctrine of the pneuma here. Cf. especially Dem. VI, 14: PSyr I, 292-7.
Grillmeier, op. cit. I, 216.
[630] See endnote 394, supra;. Johannes Quasten maintains that Basil asserted the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit, although he did not use “homoousios” in doing so. Basil’s refusal to use “homoousios” of the Holy Spirit (Quasten’s “did not use” is rather hagiography than history) was sufficient to defeat Gregory of Nazianzen’s best effort to persuade the Fathers at I Constantinople to endorse the homoousios of the Spirit; the homoiousions won the day. I Constantinople had been called by a pro-Nicene emperor, which rendered meaningless the political dissent of the homoiousians to the authority of Council of Nicaea. .
[631] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 258-69.
[632] Karl Rahner, in The Trinity, argues on this basis for the radical unintelligibility of an affirmation of three “centers of consciousness” subsisting in the Trinity:
We never discover in our experience a case where what “subsists as distinct” can be thought of as multiplied without a multiplication of natures.
Trinity, at 105.
Rahner’s argument against distinct Personal subsistences in one Substance is easily met: neither do we ever encounter a person who is not self-aware by definition, for only as self-aware is he recognized as a person, a subject rather than an object. In fact, our consubstantiality with the persons we meet is the metaphysical condition of our meeting them as persons, for between substances there is no possibility of communication. Indivisum in se, divisum ab omni alio, each is solipsist, incapable of knowing any other existence than its own. Rahner’s question-begging subtraction of self-awareness from the Trinitarian Persons is far more obnoxious to our experience than is the Personal Self-awareness of the Trinitarian Persons which he would condemn as tritheist, for in our encounter with self-aware human persons we never experience human subsistence as “distinct;” we encounter each other as relations, consubstantial members of the free perichōresis that is the human community. We never encounter a “multiplication of natures” for natures are abstractions, mere entia rationis. Insofar as we understand human nature historically, i.e., as experienced, as concrete, as capable of being encountered, its objectivity is personal, that of a unique, irreducibly distinct human person, inseparable from the consubstantial community of such persons. We never have occasion to infer from that encounter a multiplicity of “human natures” whether as the abstract precondition of the encounter, or as the presupposition of a multiplicity of human persons. All that is cosmology, a pattern of abstractions which rejects free historicity out of hand.
It is true that the several cosmological anthropologies do so conclude, but only because they presuppose the concrete identity of subsistence in a substance with the substance itself, a presupposition far more easily refuted than defended. Rahner’s insistence on the monadism of self qua tale is sheer assumption, an arbitrary postulate, with which, apart from a recognition of its intrinsic incoherence, our human experience is entirely incompatible.
If with John Donne we accept that “No man is an island,” still less can we recognize as human the solitary monas whom Rahner makes to be the subject of his anthropology. Human persons are relational per se, despite the inability of the classic Thomist anthropology to admit it, as the price of cosmologically-normed speculation. Because patristic theology little adverted to the paganism of the culture out of which the classic cosmologies arose, the Fathers who were learned in and imbued with that culture spontaneously accepted its inherently monadic postulates and the correlative one-many dilemma along with, notably, its deprecation of the feminine and consequently of marriage. Paganism knew no nuptial symbolism which was not governed by that dilemma: see Volume II, Chapter Four, supra.
Consequently the Fathers found no resources, whether in Plato, in Aristotle or in the Stoics, that are compatible with the constitutive freedom of the nuptial covenant, theological interest in which consequently languished during the patristic and Carolingian periods. Thus the Parmenidian monism of substance instinctive to the Greek tradition remained normative for the patristic and Carolingian anthropology, for the Fathers routinely reduce the free substantial unity of the nuptial “one flesh” to that of a physical “body”: cf. the famous “three bodies” of the Eucharistic celebration as proposed by Amalarius in the early 9th century. Peter Lombard wrote this monist aberration into his Four Books of the Sentences, from which it passed into the medieval theological tradition via St. Thomas, nemine contradicente. Rahner’s rationalization of that monism sufficiently manifests its theological vacuity.
[633] Ibid., 133-136ff.
Rahner’s argument against distinct Personal subsistences in one Substance is easily met: we never encounter a person who is not self-aware by definition, for only as self-aware is he recognized as a person, a subject rather than an object. In fact, our consubstantiality with the persons we meet is the metaphysical condition of our meeting them as persons, for between substances there is no possibility of communication. Indivisum in se, divisum ab omni alio, each such monas must be solipsist, incapable of knowing any other existence than his own. Rahner’s question-begging denial of the self-awareness of the Trinitarian Persons is far more obnoxious to our experience than is the apostolic faith in the Personal Self-awareness of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit which he would condemn as tritheist. In our encounter with other self-aware human persons we never experience human subsistence as “distinct;” we encounter each other as personal, as members of the substantial human community. We never encounter a “multiplication of natures” for natures are abstractions, mere entia rationis. Insofar as we understand human nature historically, i.e., as experienced, as concrete, as capable of being encountered, its objectivity is personal, that of a unique, irreducibly distinct, self-aware human person, inseparable from the consubstantial community of such persons. We never have occasion to infer from that encounter a multiplicity of “human natures” whether as the abstract precondition of the encounter, or as the presupposition of a multiplicity of human persons. All that is mere cosmology, a pattern of abstractions which rejects free historicity out of hand.
It is true that the several cosmological anthropologies do so conclude, but only because they confuse subsistence in a substance with the substance itself, a presupposition far more easily refuted than defended. Rahner’s insistence on the monadism of self qua tale is sheer assumption, an arbitrary postulate, with which, apart from a recognition of its intrinsic incoherence, our human experience is entirely incompatible.
Consequently the Fathers found no resources, whether in Plato, in Aristotle or in the Stoics, that are compatible with the constitutive freedom of the nuptial covenant, theological interest in which consequently languished during the patristic and Carolingian periods. Thus the Parmenidian monism of substance instinctive to the Greek tradition remained normative for the patristic and Carolingian anthropology, for the Fathers routinely reduce the free substantial unity of the nuptial “one flesh” to that of a physical “body”: cf. the famous “three bodies” of the Eucharistic celebration as proposed by Amalarius in the early 9th century. Peter Lombard wrote this monist aberration into his Four Books of the Sentences, from which it passed into the medieval theological tradition via St. Thomas, nemine contradicente. Rahner’s rationalization of that monism sufficiently manifests its theological vacuity.
[634] Ibid., 133-136ff.
[635] Over the past two decades and more, the quarterly journal of the National Association of Scholars, has been reviewing the equation, in American colleges and universities, of academic freedom with political correctness: the evidence for that equation is lavishly at hand. The impact of this pervasive interpretation of morality as irresponsibility is effective in the toleration, if not approval, by Catholic college and university administrators of the performance on their campuses of the much-praised feminist travesty, The Vagina Monologues, precisely as the indispensable litmus test of their ‘Catholic’ subscription to ‘academic freedom’. That notion of academic freedom required that the academic dean of Georgetown University apologize to the students and faculties for Cardinal Arinze’s commencement address (17 May, 2003), in which he had been sufficiently blind to the proprieties as to uphold the Catholic moral tradition in sexual matters in an address to the students, faculty and administrators of a Jesuit university once considered the flagship of Catholic higher education. The AAUP version of academic freedom does not permit the religious traditions of institutions of higher learning to place any limit upon the secular interpretation of that term. In short, religion is irrelevant to academic freedom: Thus
3. Most church-related institutions no longer need or desire the departure from the principle of academic freedom implied in the 1940 Statement, and we do not now endorse such a departure. Emphasis added.
1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure with 1970 Interpretive Comments: American Association of University Professors, 1012 Fourteenth Street, NW, Suite #500, Washington, DC 20005;
The A.A.U.P.’s offhand dismissal of the relevance of religion to the exercise of academic freedom and responsibility does not appear to have inhibited the subscription of Catholic academics to this evident perversion of academic freedom. The active promotion of an open discussion of its Catholic corrective evidently is not regarded as career-enhancing activity within the current Catholic university faculties.
[636] Crouzel suggests that Middle Platonism may have its origin in Middle Stoicism: Origen, at 163.
[637] See Christopher Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity, at 53 and 292-309.
[638] Aloys Grillmeier, Christian Tradition, 252ff, 372-73. Lucian Turcescu, in the article cited and excerpted in endnote 430supra, has detailed Basil’s preference for “hypostasis” over “prosōpon” in Trinitarian usage. Turcescu believes Basil to have avoided “prosōpon” as open to misunderstanding and ambiguity because of the prior Sabellian use of “prosōpon” in the impersonal sense of “mask.”. Joseph Lienhard's disagreement with Turcescu's analysis is cited in the same endnote. The Greek theologians of the fourth century tended to regard the Latin vocabulary as theologically impoverished, a defect particularly evident in Tertullian’s use of “persona” to designate what is three in God. Insofar as he was a Stoic, he could easily be read to have envisioned the divine “substantia” as material, divisible among the “personae,” had it not been obvious that no Christian theologian of the late second or early third century ever considered a material divinity Awareness that few if any of the Western theologians so understood him could hardly arise: few of the Greeks read Latin or were acquainted with, much less influenced by, the Latin theology.
[639] Kelly, Doctrines, at 264-66; Kelly there supposes the “Cappadocians” to have spoken with a single voice. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity, 292-303, published thirty years later, has shown that this is not the case; Cf. Hanson, Search, 692-94, 776-77. The “Cappadocian Settlement” was a homoiousian construct to which the pro-Nicene Gregory of Nazianzen, and his equally pro-Nicene cousin, Amphilocius of Iconium. made no contribution.
[640] G. L. Prestige, citing Frag. 15 of Amphilocius of Iconium (PG 39:212):
His (Basil’s) friend Amphilochius of Iconium insists that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do not represent ousia as such, but .”a mode of hyparxis or relation.”
Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, at 246; cf. J. N. D. Kelly, citing the same fragment in Doctrines, 266.
[641] Kelly also provides the Greek of this clause: «τρόπος ὑπάρξος ἤ τουν σχέσεως »
[642] In the fifth century Theodore of Mopsuestia still held to the cosmological identification of the Father with the divine ousia; see Raymond Tonneau, O.P. and Robert Devreesse, Les homélies catéchétiques de Théodore de Mopsueste ; traduction, introduction, notes par Raymond Tonneau en collaboration avec Robert Devreesse (Vatican: Vatican Apostolic Library, 1949), Hom. ix, 6, pp. 223-225. In subscribing to this ancient error, Theodore anticipated Karl Rahner’s reduction of the Trinity to a Monas, a substantial Self, together with its corollary, the impossibility of the immanence of that absolute Self in history.
Taken seriously, this is mere modalism, condemned by Pope Callistus ca. 222, by Pope Dionysius in a Council of Rome ca. 262, by the Council of Antioch in 268, and continually thereafter. It eliminates the homoousion, the Personal consubstantiality with the Father of the Son and, implicitly, of the Spirit, defined in principle at Nicaea, affirmed explicitly in the Letter to the Antiochenes of the Council of Alexandria in 362, taught by Gregory of Nazianzen’s Theological Orations III, IV, and V (380), and completed at I Constantinople by the definition of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, albeit without explicit affirmation of his consubstantiality with the Father and the Son. However the reference to the Holy Spirit in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, viz., “who together with the Father and the Son is together worshiped and together glorified” is decisive of the Holy Spirit’s Personal equality with the Father and the Son, excluding the binitarian hesitation to affirm te hypostatic unity of the Holy Spirit which Basil evinces in his De Spiritu Sancto. .
The homoousion of the Son, human as well as divine, was explicit in the doctrine taught by the Council of Ephesus, given credal expression in the Formula of Union, that Jesus is consubstanthial with us, and that Mary is Theotokos; it received its integral statement, Trinitarian and Christological, at Chalcedon, the leitmotif of whose Symbol is Irenaeus’ Christological summary: Jesus the Lord is “one and the same Son.
We have seen that Karl Rahner’s version of Thomist Trinitarianism admits no substantial Trinity:
Hereby we refer concretely to the “person” of the Father, who is not only “fatherhood” (hence “notionality”), but the concrete God in the unity of essential aseity and notional fatherhood, concrete unoriginatedness.
Trinity, 84, note 5; cf. endnote 1, infra.
The expressions, “notional fatherhood” and “concreate unoriginatedness’ deny objectivity to the Name of the Father, and so to the Names of the Son and the Spirit, whose objectivity would be their Personal subjectivity, their Selfhood, but for Rahner there is only one Self in God: the Monas, the divine substance, who may indifferently be named Father, Son, or Spirit, since these Names, as such, are only nominally distinct, and only nominally interrelated : hence, their “notionality.”.
Of course it is not enough to point out that in God the relations are “virtually” distinct from the essence and that this suffices to make them not identical with each other, although they are really identical with the essence.
Rahner, Trinity, at 70.
As usual, Rahner’s language is obscure: he wishes to assert the “virtual” distinction of the “relations” from each other, which “virtual” distinction does not obtain with respect to the divine “essence;” with which he holds the “relations” to be identical. As indistinguishable from it, they cannot constitute it. Rather, as Rahner states in another place, the monadic divine Self, i.e., the divine Substance/Subsistence, subsists in three Persons who are not self-aware Selves. Rahner has not provided a basis for the systematic intelligibility of his assertion of a substantial subsistence of this divine Monas in three Persons, however Selfless; still less has he developed it. Given his denial that his Trinitarian theology is radically modalist, this failure is understandable, for his postulate that the divine “Self “subsists in three Persons” is meaningless on any other basis, although it is not without patristic warrant: e.g., Novatian’s language intimnates much the same modalism: (J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, at 126). Victorinus had the same problem: the divine substance subsists “tripliciter” (ibid., 271). His views of the Trinity, like Rahner’s, are finally Sabellian.
[643] See Martin Tetz, Theologische Realenzyklopädie iv, 1977, “Athanasius von Alexandrien,” 333-349; esp. 342-44; cf Annick Martin, Athanase, 587, n. 163.
[644] Karl Rahner, in The Trinity, argues on this basis for the irrationality of the postulate of three “centers of consciousness” subsisting in the Trinity; he condemns it as tritheistic::
We never discover in our experience a case where what “subsists as distinct” can be thought of as multiplied without a multiplication of natures.
Trinity, at 105.
[646] J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 258-69.
[647] Ibid., 134-35, 235.
[648] This discussion of Hilary of Poitiers’ theology relies largely upon J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, especially the tenth chapter, “The Doctrine of the Trinity,” 252-69, a lucid summary of the controversy which had long obscured the meaning of the Nicene definition of the homoousion of the Son; upon R. P. C. Hanson’s Search, esp. pp. 471-506; upon Mark Weedman’s The Trinitarian Theology of Hilary of Poitiers, earlier cited in endnote 452 supra; upon Carl L. Beckwith, Hilary of Poitiers on the Trinity : from De fide to De trinitate (Oxford University Press, 2008), and upon M. Figura and J. Doignon, “Introduction,” Hilaire de Poitiers’ La Trinité, Tome I (livres I-III): Texte critique par P. Smulders, Ser. Sources chrétienne 443 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999), 11-45. The only English translation available to me is that by Stephen McKenna, C.SS.R.: St. Hilary of Poitiers, The Trinity (New York, Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1954).
[649] Carl Beckwith, reviewing the scholarship assessing the Council of Béziers, concludes that it was Hilary’s refusal to submit to the Arian denial of the divinity of the Son at that Council that caused his exile; see “The Condemnation and Exile of Hilary of Poitiers at the Synod of Béziers (356 C.E.) Journal of Early Christian Studies 13.1 (2005) 21-38. Beckwith quotes an excerpt from Hilary’s “Preface to Adversus Valentem et Ursacium” (356) “perhaps the best surviving document we possess describing the general character of the events at Beziers.” In it Hilary recites the incentives offered him and the other bishops present at the Synod to “corrupt the Gospel truth by falsehood.” See also T. D. Barnes, “Hilary of Poitiers on his Exile,” From Eusebius to Augustine: Selected Papers, 1982-1993: Variorum Collected Studies Series; CS 438 (VARIORUM: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Aldershot, Great Britain, & Brookfield, Vermont, 1994), XVII, and Paul Burns, “Hilary of Poitier’s Road to Béziers: Politics or Religion?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1991), 273-289.
[650] Hanson, Search, at 468-69, n. 41, citing Doignon’s remark upon Hilary’s early work, Comm. In Matt. 31, 3, and again at 481; see also Weedman, op. cit., at 79, quoting in translation an extended passage from Comm. In Matt. 16 to the same effect. The Commentary in Matthew should be read in terms of the naively subordinationist acceptance of the Trinity revealed in the passage earlier translated by Weedman:
…he is God of God, Son from the substance of the Father and existing within the substance of the Father -
Weedman, op. cit., at 27. the associated footnote (8) provides Doignon’s rendition of the Latin text, whose pertinent clause is “intra Patris substantiam subsistentium.”
This language can connote an identification of the Father with the divine Substance, together with its corollary, the subordination of the Son as an emanation from the Father. Tertullian speaks similarly of the Son, i.e., as emitted, in the passage from the De Prescriptione which Weedman quotes two pages further on. Pierre Labriolle’s edition of the Latin text, quoted by Weedman in footnote 12, reads in the text as follows:
There is one God, the Creator of the World, who produced all things out of nothing; through his word who was emitted in the beginning of all things. That this Word is called his Son, who in the Name of God was seen in diverse form by the patriarchs, was always heard by the prophets.
Weedman, The Trinitarian Theology of Hilary of Poitiers, 29.
Vnum omnino Deum esse nec alium praeter mundi conditorum qui universa de nihilo produxerit per verbum suum primo omnium omissum. Id verbum filium eius appellatum in nomine Dei visum a patriarchis, in prophetis semper auditum . . .
Ibid., n. 13.
In the case of Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine, subordination is ruled out by his numbering the Father among the Personae of the Trinitas: this is simply conclusive, and sets the hermeneutic by which his ancillary Trinitarian observations must be understood. His classic substantia-persona distinction between the unity of the divine Trinitarian substance and that unity proper to each of the divine Persons, set out in the Apologeticus 22, became normative for the Latin Christology as well as for the Latin Trinitarian theology. It was quite unacceptable to Hilary, who seldom cites Tertullian. Influenced by the homoiousian subordinationiosm of Basil of Ancyra, he understands the Trinitarian use of “Person” to denote the divine substance, not subsistence in the substantial Trinitas, as Tertullian does in the Apologeticus.
Hanson however observes:
Tertullian had used ‘one God’ (unus deus) of the Father, but Hilary concluded that the Father is unus deus as generating and the Son unus deus as generated, but neither is solus Deus (sole God). He never uses single (unicus) of God, because this, he believes, would imply Sabellianism.94
94 The foregoing remarks are much indebted to J. Moingt, in Hilaire et son Temps 164-5. Smulders in his earlier work had said quite correctly that Hilary does not distinguish between numerical unity and what he calls ‘l’unité purement spécifique’ (Le doctrineTrinitaire, 234-5, cf. 345). Generally speaking, though the Fathers recognized the danger of imagining a kind of ‘God-stuff’ behind and beyond the Persons, they did not see the necessity (if such a necessity exists!) of making a distinction such as this.
Hanson, Search, 480.
These excerpts only typify the inherent confusion of Hilary’s attempt to reconcile the uncritical subordinationism pervading his Trinitarian theology with the baptismal faith upon whose defense he was intent, and from which he never departed.
[651] Weedman, op. cit. at 11, note 30, observes that the doctrinal standing of the Nicene Creed had already been highlighted by Eusebius of Vercelli at the Council of Milan in 355, as Hilary later reports in his Ad Constantium. It may well be that Hilary learned of this Council shortly before his exile and thereby first heard of the Nicene homoousios. Hilary recalls his early ignorance of it in his De synodis, 91.
[652] Weedman, op. cit., at 35.
[653] The difficulty of dating Hilary’s works, as pointed out by Hanson, Search, at 369; is confirmed by Weedman who, op. cit., at 21, divides Hilary’s major works between the In Mattheum, written prior to the exile, and those written during or immediately following the exile (Liber adversus Valentem et Ursacium, in 356 or early 357, the De Fide (De trinitate, Bks 1-3) in 357 or early 358, the De synodis in late 358, and the De trinitate (Bks 4-12) in 359 or 360; precision remains elusive.
[654] Hanson, Search, at 356, citing Anathema 13 of the Council of Ancyra (358).
[655] Thus Weedman, op. cit., 23-27, and Covenantal Theology (1996) Chapter One, passim.
[656] Hanson notes Hilary’s identification of the Father and the divine substance:
“Remember”, he says, later on, ‘that the Father has not been revealed to you as God, but it has been revealed to you that God is Father.’ God is essentially, and not accidentally, Father.69
69De Trin. III, 22
Hanson, Search, at 476.
[657] Arius’ brief Letter to Alexander is translated by Jurgens, Early Fathers I, at 277-78.
[658] Courtonne, Lettres, Tome I, Lettre IX, A Maxime, Philosophe, 3, at 39.
[659] This is the burden of his Contra Constantium, a diatribe written in 361 after suffering the disillusion of Constantius’ imposition of homoeanism upon the empire at the Council of Constantinople in 360.
[660] Ibid.
[661] Hanson, Search, at 480, 486f.
[662] E.g., De Trin. I, 21, 27; II, 5.
[663] Hanson, Search, 480
[664] Jurgens, Early Fathers I, §858 (bk 2, 1), at 373; §859 (bk 2, 5), at 374; §861a (bk 2, 29) at 375; §871 (bk. 8, 19) at 380, §872 (bk. 8, 21) at 378; §878 (bk 12, 56) at at 383. In the earliest of these citations, in Book II, ch. 1, Hilary identifies the divine Names with the unity of the Godhead.
[665] The corresponding excerpts from the Latin text of Hilary of Poitiers’ De trinitate are taken from P. Smulder’s Sancti Hilarii Pictaviensis Episcopi De trinitate, v. II, in Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina; 62-62A, ser. Sancti Hilarii Pictaviensis Episcopi Opera; pars II (Turnholti: Brepols, 1980) [hereafter, Smulders] Smulders work provides a French translation of the Latin text. The only published English translation is that by Stephen McKenna, C.S.S.R. in Saint Hilary of Poitiers. The Trinity , New York, ser. Fathers of the Church, Inc. 1954. Fr. McKenna's translations of Hilary of Poitiers are used thruought this work, referred in all cases to Fr. Smulders critical edition of Hilary's works.
[666] Bk 8, Chapter 19:
. . . .Vnum sunt Pater et Filius natura honore uirtute; nec natura eadem potest uelle diuersa. Et audiant adhuc naturae sibi cum Patre unitatem Filium testantem. Ait enim: Cum uenerit aduocatus ille, quern ego mittam uobis a Patre Spiritum ueritatis qui a Patre meo procedit, ipse testificabitw de me. Aduocatus ueniet, et hunc mittet Filius a Patre, et Spiritus ueritatis est qui a Patre procedit.
Excutiat ingenii sui aculeos omnis hereticorum schola, et quaerat nunc quod uel mentiri ignorantibus possit, et doceant quid sit hoc quod Filius mittit a Patre. Qui mittit, potestatem suam in eo quod mittit ostendit. Sed quod a Patre mittit, quid intellegemus, utrum acceptum, aut dimissum, aut genitum ? Nam horum necesse est unum aliquid significet, quod a Patre missurus est. Et missurus a Patre est eum Spiritum ueritatis, qui a Patre procedit. Iam ergo non est acceptio, ubi demonstrata processio est. Superest ut confirmemus in eo sententiam nostram, utrum in hoc consistentis egressionem an geniti processionem existimemus.
Smulders, 330-31
[667] Bk 8, Ch. seven times repeated, 20 :
. . . .Nunc certe ideo a se accepturum ait, quia omnia Patris sua essent. Disseca naturae huius, si potes, unitatem. Et aliquam dissimilitudinis infers necessitatem, per quam Filius non sit in unitate naturae. A Patre enim procedit Spiritus ueritatis, sed a Filio a Patre mittitur. Omnia quae Patris sunt, Fili sunt; et idcirco quidquid accipiet, a Filio accipit ille mittendus, quia Fili sunt uniuersa quae Patris sunt.
Natura itaque in omnibus tenet suam legem; et quod unum ambo sunt, eiusdem in utroque per generationem natiuitatemque diuinitatis significatio est, cum id quod accipiet a Patre Spiritus ueritatis, id Filius dandum a se esse fateatur.
Non permittenda itaque ad inpiae intellegentiae libertatem heretica peruersitas est, ut dictum hoc Domini — quod quia omnia quae Patris sunt, sua sunt, idcirco a se accipiet Spiritus ueritatis — non ad unitatem confiteatur referendum esse naturae.
Smulders, at 332-33
[668] Hilary’s departure from Trinitarian orthodoxy in the exposition of his doctrine of the Holy Spirit was pointed out by E. W. Watson a century ago: see St. Hilary of Poitiers: Select Works Translated; A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, 9 (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1954), viii, 31, at 146 B, n. 9.
[669] Bk 8, Ch. 21
In Spiritu autem Dei Patrem Deum significari, ita existimo inteuegi oportere, quod Spiritum Domini super se esse Dominus lesus Christus professus sit, propter quod eum ungueat et mittat ad euangelizandum. Paternae enim naturae uirtus in eo manifestatur, naturae suae communionem in Filio etiam in carne nato per sacramentum spiritalis huius unctionis ostendens, cum post consummati baptismi natiuitatem tum haec quoque proprietatis significatio audita est, uoce testante de caelo: Filius meus es tu, ego hodie genui te. Non enim uel ipse super se esse, uel sibi de caelis adesse, uel ipsum se cognominasse sibi filium intellegendus est. Sed omnis haec fidei nostrae fuit demonstratio, ut sub perfectae ac uerae natiuitatis sacramento unitatem naturae manentis in Filio, qui etiam homo esse coeperat, nosceremus.
Et Patrem quidem in Dei Spiritu ita significari repertum est. Filium uero hoc modo demonstratum intellegimus, cum dicit: Quodsi in Spiritu Dei ego eicio daemones, utique adpropiauit in uobis regnum Dei: se scilicet, id est naturae suae potestate, daemones eicere demonstrans, qui non nisi Dei Spiritu eici possent.
Est autem et in Spiritu Dei Spiritus paracleti significatio, neque solum profetica sed et apostohca auctoritate, cum dicitur: Sed hoc est quod dictum est per profetam: Erit in nouissimis diebus, dicit Deus, effundam de Spiritu meo in omnem carnem, et profetabunt filii eorum et filiae eorum. Et consummatum hoc totum fuisse in apostolis docetur, cum misso Spiritu sancto omnes linguis gentium sunt locuti.
Smulders, 336-37
[670] Bk 8, Ch. 26 :
Haec autem idcirco demonstrata sunt necessario, ut in quamcumque se licet partem heretica falsitas contulisset, finibus tamen adque praescribto ueritatis euangelicae concluderetur. Habitat enim in nobis Christus, et habitante Christo, habitat Deus. Et cum habitat in nobis Spiritus Christi, habitante tamen in nobis Spiritu Christi, non alius tamen Spiritus habitat quam Spiritus Dei. Quodsi per Spiritum sanctum Christus in nobis esse intellegitur, hunc tamen ita Spiritum Dei, ut Spiritum Christi esse noscendum est. Et cum per naturam rei natura ipsa habitet in nobis, indifferens natura Fili esse credetur a Patre, cum Spiritus sanctus, qui et Spiritus Christi et Spiritus Dei est, res naturae esse demonstretur unius.
Quaero nunc igitur, quomodo non ex natura unum sunt ? A Patre procedit Spiritus ueritatis. A Filio mittitur et a Filio accipit. Sed omnia quae habet Pater, Fili sunt: et idcirco ab eo accipit. Dei Spiritus est, sed idem et Spiritus Christi est. Res naturae Fili est, sed eadem res et naturae Patris est. Excitantis Christum a mortuis Spiritus est, sed idem Spiritus Christi est a mortuis excitati. In aliquo differat Christi et Dei natura ne eadem sit, si praestari potest ut Spiritus qui Dei est, non sit et Christi!
Smulders, 337-38
[671] Hanson Search, at 504-05, understands Hilary to have provided for the Personal subsistence of the Holy Spirit in the economy, citing Moingt to the same effect. Their conviction on this point relies upon their exegesis of Hilary’s discordant statements, notably his use of ‘subsistere,” to justify their conclusion, viz., that Hilary upheld a Personal presence of the Spirit in the economy. The evidence cited is not always persuasive. In an excerpt intended to illustrate the obscurity of Hilary’s language, Hanson parenthetically inserts into the final sentence a Trinitarian exegesis clearly at odds with the sentence’s clear limitation of its subject to the Father and the Son:
Not two ingenerates because by the authority of his ingenerateness God is one; and the Only-begotten is not thereby not God, because his origin is ingenerate substance (substantia = ousia ). Not one Person (lit. “subsister”, subsistentem) but one uniform substance (substantium non differentem, ousia) of one name and nature. Not one (of the Three; sic) superior to the other in type of substance (substantia = ousia), but one subordinated to the other by the generation of his nature.
Ibid., at 487-88 (underelineation added).
Inasmuch as a few pagss later Hanson recognizes that Hilary does not find a place for a Personal subsistence of the Spirit in the Trinity, a failure perforce binitarian, it must be supposed that the insertion “(of the Three)” into the last sentence of the excerpt supra refers to the economic “Three.” In Search,at 504, Hanson affirms that Hilary “does not teach that the Holy Spirit is included in the internal relations of the Godhead,” citing Smulders’ agreement. Given the revelation of the Trinity precisely through the economy, it is then difficult to justify the supposition that Hilary who, following Basil of Ancyra, precisely invokes the economic revelation of the begetting of the Son by the Father to justify their Personal distinction within the divine Unity, should be thought to maintain a Personal presence of the Spirit in the economy, the while rejecting that Personal presence of the Spirit within the Godhead, the divine Ousia which, apart from its economic revelation in Christ, could only be a Monas, not a Father.
Clearly, a criticism of Hilary’s Trinitarian theology must examine his vocabulary and the modalities of its use, but these only reveal the ambiguities which Hansen and Smulders have noted. Their resolution cannot ignore the metaphysical presuppositions out of which that theology develops, and which finally control its interpretation. Hilary’s De trinitate has long been recognized as the first Western work of systematic theology. It is clear thatr he intended a systematic exposition of his theology. Unfortunately its methodological or systematic postulates are those of Basil of Ancyra’s homoiousian doctrine. Hilary’s De trinitate and De synodis are consistently homoiousian and thereby binitarian, incapable of admitting a second homoiousion, consequently unable to recognize a third divine Person, and therefore unable to admit the Personal identity of the Holy Spirit. The prolonged vehemence of Hilary’s presentation of his doctrine of the Holy Spirit in Bk 8, Chapters 19-32, may witness to a personal uneasiness over its adequacy.
[672] Phoebadius of Agen and Gregory of Elvira offer examples of language which, taken out of context, can be read as binitarian: see Hanson, Search, at 519 and 523.
[673] Kelly, Early Creeds, at 296.
[674] See Hanson, Search, at 531; see also The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005), s.v. at 1706.
[675] This account of Victorinus’ Trinitarian doctrine relies upon expositions by Pierre Hadot, “L’image de la Trinité chez Victorinus et chez saint Augustin,” Studia Patristica 6, 409-442, by Weedman, op. cit., 63-73. and by Hanson, Search, at 531-556, esp. pp. 350-56. It is treated succinctly by Kelly, Doctrines, at 270-71, by Grillmeier, Christian Tradition, 405-07. Victorinus’ theological works have been edited by Paul Henry, S.J.: Sources Chrétienne 68-69 (Paris : Éditions. du Cerf, 1960) ; ET by Mary T. Clark, R.S.C.J., col. Fathers of the Church 69 (Washington : Catholic University of America Press, 1981) .W. A. Jurgens, in Early Fathers I, 395-96, has translated excerpts from Against Arius; he concludes his presentation of Victorinus with an endnote:
4. Marius has a difficult way of describing the Trinity, and the present situation seems to pinpoint the problem. He views the Trinity as three entities coming together to form a being of one substance. Perhaps.Bardenhewer’s old remark is not too harsh: It was no loss to theology of the East that Victorinus’ doctrine of the Trinity was utterly disregarded. .
Jurgens, Early Fathers I, 396
[676] Kelly, Doctrines, at 271, note 5, citing Adversus Arianos 2, 4; he finds an equivalent statement in 3, 4.
[677] Hanson, Search, at 546.
[678] Weedman explores the possible influence of the homoiousion doctrine upon Victorinus: op. cit., 64-67. As will be seen, there is little doubt of Victorinus' conformity to its binitarianism; his Neoplatonism left no alternative save Sabellianism.
[679] Hadot’s text:
. . .pour lui, c’est en tant qu’image de cette image qu’est le Logos, que l’âme sera image de la Trinité. Autrement dit, c’est dan le mesure où le Logos manifeste la structure trinitaire de l’être divin, que l’âme, image du Logos, est elle-même image de cette structure trinitaire. Nous retrouvons ici l’étroit liaison déjà signalée entre la substance et l’image. Augustin a tendence à confondre les notions d’image et de ressemblance. L’image, pour lui, est une copie d’un modèle. Pour Victorinus, l’image fait en quelque sorte partie de la substance ; autrement dit, pour lui, l’être est essentiallement double, il est lui-même et sa définition, lui-même et sa propre manifestation : l’image est une sorte de dédoublement qui est esssentiel a être.3 Il en résulte, que, dans le monde intelligible, substance et image s’impliquent mutuellement: la substance est déjà image, l’image est encore substance.4 Ainsi, nous dit Victorinus5, Dieu a dit : « Selon notre image » parce que Père et Fils sont une seule image. Nous touchons ici pour la première fois à la doctrine trinitaire de Victorinus. Pour lui, le Père, auquel il réserve le nom de Dieu, est la substance, le Fils est l’image de cette substance, son Logos, sa définition, sa révélation. En vertu de l’implication mutuelle de la substance et de l’image on peut dire que le Père est déjà image, c’est-à-dire que la substance est déjà déterminée et definie en puissance. Père et Fils sont une seule image qui est in puissance dans le Père, en acte dans le Fils. Quand Dieu dit : « Faisons l’homme à notre image », cela veut donc dire, pour Victorinus, que le Père s’addresse au fils pour lui dire : « Faisons l’homme selon l’unique image, que nous sommes tous deux, de l’unique substance que je suis. L’âme est donc l’image propre du Logos, c’est-à-dire du Fils, et elle n’est image de la Trinité que parce que le Logos, grâce a l’unité de la substance, a en lui-même la Trinité: comme chacun des Trois, est les Trois.
3 Marius Victorinus, explan. in Cicer. rhetor, 1 2; Halm (Rhetores latini minores), p. 165, 32: Omne perfectum bonum…duobus ad plenum constat, re ipsa et specie atque imagine sui.
4 Cf. Marius Victorinus, adv. Ar. I 20, 7-32
5 Adv. Ar. I 20, 7-8.
Hadot, art. cit., 412-13.
A few lines further on, Hadot returns to the “dédoublement” theme, now in its application to the Son’s imaging of the Father as integral with the Son’s relation to the Spirit, using the soul’s imaging of the Logos as a point d’appui:
Selon la première consideration, l’âme est donc être, vivre et penser, comme la Trinité. Mais comme la Trinité, elle est constitué de deux dyades, d’une part la substance et son Logos, d’autre parte, au sein de l’unique Logos de la substance, la vie et la pensée. En effet, nous retrouvons ici le dédoublement essentiel à l’être que nous avons déjà recontré. L‘âme est une substance incorporelle, nous dit Victorinus.1 Mais, en tant même que substance, elle a nécessairement une image et une définition de soi, en un mot, un Logos qui la révèle et la manifeste. Ceci correspond dans la Trinité à la distinction entre le Père et le Fils, c’est-à-dire son mouvement, son actuation et sa révélation. Dans l’âme, cette définition de la substance, ce Logos de l’âme, c’est sa puissance vivante et pensante. Autrement dit, dans l’âme, comme dans la Trinité, le Logos est double en un unique mouvement, il est vie et intelligence.
1. Adv. Ar. I 32 ; Pl, 8, 1065 a : anima, sustantia incorporalis quae sit, definitionem et imaginem habet, vitalem potentiam et intelligentialem.
Ibid., 413-14.
It will follow that the dyad integral to the Logos is provided by the Spirit’s actualization or definition of the Logos, i.e., the Spirit, as « penser », is the manifestation of the substantial Logos, a manifestation inherent, i.e., potential, in the Logos precisely as substantial, as life, « vivre, » and whose actuation is the Spirit as qualitative, as a movement, an action, a « penser. » The dédoublement of substance, « être, » « vivre, », is limited to the Father and the Son. As with the homoiousion Trinitarianism of Basil of Ancyra and Hilary of Poitiers, it can have no application to the Spirit who, as the actualization of the Logos, is not substantial, and therefore not homoousios, except as identified with the Logos, which entails the Sabellianism which Hanson has noted in Victorinus’ doctrine. The Spirit must then drop out of the Trinity: the “predominance” (i.e., subordination of the hypostasis to its source), which Hadot understands to constitute the Trinitarian hypostases, suffices only for the Father, who constitutes the divine substance, and the Son, who are coincident with the divine substance despite the paradoxical subordination of the Son as begotten by the Father, and therefore also homoousios in Victorinus’ substantialist and implicitly Sabellian meaning of the term. Victorinus, as a convinced convert to the Christian faith, insists on including the Spirit in the Trinity, but his theological metaphysics, like Hilary’s, is at best binitarian, and cannot acccomodate the Holy Spirit as a hypostasis distinct from the Father and the Son, i.e., from the divine Substance.
[680] Rahner, The Trinity, at 42-44, 56-57.
[681] Its salient exponents include Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994) who in the course of a lengthy Introduction, asserts that the bishop (Ambrose) ”belongs within the rough and tumble of political life, not above it.” and concluding with “The Ambrose of this book is, above all, a survivor. The achievement, if less spectacular than the victories of church over state with which he has so often been credited, should not be underrated.” Doubtless, but survivors as such are little esteemed. If Ambrose is not recognized as “above all,” the Bishop of Milan, his public life is that of a politician, in which case his disciplining of the Emperor Theodosius is incomprehensible. See also Daniel H. Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the end of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) who in the course of another long introduction,“suggests” that Ambrose’s victory over Arianism in the west was the imposition of “tyrannical catholicism“ (p. 10).
The reduction of history to politics has become a cottage industry among Church historians of late: e.g., Charles Kannengiesser, “A Century in Quest of Origen’s Spirituality,” Theology @ McAuley: An E-Journal of Theology From the Staff and Students at McAuley Campus. Issue 3, Banyo Edition, February, 2003. This ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ was popularized in the U.S. by the publication of the English translation of Walter Bauer’s Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1934): Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971); see Hurtado’s observations upon its influence: op. cit., at 520-21.
The permanent tension between the “two loves that build two cities” is neatly posed by two recent summary observations, the first by an author deeply committed to the history of his time, whose significance he knows to be salvific, finally sacramental, and the second by a writer who seeks to transcend and so annul that significance by reducing it a matter of a secularized, even clinical academic interest: the first is by a well-known Catholic priest, the late Rev. Richard Neuhaus, a Lutheran convert to Catholicism, the founder and the first editor of the Catholic monthly, First Things. The second is the comparably well-known Anglican scholar, Bishop Rowan Wiliams, later the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Fr. Neuhaus has succinctly summarized the indispensability of the doctrinal tradition in a fallen world:
Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.
Richard Neuhaus, “The Public Square,” First Things, March, 2009, Number 191, p. 63. (reprinted from First Things, January, 1997).
Bishop Williams is of another mind:
Orthodoxy is constructed in the processes of both theological and political conflict; which means that understanding it fully should involve understanding these conflicts.
Rowan Williams: The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in honor of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. ix.
Fr. Neuhaus’s prophecy has been fulfilled in the sea-change undergone by the departments of theology in the Catholic colleges and universities in the United States; they have been transformed into departments of ‘religious studies,’ wherein Dr. Rowan’s clinically dispassionate examination of processes of conflict is normative for the goals of higher education as established by the American Association of University Professors, whose dictamina are now uncritically received at such nominally Catholic universities as Georgetown and Notre Dame: see endnote 635 supra. The current cowering before the Zeitgeist by those universities has begun to awaken the U.S.C.C.B. from its fainéant slumbers; the Vatican finally noticed that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious which, until 1992, it had regarded as the authentic representative of all American nuns, has been in insurrection for the past thirty years, to the point that orthodoxy is no longer optional in that organization; it is long since forsworn.
It may be concluded that any scholarly discussion of Ambrose of Milan, or of any other bishop comparably situated, will be forced to pass upon the authenticity of his performance of his episcopal office and, inevitably, upon the authenticity of the office as such. To judge Ambrose’s successful resistance to Arianism as the imposition of “tyrannical catholicism,” or to assess his episcopacy as “within the rough and tumble of political life, not above it” is to have assumed a stance in which the historical significance of Ambrose’s concern for Catholic orthodoxy has been proscribed a priori, barring any comprehension of the conflicts which a fourth century Catholic bishop could avoid only by abdicating the responsibilities of his office, which are historical in a sense such judgments fail to recognize. In the end, two understandings of history are here perennially opposed. One is sacramental, and supposes history to possess an intrinsic free order. The other is secular, and regards all order in history as imposed ab extra, that is, as finally the product of coercion. .
[682] The Gelasian formula:
(2) Duo sunt quippe, imperator auguste, quibus principaliter mundus hic regitur, auctoritas sacrata pontificum et regalis potestas, in quibus tanto gravius pondus est sacerdotum, quanto etiam pro ipsis regibus hominum in divino reddituri sunt examine rationem.
DS *347: “Famuli vestrae pietatis” ad Anastasium I imp., a. 494.
This lambent sentence is usually deformed in translation by an editing which changes its “duo sunt” into “duae sunt potentiae” or its equivalent, as exemplified in the DS headnote, “De duplici suprema potestate in terris”, by which Gelasius’ crucial affirmation, “there are two by which the world is ruled,” becomes “There are two powers by which the world is ruled.” The insertion changes the meaning of the sentence entirely: it would reduce the governance of the world to a permanent stand-off between two mutually exclusive powers. This is the classic pagan stasis, the standing tension of the one and the many, wherein the ruler, the holder of potestas regalis, is the monadic source of law, the one whose rule subsumes the governed, the ‘many,’ to his dominion while the “many,’ the subject of that subjugation to coercive dominion, continually resist it by an intrinsic dynamic of disintegration which the ruler cannot overcome: this is also the classic, i.e., pagan, view of the husband-wife polarity, where in the man is the source of unity and the wife the source of resistance to unity, a dualist historical pessimism instinctive to the Greek cosmological tradition: Chapter 4 of the second volume of this study examines the Catholic conversion of that ancient despair to historical optimism, via the sacrifical institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant.
When this cosmological dualism is read into Gelasius’ letter, the Church is at once politicized, submitted to the fragmentation, the disunity, of fallen historicity, tempted to theocracy as the alternative to insurgency: in either case, reduced to merely pragmatic significance, no longer sacramental, to become only another worldly institution doomed by its fallen historicity. The point is further developed by the present writer in "Liturgy and Law: The Marital Order of Community," Church and State in America: Catholic Issues; ser. Proceedings: The Fourteenth Convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, Denver, 1991, ed. Msgr. George A. Kelly (New York: St. John's University, 1992) 1-68.
In fact, Gelasius’ letter asserted the tension, permanent in the fallen world inhabited by a Christian people, between the moral authority of the Church and the political power of the civil government: these are “the two by which (as Christian) the world is ruled.” John Courtney Murray repeated this classic doctrine in his successful insistence at Vatican II that the Church is without direct political authority: insofar as political, authority is proper to the laity, whose whose political freedom is grounded in their liturgical worship: see that Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty: Dignitatis humanae, in Vatican Council II. The Conciliar and Post Conciliar documents: Study Edition, General Editor, Austin Flannery (Northport, N.Y., Costello Publishing Company, 1987) 799-812.
One may add that political authority and responsibility are proper to the laity as sacramentally ordered in free societies by reason of foundation of those free societies in the radical freedom of sacramental marriage, whose efficacy ex opera operato is proper to the marriage of baptized Christians as such, thus not restricted to Catholics; its freedom is equally proper to the marital ritual of the Jewish people. Unfortunately the U.S. bishops returned from the Second Vatican Council imbued with an ambition to speak upon clearly political issues concerning which, as bishops, they had neither ecclesial authority nor secular competence. The results of their assumption of an ultra vires political authority have been disastrous, for it entailed the neglect of their authority and responsibility simply as bishops.
[683] Acquaintance with that “dilemma” was renewed toward the end of the twentieth century by the late Robert Bork’s The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (New York & London: Macmillan [Free Press], 1990). In this work Bork poses the rational impossibility, the “Madisonian dilemma,” of accounting at once for majority rule and for personal rights, for personal dignity and personal freedom under the rule of law. Its only resolution is via the Gelasian dialectic, whose ecclesial pole removes it from the abstract realm which Madison invoked, and instead identifies the historical context that is its condition of possibility: i.e., civil existence under the rule of law is existence in two distinct societies, the sacramental and the political. “Sacramental” is used here in its broadest application as designating the free polity of those citizens who distinguish between their free exercise of public responsibility for a free future and their submission to coercive power. The ground of that distinction is neither empirical nor abstract: it has no empirical verifiability and can be given no ideal justification. Its historical objectivity is the free exercise, the praxis, of a free consensus, whose foundation can only be sacramental, which is to say, sustained by the common liturgical appropriation of the free responsibility which, as free, is gift, the gift of God to his people. The indispensable public element of this sacramental praxis is the sacrament of marriage, for its concrete living out of the mutuality of authoritative personal responsibility as constitutive of the free unity of the nuptial ‘one flesh’ is a standing refusal of the one-many dilemma inherent in the contemporary judicial rationalization of the rule of law. Sacramental authority and responsibility cannot consist with that reduction of the rule of law to coercion as upheld by H. L. A. Hart and his disciples: “It shall not be like that among you.”
[684] The Pelagian controversy and Augustine’s lapse into predestinationism, are finely treated by Gerald Bonner, St. Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies; revised edition (Norwich, Norfolk, GB: The Canterbury Press, 1986), 310-393.
[685] DS §370-400.
[686] St. Thomas’ view of our imaging of God is found in S. T. Ia, q. 93, a. 3, c. Unfortunately his application of the Aristotelian faculty psychology to the Augustinian psychological analogy is reductively subordinationist in that it does not account for the Father’s immanence in the Trinitarian substance. St. Thomas is of course correct in holding that the Processions of the Son and the Spirit remain “in agente,” i.e., in the Father (cf. S. T. Ia, q. 27, articles 1-3). The subordinationist implications of this immanence of the Son and the Spirit in the Father are evident, for St. Thomas sometimes identifies God with the divine Substance, as Rahner’s Trinitarian theology, set out in The Trinity, supposes; at other times St. Thomas identifies God with the Father, thus as a member of the Trinity with which in consequence he cannot be identified. The homoousion of the Son and the Holy Spirit with the Father requires that the Father subsist in the divine Substance, the Trinity, as its Head, the source of its free unity. Only thus can he be consubstantial with the Son and the Holy Spirit, and only in this way can the Scylla and Charybdis of Sabellianism versus subordinationism be avoided. St. Thomas avoids the theological question posed by the immanence of God the Father in the Trinity. This is the greatest of the mysteries of the faith; inexhaustible, unplummable; therefore it is the first and radical subject of the fides quaerens intellectum. It cannot be ignored. The theological question is not that of explaining how the Father can be a member of the Trinity, for theology is not cosmology. Rather, the question is a fides quaerens intellectum, grounded in the personal faith of theologian, and directed to the Church. It asks what the implicrtions of this mystery may be; it does not question how or why it may be.
[687] This heading is on loan from J. N. D. Kelly: Doctrines, at 252. The same must be said of many of the references to patristic theology herein; their indebtedness to Kelly’s classic will have been evident to anyone familiar with it.
[688] By way of illustration, we may examine the review article by Fr. Roger Balducelli, O.S.F.S., in which he reviews the French original of Christian Cochini's study, Origines apostoliques du célibat sacerdotal (Paris: Éditions Lethielleux, 1981), published in ET as Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy (San Francisco: Ignatius Pres, 1990). Fr. Balducelli simply dismisses religious faith as a basis for historical judgment, while remaining supremely uncritical of the comparably parti pris character of the fashionable postulatory atheism grounding his own methodology; viz.:
Cochini also unveils the principle the application of which will allow historians to exploit methodically the possibility of an unrecorded teaching and evoke out of later, nonapostolic utterances the historical certainty that clerical continence is in effect entitled to claim apostolic origins. He stipulates that to the extent to which we can ascertain that a doctrine or a discipline is effectively observed "by the whole Church" and "has always been observed,' we have the right to think that the point of departure of that doctrine or discipline is located in the age of the apostles (78). For the sake of convenience, this stipulation is made into a principle, and the principle is named "principle of spatial-temporal universality' (85), where "spatial" points to the fact that the whole Church subscribes to a given doctrine or discipline, and "temporal" refers to the fact that the whole Church has done so always.
What response is this principle likely to elicit from historians concerned with the integrity and credibility of their discipline? Can they agree in principle that the spatial-temporal universality of a discipline that first bears witness to its own institutional existence in the fourth century was in fact willed into existence by the apostles, even if these bequeathed to posterity no public evidence of any such act of their will? Only a special kind of historian, I believe, can afford to answer this question in the affirmative. This is the historian who at that critical moment when the act of knowing is about to come to fruition in judgment can in good conscience call upon a conviction to which historians qua historians have no access. This is the believer's conviction that the Christian Church is indefectibly faithful to the normativeness of her own origins, and cannot therefore subscribe universally and always to an institution unless the authority of an apostolic enactment stand at the origins of it. It is only on the strength of such a privileged conviction that the universality of an institutional discipline can be construed as evidence of the apostolic origins of the same. But since this conviction is available only to believers, an assertion made on the strength of it does not constitute an act of historical knowing, and public validity is not, in consequence, one of the qualities that assertion is entitled to claim of itself.
Balducelli, "The Apostolic Origins of Clerical Continence: A Critical Appraisal of a New Book," Theological Studies 41 (1982) 693-705, at 695-696):see also, in Theological Studies 52 (1991), at 738-39, Fr. George T. Dennis' derivative and similarly dismissive review of the Ignatius Press translation of Cochini's study.
A reply to Fr. Balducelli’s reliance upon dogmatic methodology to dismiss all who fail to subscribe unreservedly to its diktat must consist in refusing its presumptions. It is then appropriate to rewrite his criticism in such wise as to reveal its incompetence. Thus:
What response is this principle likely to elicit from historians concerned with the integrity and credibility of their discipline? Can they agree in principle that the spatial-temporal universality of a discipline that first bears witness to its own institutional existence in the fourth century was in fact willed into existence by the apostles, even if these bequeathed to posterity no public evidence of any such act of their will? Only a special kind of historian, I believe, can afford to answer this question in the affirmative. This is the historian who at that critical moment when the act of knowing is about to come to fruition in judgment can in good conscience call upon a conviction to which historians qua historians have free access. This is the conviction proper to the Catholic historian that the Catholic Church is indefectibly faithful to the normativeness of her divine origins, which the apostolic tradition asserts but did not invent.
As a historian, he cannot therefore subscribe universally and always to an ecclesial discipline such as priestly celibacy unless the apostolic tradition confirms it. Here let it be remembered that the apostolic tradition is liturgical, consequently public and therefore historical; the writings which constitute the New Testament are consequently themselves liturgical, as are the enactments of the several councils, provincial as well as ecumenical, for the bishops who attend and constitute them, and authorize their edicts, are as bishops within the apostolic succession: they have no other authority than that which the Apostles received from their Lord.
It is on the strength of this episcopal authority that the enactment by an early provincial council of a canon imposing clerical celibacy cannot be presumed to be an instance of ex parte juridicalism, but to rest upon the perceived violation of an ecclesial tradition which can hardly be other than apostolic, especially in this case, wherein the province concerned is remote from the influence of any other tradition. Because this Catholic conviction of the divine origin of the Church is available to all, an assertion founded upon it cannot be dismissed as arbitrary. Its free affirmation is an act of historical knowing, and as such has every right to claim public validity, supposing the public in view to comprise scholars whose discipline is a free quaerens intellectum, a concern for historical questions which presupposes the historian’s integrity and competence until the contrary is shown, not by failure to subscribe to a politically correct method, but by a failure to subscribe to the canons of free inquiry into a free historical reality, from which Fr. Balducini has immuneized himself. His notion of history is that of the Enlightenment, subscription to which has been diminishing for several decades.
In sum, a historical-critical method such as Balducelli's, resting upon the untestable criteriological postulates of Enlightenment historicism, cannot deem itself triumphant over or exclusive of other methods of historical criticism resting upon the comparably untestable―and comparably criteriological―Catholic postulate of the free unity and intelligibility of history. Balducelli's objection to Cochini's method and the conclusions it substantiates is academically fashionable, but it is not critically sustained, nor can it be. This failure in his logic accounts for Balducelli's descent to the ad hominem; there is no other support for the "hermeneutic of suspicion" he employs. Cochini's concern for "the integrity and credibility" of the historian's discipline rests upon his personal conviction that history has an intrinsic coherence or truth which is free; one might add, as Cochini has not, that only that postulate permits a responsible historical inquiry, one which would be neither an arbitrary Romantic construct nor an ideologically-driven academic fiat. Balducelli’s compareable concern for the “integrity and credibility” of the historian’s discipline rests upon his equally personal―and therefore implicitly free―conviction that history has only that unity which his method can recognize. He understands Cochini’s view of history to be irreconciliable with his own; he fails to understand that his own view of what “constitutes a historical fact” is irreconciliable with the historicity of the Church, whose historical cause is precisely her liturgical tradition:
A further consequence is that the inquiry conducted on the basis of the universality principle is caught in an identity crisis. It is undertaken for the explicit purpose of answering a historical question historically, but moves from question to answer without the correct estimate of what constitutes a historical fact, what lends the reconstruction of historical facts the quality of historical knowledge, and what is required if that reconstruction is to claim historical certainty or the nearest approximation to it.
Ibid., at 696.
Moreover, Balducelli supposes that the apostolic tradition must rest upon the apostles' acts of will, their "enactments." It is understandable that he should have so voluntarist a notion of the role of the apostles and of the nature of the Church, for this is what authority meant for the Enlightenment: then and there it was is simply identical with power, as Thomas Hobbes explained so clearly in The Leviathan, and therefore with personal autonomy as such, as J. S. Mill supposed in his Essay on Liberty. This reductionism remains instinctive to the Enlightenment-inspired rationalism of what is still much of the contemporary academy. It has dominated Anglo-American jurisprudence from the time of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin down to Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and the authors of Roe v. Wade in our own day. By a generally unreflective, even innocent irony, it is lately denominated "historical consciousness."
Catholic scholars who are truly "concerned with the integrity and intelligibility of their discipline," remain Catholic and remain historically conscious by making the liturgical affirmations of the Eucharistic liturgy their own, and this in the full recognition of the normative sacramental and apostolic historicity of those same liturgical affirmations. The single alternative, that alternative posed by the rigorous application of Enlightenment historicism, was explored from its sola fide inception to its unitarian dregs by the liberal theology of which Harnack is the best-known exemplar: his fascination with Marcion was not an accident.
In the end, Jesus either transcends history as its Lord, its Alpha and Omega, or he does not; either the Eucharistic celebration in his Person of his One Sacrifice is historical with the historicity of that history-transcending Event, or it is not. A historian who ignores that question is in no position to criticize one who does not.
[689] Jeremy Bentham, in Anarchical Fallacies, vol. 2 of Bowring (ed.), Works, 1843. Charles Milner Atchinson, in Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (Boston, Beacon Press, 19551928), at 175, cites Bentham’s famous sneer:
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense―nonsense upon stilts.”
Jeremy Bentham (New York: AMS Press, 19711905) at 109. It must be remembered that this bitter critic of the Common Law was also the first to defend the inviolability of the Catholic confessional. No human person can be categorized; we are each a mystery, knwn only to God.
[690] See "What is Heresy?" Theological Investigations V, 468-512 at 481, 498ff.; see also the Introduction in Volume I, endnote 6. Inasmuch as Rahner uses “cryptogamic” to designate a coded or encrypted text, its appearance in the article cited can hardly be other than as a misprint of “cryptogrammic”. “Cryptogamic” is an obsolete botanical term. It survives as a label for a veiled heresy only because of Rahner’s mistaken use of it. See Richard Lennan, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner (Oxford University; Clarendon Press, 1995).
[692] The key paragraphs of this conclusive statement of the doctrine of the Council of Ephesus read as follows:
We confess therefore that our Lord Jesus Christ is the Only-begotten Son of God, perfect God and perfect Man, having a rational soul and a body, according to His humanity, born of the Father for the ages, and in these last days, according to His humanity, born of the Virgin Mary for us and for our salvation. According to his divinity, He is consubstantial with the Father, and according to His humanity he is consubstantial with us. A union was made of the two natures, on which account we confess one Christ, one Son, one Lord. In accord with this understanding of the unconfused union we confess that the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God (6) through God the Word’s being incarnate and becoming Man, and, from this conception, His joining to himself the temple assumed from her. As to the evangelical and apostolic sayings about the Lord, we know that theologians (7) make some common, as pertaining to the one Person (8), and divide some, as if pertaining to the two natures, and those that are divinely apt they+ concede to the divinity of Christ, but the lowly they attribute to His humanity.
6. Qeotόkon.
7.toὺV qeolὸgoV ἅndraV.
8. ἐj` ἑnὸV prosώpon.
Tr. from Jurgens, Early Fathers III, §2060, at 207: Jurgens notes that the full text is found in Labbe and Cossart, Concilia, Tom. IV., col. 343 and col. 164; and in Migne, Pat. Graece., Tom. LXXVII. [Cyrilli Opera, Tom. X.], col. 173. He considers the best edition of the Greek text to be that of P. E. Pusey, "Cyrilli Alex. Epistolae tres oecumenicae, libri V c. Nestorium, XII capitum, explanatio, XII capitum defensio utraquem scholia de Incarnatione Unigeniti" Oxford, 1875.
[693] Comment. In Joannem, Lib. IV, esp. c. 3-5 (P.G. 73: 559-630); see also the Second Reading for Tuesday of the sixth week of Easter, The Liturgy of the Hours, II, at 889 ff., I.C.E.L.s rendering of Cyril’s Comment. In Joannem, Lib. XI, 11 (P.G. 74, 559-562).
[694] S. T. iiia, q. 78, a. 4, ad. 2.; cf. q. 13, a. 2, c.
[695] As has been seen, John Paul II, in Veritatis Splendor, dissociated the doctrinal tradition from any received method of philosophical or theological speculation, thereby putting an end to a long confusion, whose history has been summarized by José Pereira: see Volume I, endnote 274, supra.
[696] This ultra vires delegation of their indelegable episcopal authority (Delegata potestas non potest delegari) was underwritten in November, 1990, by the bishops of a “joint committee” in a document entitled “Criteria for the Evaluation of Inclusive Language in the Liturgy as Established by the N.C.C.B. Joint Committee [Liturgy and Doctrine] on Inclusive Language.” The document [hereafter Criteria], includes an assertion, in Paragraphs 12 and 13, that Scriptural texts intended for liturgical use may legitimately be adopted to that use by changes in wording. This said, it proceeds to justify the adaptation of Scriptural texts to a presumed need to incorporate in their liturgical texts an “inclusive” misuse of the English language yet more insistent than that constituted by I.C.E.L.’s 1970 “translation” of the Roman Missal, a liturgical language henceforth to be imposed upon those of the faithful who still attend the celebration of the Mass.
To the Criteria’s exposition of the liturgical adaptation of Scripture it must be replied that while it is no doubt appropriate that the Joint Committee who wrote it should remind the bishops of the propriety of the liturgical use of Scripture, the Joint Committee blithely ignored the historical fact that Scripture is liturgical per se; it does not possess an abstract and independent standing free of liturgical expression and interest, pace―if need be―the academic exegetes whose hearts are restless until they find repose in a value-free reading of their methodologically dehistoricized texts. Hence, by way of illustration, the Septuagint is not a manipulation, for extraneous liturgical purposes, of a Hebraic Old Testament theretofore untroubled by such alien concerns. The Septuagint translation was made for religious purposes by Jewish scholars whose faith underwrote the authenticity of that translation and whose liturgical needs were met by it.
Neither is the New Testament usage of the Old Testament such a liturgical manipulation of the text as the Joint Committee's attempt to "adapt" Scripture to liturgy intimates One must still insist, however discommoding that insistence be to an exegetical community increasingly reluctant to speak of the "Old Testament," or even to admit the legitimacy of its Catholic reading, that the New Testament books in fact have their Sitz im Leben in the Old Testament, understood not as a value-free collection of value-free documents of no intrinsic, i.e., historical significance or interest, but as a liturgically-unified religious interpretation of the history of the Chosen People, the culmination of whose history is the sacrificial death and resurrection of the Messiah, represented and celebrated in the Mass. This too was obvious, until the Enlightened historicism which led Harnack out of Lutheran orthodoxy became popular also in professedly Catholic circles: e.g. the rejection by the Protestant scholar Walter Brueggemann of the liturgical historicity of the biblical “narrative” in favor of economic liberation; see his “From Biblical Narrative to Economic Policy, published in the National Catholic Reporter 45, 22 (Aug. 21, 2009), scattered across pp. 1, 22-24 of that curious journal.
The statement of the Joint Committee may stand, for so long as it is recognized that what warrants this accommodation of the Scripture to the liturgy is not the "nature of the liturgical assembly," as the Committee would have it, but the concretely historical and heirarchical reality of the Eucharistic worship of the Church out of which the New Testament emerged under the inspiration of the Eucharistic anamnesis of the One Sacrifice in the Person of him who alone can offer it, Jesus Christ the Lord. This worship is nuptially ordered, a celebration of the sacrificial institution of New Covenant, of the union in One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve as accomplished, as consummated, on the Altar at the Last Supper and on the Cross, inseparably, and represented on the altars of the Church. The sub-sociological jargon employed by the Joint Committee is only ridiculous.
Thus in the Catholic Eucharistic liturgy there will be found no room for that accommodation of the literal language of Scripture to that fastidious avoidance of any recognition of the liturgical celebration of the personal differentiation of men and women upon the abolition of which the Joint Committee is intent, an anti-sacrificial animus all too manifest in the post-1970 I.C.E.L. “revisions” of the Roman Missal, for this differentiation is integral to the dignity and eschatological significance of the historical masculinity and femininity of the people of God, whose plenary historical expression is the One Flesh instituted by the One Sacrifice by which we are redeemed, which is celebrated daily on our altars, and of which the sacrament of marriage is the publicly efficacious image, to the marked distress of the secularized and secularizing pundits of this Western world. Apart from the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve, God is not imaged in history.
The NCCB approval of the program proposed by its Joint Committee [Liturgy and Doctrine] on Inclusive Language for the acommodation of the Eucharistic nuptial symbolism to the feminist ideological suppression of the liturgical significance of masculinity and femininity is a clear abdication by the bishops of their indelegable liturgical responsibility in favor of deferring to the insolence of their faceless bureaucracy. Fortunately that pusillanimous program has been overtaken by events, but Bishop Trautman’s futile effort to revive it, while Chairman of the Bishops’ Liturgical Committee and thereafter, is eloquent of the continuing bureaucratic summons to episcopal irresponsibility confronting the bishops when met in their national conferences. Fortunately, the haphazard products of these markedly clueless gatherings can no longer claim a magisterial authority apart from the showing of an impossible unanimity of the members of the national conferences, or a comparably unlikely recognitio from the Vatican, should two-thirds of the nation’s bishops find something upon which they can agree―happily an unlikely prospect.
[697] See History of the Church, II, Part Two: Theological Disputes in East and West to the Middle of the Fifth Century, Chapter 8: "From Ephesus to Chalcedon: The Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451)," 114-121, at 120.
699 See The Critical Meaning of the Bible (New York: Paulist Press, 1981). This small book (150 pp.) is a collection of Brown’s essays, each given a chapter, The first of them, originally published in Theological Studies 42 (1981) as ”And the Lord Said’? Biblical Reflection on Scripture as the Word of God.” A Summary of theme prefaces the first chapter: its first two sentences sums up the Nestorian foundation of Brown’s exegesis.:
The mystery of “the word of God” is appreciated when we take both sides of that expression seriously. It is a human word, for God does not speak.
This diophysite Nestorian Christology is radically anti-sacramental; its best-known contempory expression is Calvinism, which agrees with Brown that God does not and cannot act in history. Brown is no doubt sympathetic to Calvinism but there is no reason to think him a Calvinist. At bottom he is simply a Nestorian, intent upon banishing God from history in order that exegesis may be freed from the didactic oversight of the magissterium of the Church of which he professes to be a member.
[699] Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, Herder and Herder, New York, 1973, see all of the first chapter: e.g., pp. 4, 15, 17, 19, 20, 25.
[700] Here it must be said again that the historicity of the Eucharistic worship is its sacramental order: it has the free unity of the Old Covenant, the new Covenant, and the Kingdom of God. These elements of human historicity relate to each other as sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, and res tantum; it is as thus freely related that they are freely inseparable, in that their conceptual isolation is their disunity, their fragmentation, their reduction to the immanently necessary disintegration that is sarx, the flesh that profits nothing. The universality of this salvation history is the presupposition of Fides et Ratio; it is only in this context that the pagan seers, whose wisdom was appropriated by the patristic tradition as the “spoils of the Egyptians,” are understood by John Paul II to have been in search of him whose Eucharistic immanence in history mediates salvation to the entirety of the historical human substance of whom he is the Head, the source of its free unity: i.e., as the Lord of history, the Messiah, the primordial Jesus, the second Adam, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the “ancient beauty who is forever new.”.
[701] J. N. D. Kelly, Creeds, 358-67, has provided a succinct account of the origins of the Latin inclusion of the Filioque in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
[702] In response to a request from Pope John Paul II for a “clarification” of the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, made in a homily delivered in St. Peter’s Basilica on 29 June, 1995, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, under the direction of its President, Walter Cardinal Kasper, published a document entitled “The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit.” Its English translation appeared in the September 20, 1995 issue of in the weekly English-language edition of L’Osservatore Romano, pp. 3, 6. John Paul II’s concern for the union of the Church of the East and of the West, as enabling her to breathe with “both lungs,” was constant throughout his papacy. The “clarification” therefore bore upon the Mission of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Mission of the Son, an issue long since seemingly inseparable from the Filioque dispute: thus the title of the Pontifical Council’s document and the focus of the Orthodox response to it.
[703] John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, at 94, 189. For further commentary, see Yves M.-J. Congar and D. Smith, I Believe In The Holy Spirit (New York: Seabury Press; London: G. Chapman, 1983), III, 49-56; 174-256; Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way. Revised edition. Crestwood, New York: 1995, pp. 89–104, 210-216. Bishop Ware has recognized, as also perhaps had John Meyendorff, that the Filioque controversy is not doctrinal, a view with which the West of course agrees. However, many if not most Orthodox theologians disagree. It would be pleasing to suppose that their disagreement is reducible to a lis de verbis, but that is condescension. It is urged in this section that only a return to the historicity, the soteriological interest, of the doctrinal tradition, and thus to the sacramental nature of our imaging of God, can so modify the content and tonality of the discussion as to satisfy both Latin and Greek that their faith in the Trinity is the same. A fine, ecumenically nuanced statement of the Filioque issue is provided in The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue? An Agreed Statement of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation Saint Paul's College, Washington, DC, October 25, 2003. It provides a basis for continuing the current discussion, but its theological resources have long been exhausted; at bottom, the Filioque disputants have disagreed over a false problem, much as had the diophysite–monophysite controversialists of the fifth century, and as do those who would prolong that futility into the twenty-first. A return of theology to its normative foundation in the liturgically-mediated historical faith of the historical Church in the historical Jesus the Lord is now indispensable, to the West as well as to the East.
Gianni Valenti, a widely published authority on Catholic-Orthodox relations, published “Rome Calling Constantinople,” 30DAYS, (No. 3, 1996), 36-48. This article gathers statements from Orthodox prelates and theologians, irenic in tone but expressing the traditional Orthodox concerns stemming from their ‘acephalic’ rejecttion of the authority of the papacy, and from the lack of a common Creed. They include contributions from such authorities as Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, (38-39), from John Zizioulas, the Metropolitan of Pergamon (42-44), from Chrysostomos Konstantinidis, the Metropolitan of Ephesus (45-48), and from Daniel Clobotea, Metropolitan of Moldavia and Bucovina (48).
[704] S. T. 1a, Q. 14, aa. 1 - 4; Q. 19, aa. 1 - 2; Q. 27, aa. 1-5; Pegis I, 135-40; 195-198; 274-81. The processions are of course of the Son and the Spirit, and are immanent in the divine substance, the Trinity, but in QQ. 14 and 19, St. Thomas has identified the divine substance not with the Trinity, but with the “intelligible agent”, the one God, who, in Q 27, St. Thomas identifies with the Father, the intellectual substance from which the Word, as an intelligible emanation, proceeds as begotten. The second emanation from the intelligent agent, i.e., the procession of Love (the Holy Spirit), St. Thomas considers to be implicit in the emanation-procession of the Word.
St. Thomas’ insistence upon the processions of the Word and of Love terminating within the “intelligible agent” who is God the Father, the divine substance within which the Processions must remain immanent, can avoid subordinationism only by recourse to modalism. The Council of Nicaea has made clear that the Father is Personally, not substantially, homoousios with the Son and the Holy Spirit, and consequently each Person must subsist, as each Person does, in the intellectual substance that is the Trinity, which the Father does not transcend and with which he cannot be identified, given the definition at Nicaea of the Son’s Personal consubstantiality with the Father.
Underlying this confusion of the Father with the divine essence is a view of the Son’s homoousion with the Father which understands it to be substantial or essential rather than Personal in such wise that the Holy Spirit is thought to receive the divine substance from the Father, as the Gift with which we have seen the Father, i.e. the divine substance, identified. Inasmuch as the divine substance is the Trinity, this supposition is untenable, as the failure of the homoiousian movement amply demonstrates. It is worthy of note that St. Thomas cites Hilary’s flawed treatise.
These mistakes are inherent in cosmological rationality: they evidence the pervasive presupposition of a monadic rather than a Trinitarian God. Rahner’s modalism then becomes the sole alternative to a comparably heretical subordinationism. The Personal immanence of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the Father, as emanations from him, the divine substance with which St. Thomas identifies the Father, must be either concrete, with a consequent subordinationism, or nominal, with a consequent modalism. Both options have long since been condemned.
[705] See Christopher Beeley’s discussion of the division between these senior Cappadocians in Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity, 195-201
[706] John McGuckin has expressed himself similarly in a comment upon a passage excerpted from Gregory of Nazianzen's Oratio 38:
Once I had a share in the divine image. I did not keep to it. So he assumed my flesh in order that he might at one and the same time rescue the image and immortalize the flesh. He offered a second communion, even more wonderful than the first.144
This movement of God's compassion, however, must be consistently referred to the content of his economic salvation. It does not reveal theological verities per se. In other words the long list of limitations, and involvements in relativized history, which Arian exegetes had taken as evidence for their denial of the homoousion of Jesus, do not prove that the word of God is not a simple divine being, beyond all time and limit. On the contrary, the biblical evidence proves that he is a divine being who has a divinely expansive philanthropy and so assumes an active economy in time and space for the re-creation of his own handiwork.145 Gregory appliees a vivid allegorical exegesis: in coming in the incarnation for this economy, Christ is like the widow of the parable who "lit the candle of the flesh and swept out the whole household in search of the precious coin (of the lost image).146 All the references to Christ being sent, or being subordinate, or suchlike, must be taken in reference to the human nature the Word of God adopted.147
144 Orat. 38, 13, PG 36, 325.
145 Orat. 38, 14, PG 36, 328
146 Alluding to Lk 15, 8-9,
147 Orat. 38, 15PG 36, 328-w3329,
McGuckin, Gregory of Nazianzus, 339 (emphasis added).
This diophysite reading of Gregory's Christology has been contravened recently by Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzen on the Trinity, at 113, 117-51, 187-233, esp. 195-201. McGuckin’s remark of the economy of salvation that “It does not reveal theological verities per se” of course eliminates all revelation of the Trinity. Nothing in the economy of salvation “can prove that “the Word of God is not a simple divine being, beyond all time and limit. On the contrary, the biblical evidence proves that he is a divine being who has a divinely expansive philanthropy and so assumes an active economy in time and space for the re-creation of his own handiwork.” So much for the Trinitarian faith of the Church that Jesus Christ is Lord.
[707] The ancient canonical requirement of the wife’s consent to the diaconal ordination of her husband (C.C.L. 1031, §2; 1050, §3) has no other explanation. In the same tradition, the widowed deacon cannot remarry (CCL 1087; see also the document in which Paul VI, in accordance with Lumen Gentium §29, restored the permanent diaconate and authorized the ordination to it of married men:
Post ordinem receptum diaconi, grandiore etiam aetate promoti, ex tradita Ecclesiae disciplina ad ineundum matrimonium inhabiles sunt.
"Sacrum Diaconatus Ordinem,” §16 (A.A.S. 59 [1967] 697-704), at 701; emphasis added.
The standing of major orders as an absolute or diriment impediment to marriage was shaken by interdicasterial correspondence emanating from the Vatican’s Secretariat of State in 1997, which granted married deacons several significant because easily verified exceptions to the traditionally diriment impediment of their orders to marriage, and the subsequent issuance by the Congregations for Education and for the Clergy of documents urging that the married deacon’s spirituality be founded upon his marriage rather than upon his ordination to that liturgical proximity to the Altar of the One Sacrifice, the institution of the One Flesh by which the marriage of anyone subsequently admitted to major Orders is transcended. The unqualified character of that impediment has now been restored in practice by the effective elimination of those more than doubtful exceptions: see Prot. N. 1080/05, dated 13 July, 2005, from Francis Cardinal Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, to the Presidents of the Conferences of Bishops, and the Superior Generals, by which, inter alia, he notified the addressees that
In addition the Holy Father, by a letter to this congregation dated 7 July 2005, has directed that as of 1 January 2006, those Deacons who are widowed and who desire to celebrate new weddings with a dispensation from the impedimentum ordinis and therefore to remain in the ministry may submit their cases to this Dicastery, which will retain competency in this matter. However these will be taken into consideration only when the following conditions occur together: great pastoral usefullness of the deacon’s ministry, attestation by the Bishop, and the care of minor children (original emphasis).
This is the idiom of Romanitas; while no statistics are available, it is unlikely that any local or personal ordinary will have failed to understand it. The canonical situation existing prior to this correspondence has been minutely detailed by Edward N. Peters in “Canonical Considerations on Diaconal Continence,” Studia Canonica, vol. 39/1-2, 2005, 147-180.
[708] Cf. J. N. D. Kelly, Doctrines, 133-146.
[709] Grillmeier, op. cit., at 159.
[710] The patristic witness to the Procession of the Spirit “through the Son” is generally held to include Tertullian, Origen, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Hilary of Poitiers, Didymus the Blind, Epiphanius of Salamis, Basil the Great, Marius Victorinus, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine, and Cyril of Alexandria. Their witness is of course inconclusive for, prior to Augustine, there was no clear grasp of the free and consequently dynamically relational unity of the perichōresis of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit within the substantial unity of the Trinity, an insight still commonly resisted by contemporary theologians, as Cardinal Kasper has pointed out. We have seen that Meyendorff would limit the legitimacy of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son to the “economic” Trinity; a theme repeated by Zizioulas: both learned it from Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto. The unacceptability of that reading of “through the Son” to Catholic theologians, i.e., those loyal to the first four Councils, can hardly be doubted, for it leaves unexplained and inexplicable the Personal distinction between the Son’s relation to the Father, i.e., his being eternally begotten, by which he is the Son, and the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father, the ‘eternal outpouring’ by which he is the Holy Spirit, distinct from the Son, and yet is from the Father and, like the Son, is consubstantial with him. The Western account of that difference, as revealed by the Son’s sacrificial fulfillment of his Mission to give the Spirit, mediated to the faithful by the Church’s anamnesis of that One Sacrifice, is refused a priori by the Eastern theologians represented by Meyendorff and Zizioulas. Here it is important to recognize, with Meyendorff (Byzantine Theology, ch. 4), that the Orthodox tradition, like the Catholic, is radically liturgical, and that in the Orthodox communion, the liturgy is a monastic responsibility, resistant to the academic propensity to theological rationalization and cultural accommodation.
It is apparent that neither side of the Filioque controversy has any soteriological investment in the abstract Trinitarian theology which has long sustained their dispute. The Trinitarian faith is historical: so also must be all Trinitarian theology, for its foundation is that Jesus is the Lord who redeemed us by his One Sacrifice, the outpouring of the Spirit upon the Church and through her upon the world. Certainly this is the Greek monastic tradition, whose ground and interest is liturgical rather than speculative and therefore us historical, unconcerned for the abstractions upon which Meyondorff and Zizioulas rely. Any advance in Trinitarian doctrinal development whether by the East or by the West requires a return to the liturgical foundation and function of the doctrinal tradition. The Father’s Mission of the Son to give the Spirit is simply the Trinitarian revelation of the Trinity, the doctrinal Trinity revealed in and by Jesus the Lord. The dissociation of the Son’s revelation of the Trinity, as though inadequate to its mystery, is to prefer cosmological monism to the Truth of Christ. However, his Eucharistic Presence of Truth in the Church is immune to theological veto. The Church teaches doctrine, not theology.
[711] St. Thomas’ willingness to abstract from the revelation of the Trinity, in order to consider the divine substance a monadic Person, reflects his monist identification of intellectual substance with subsistence in that substance, and its corollary, his highly inadequate and finally subordinationist interpretation of the Trinity. His analytical transformation of Augustine’s phenomenological psychological analogy into a faculty psychological analogy (omitting that faculty which was of the first importance to Agustine, the memory), must regard the Son and the Spirit as each proceeding from analogous faculties which are identified with the divine substance, viz., the Word proceeding from the intellect and Love from the will, and therefore as emanations from the substantial mind, the Father from whom they proceed as begotten and as spirated. This is an implicit subordinationism; it also imposes logical necessities upon the intelligible agent, the substantial Father, from whom the Son and Spirit cannot but emanate for, as intelligent substance, God cannot but know and love himself, thus cannot but emanate the Son and the Spirit. Elsewhere it appears he cannot but create. The influence of Neoplatonism upon St. Thomas is here evident: Bonum diffusivum sui states an immanent necessity, not a free begetting of the Son, the free Love of the Father and the Son who is the Spirit, proceeding from the Father through the Son. This freedom is imaged and revealed in the Son’s fulfillment of his Mission in the One Sacrifice, the institution of the One Flesh of the New Covenant, which is neither the second Adam nor the second Eve, but their mutual Love, in that substantial New Creation that is the plenary image of the Triune God and the inexhaustible revelation of its mystery. .
It may be further remarked that much of this monist confusion over the Trinity arises out of the equally widespread misunderstanding of the liturgical and doctrinal Personal Naming of “God,” as the object of faith and of worship, to refer to the divine Substance, the Trinity: they do not. When “God” is named without Personification as Son or as Spirit, the Father is named. He is not the divine Unity; he is the Head, the immanent eternal Source, of that eternally free Unity, the Trinity in which he subsists consubstantially with the Son and the Spirit who proceed eternally from him. It is proper to the Head to be Named by the substance in which he is immanent: this is further discussed at the end of the second volume of this study, Appendix, C.: The Naming of God and Man. In sum, our prayer is Trinitarian in that we pray to the Father in the Son t hrough the Spirit: the Church has no other access to the Trinity than this prayer, which as liturgical, is radically Eucharisic.
The Father’s consubstantiality with the Son and the Spirit is by his Personal subsistence, with them, in the Trinity. As subsistent in the Trinity, the Father, the Archē, the Head, cannot be identified with the Trinity: thus he is not the “Dominus” of the Son or the Spirit, each of whom by his subsistence in the Trinitarian Substance possesses Personally all that the Father possesses, i.e., the fullness of divinity; because he is their Head, their Archē, they cannot but be consubstantial and co-equal with him.
Here it also should be stressed particularly that the Persons do not “share” in the divine Substance, the Trinity: they subsist in it, and thereby possess. Uniquely, the fullness of divinity; the same must be said of the Son’s “sharing in our humanity;” he is the head, the source, of our humanity: to speak of his “sharing” in it, as does the Offertory Prayer of the 1970 edition of the Missal, is worse than nonsense, for each of us, consubstantial with our head, possesses the fullness of humanity. A comparable nonsense―and not incidentally―was written into the “Offertory Prayer” of the first Mass of Our Lady; this prayer invokes Jesus’ “humanity” as the agent of our salvation, Jesus, the human Son of our Lady who, by conceiving him, is Theotokos, the mother of God. These errors were dutifully copied into the 2011 Missal.
The source of this confusion is the fidelity of the authors of these Missals to the failed theology of St. Thomas, who composed his Summa Theologiae under the supposition that the Aristotelian cosmology, whose act-potency analysis he thought to have converted to Christianity by an admixture of Neoplatonism, would clarify the apostolic tradition. That tradition is liturgical and therefore Eucharistic, incapable of the contemplated speculative clarification. The object of the apostolic Catholic faith is Jesus Christ the Lord, the one Savior. His humanity is concretely historical and therefore Personal, that of the one and the same Son, Jesus, who subsists in our humanity as its Head, as the Son of Mary, consubstantial with us, and subsists in the Trinity as the Son of the Father, consubstantial with him.
The Catholic liturgy is the source of the doctrinal tradition of the Church. The Magisterium should be more than alert to the intrusion of theologoumena into the Catholic liturgy. Theologians do not teach the Church, nor does the Church teach theology, although the composers of the Church’s Catechism were all too often confused on that simple point, which John Paul II set out with clarity in Veritatis Splendor.
[712] Veritatis Splendor, by far the most trenchant of the encyclicals of John Paul II, analyzed and condemned this separation of freedom from truth, which had issued in the situationalism and proportionalism plaguing Catholic moral theology during his pontificate. Insofar as that association of personal responsibility for the upholding and defending the freedom of truth is not understood to be sacramental, i.e., understood to be neither neither empirical nor ideal, but intrinsic to fallen humanity as a most radical grace, the moral theology resting upon the postulate of an ungraced “natural” morality will continue to generate similar absurdities.
[713] The present writer has set out this criticism in Volume I, Ch. 1, n. 78, of the present work, and in two subsequent review articles,“The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, V: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age; Hans Urs von Balthasar,” The Thomist 57/2 (April, 1993) 308-316. and in “The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, VI: Theology: The Old Testament; Hans Urs von Balthasar,” ibid., 58/2 (April, 1994).
[714] We cite as examples of this mentality, first Bernard Häring's critical review of Veritatis Splendor, where we read:
Because natural law "is open to eyes of reason," we should reason together gently and patiently as we consider the case "on either side" (Rom 2:12, 16). The hierarchical constitution of the Church cannot contradict or disallow this approach in any matter that concerns the law written in our hearts and calling for a response from our conscience.
National Catholic Reporter 30/3 (Nov. 5, 1993), 15.
Only the sacramental historicity of the “natural law,” “the law written in our hearts," by the creation which factually is in Christ but which Häring supposes to be ungraced qua tale, prevents its reduction to those debatable platitudes which he finds indefinitely open to further consideration “on either side.” Here Häring only echoes the Rahnerian reduction of “nature” to moral insignificance (see his "On The Question of a Formal Existential Ethics," Theological Investigations. II: “Man in the Church”), which has since underlain what the editors of the National Catholic Reporter, inter alia, are pleased to regard as moral theology. Morality is saved from those vapidities by the historicity of its mediation through the liturgical worship of the Church, whose historicity is her worship of her risen Lord. When, as by Rahner and his disciples, that historicity is methodologically excluded, Häring's postulate of the abstraction of moral truth from history is established, although the perusal of a few pages of Häring’s musings reveals that the price is rather high.
The same postulate of a nonhistorical, abstract, ungraced creation, thus of an ungraced human nature, and the consequent moral insignificance of concrete human action, is evident in Richard McCormick's similar review of Veritatis Splendor. Those intrinsically insignificant human acts achieve what he supposess to be moral standing only by their being placed in a still-nonhistorical context, a calculus of relative benefits and disadvantages. This reduction of morality to utility and utility to politics is inevitable once the free sacramental historicity of the Catholic moral consensus is ignored, as by Karl Rahner and his disciples. It is thus that McCormick is unable to accept the radically sacramental morality of Veritatis splendor:
It is impossible in a brief space to give a fair summary of the developments that are described by the term "proportionalism" or an adequate account of the differences that individual theologians bring to their analyses. However, common to all so-called proportionalists is the insistence that causing certain disvalues (nonmoral, premoral evils) in our conduct does not by that very fact make the action morally wrong, as certain traditional formulations supposed.
"Veritatis Splendor and Moral Theology," America 169/13 (Oct. 30, 1993), 8-11:
In McCormick's view, the human acts under consideration are intelligible only as entirely abstract, to be regarded as nonmoral or premoral. Thus viewed, they clearly have no inherent moral significance; the moral agent in view is not then understood to be possessed of an intrinsic significance and dignity which might be profaned from within, in the manner of a whited sepulchre.
From this stance, the actions of men must languish in pre-moral limbo until such time as a calculus of proportional benefit and damage is applied to them, according to canons themselves indefinitely debatable until resolved by raison d’état, lately traveling a political correctness. But at some point in the discussion conducted under McCormick’s postulates, one may say of, e.g., a falsehood that, with more or less probability, depending upon the academic climate of the day, it is or is not more or less culpable, as occupying a point somewhere on one limb or another of the bell-shaped curve of a nonhistorical moral calculus which, as merely actuarial, has only that significance which a coercive, i.e. political, sanction is always happy to provide.
But the moral quality of our existence is free by definition and therefore historical, proper to men and not to abstractions. Moral significance is intrinsic to men by their historicity, their creation in the image of God. That intrinsic dignity cannot rest upon such extrinsic norms as those upon which Häring and McCormick insist. The creation of mankind in Christ their Head, and their consequent consubstantiality with him, bar such subterfuges, which finally only mask an elitist utilitarianism, warranted not by reason but by power.
The dissent of both of these theologians of nonhistorical morality relies upon the abstract Thomist understanding of creation, of nature and of natural reason as radically rationalized and therefore dehistoricized. Häring relies upon that rationalization to deny any jurisdiction of the Magisterium in matters knowable by this supposedly ungraced natural rationality; McCormick relies upon it to ground the moral insignificance of human acts as such, all of which he holds to be pre-moral, which is to say, lacking all moral significance, until an extrinsic assessment of proportionate good and evil effect is imposed upon them by a finally political consensus, one resting upon power traveling as authority.
McCormick and Häring recognize that the Thomist dehistoricization of creation and so of nature denies the intrinsically graced creation of man in Christ, and the consequently intrinsic significance of our historical existence. Under this abstract anthropological rationale, whatever is concretely given in history must cease to be salvific−a high price to pay for school loyalty to a long outworn cosmology. The same view of "nature" as morally neutral underlies David Tracy's notion of fundamental theology: see Blessed Rage for Order (New York, Seabury Press, 1975), reviewed by Avery Dulles; see endnote 165, supra.
[716] And yet again, Augustine’s foundational economic maxim.:
Facit haec quidem Spiritus Sanctus, sed absit ut sine Filio facit.
Contra serm. Arr. 32 (PL 42:704-705) at 705.
This assertion now appears to be acceptable to the Orthodox theologians only insofar as it has no application to the “existential” or eternal and nonhistorical Trinity. However, Augustines’ maxim refers to those things which the Spirit does in his fulfillment of the Mission of the Son, which terminates in that full outpouring of the Spiritus Creator by whom all things are made new. It is more than difficult to read the New Testament account of the economy of salvation without acknowledging that the Son’s obedience to his Mission from the Father, and the Holy Spirit’s obedience to his Mission from the Father through the Son, constitute the revelation of the Trinity. The Father is eternally Father by his eternal begetting of the Son who, proceeding eternally from the Father as from his Head, is the Father’s Glory. It is the Father’s sending of “one and the same Son” whose revelatory significance is controverted. Orthodox theologians such as Zizioulas and Meyendorff refuse to abandon the cosmological rationality which, since its rejection by the Council of Nicaea, has reduced to futility their distortion of theological fides quaerens intelluctus.
Augustine’s at once precise and subtle discussion of the Holy Spirit’s procession in the De trinitate (Bk. 1, c. 12, 19; Bk.2: c. 3, 5; Bk. 4, c. 20, 29; c. 21, 32; Bk. 15: c. 17, 29; c. 26, 45-47; c. 27, 48) provides the foundation for Roman Catholic Trinitarian theology and so for the Catholic theology of the “Filioque.” Augustine is emphatic upon the Father as the immanent “principle,” the single source, of the Trinity. However, in close conformity to doctrine of the Greek fathers of the time, he cannot ignore the Scriptural passages that speak of the Son’s sending of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds eternally from the Father, but is also at once the Spirit and the Gift of the Son, a Giving which would not be have been redemptive were the Holy Spirit’s eternal Procession from the Father not identically his eternal Procession through the Son, Jesus the Lord. The nexus between history and eschaton is Eucharistic, for only by the Offering of his One Sacrifice does Jesus the Lord become the Lord of history, transcending its empirical fragmentation by his risen immanence with in it as its Beginning and its End. When Eucharistic realism is foregone, then there is no longer a basis for the historical faith that Jesus is the Lord, that he is sent by the Father to give the Spirit. The Trinity is then reduced to the Monarchy, with consequences which have been pointed out.
As is the case with the Fathers generally, the passages in the De trinitate cited by Augustine do not refer to the Headship of the Father as set out in I Cor. 11:3. It is reasonable to suppose that a theological re-consideration of the Father’s Headship in that context would clarify the Filioque issue further by clarifying the distinction between the Holy Spirit’s procession from the Father as from the Head, the source of the free unity of the Trinity, and the Holy Spirit’s relation of origin to the Son, not as from another Head, but as revealed in the Son’s Mission from the Father to give the Spirit. We have seen Zizioulas deny the revelatory significance of the economy; thus he is able to refuse any distinction between the “existential” Son and Holy Spirit, for he considers their processions from the Father to be indistinguishable, while Meyendorff, locked like Lonergan in a Thomist mindset, follows Lonergan, Louis Bouyer and many others in denying the doctrinal unity of the first four Councils, and conesquently denying the intelligibility of their ultimate affirmation of the Church’s faith in the Symbol of Chalcedon.
No attempt to develop Trinitarian theology can succeed which relies upon the cosmological abstractions which have confused the Filioque controversy from its inception. The Trinity is the foundational Mysterium fidei; The unsurpassable Image of the Triune God was instituted by the Son’s sacrificial exercise of his Mission by the Father to be the Head of all creation. This image of the substantial Trinity is of course itself substantial: the substantial New Covenant, the New Creation, the created perichōresis of the Bridegroom, the Bride, and their subsistent irrevocable love, their free unity in One Flesh, in which substantial union the second Adam and the second Eve subsist in their substantial One Flesh, therefore as consubstantial with each other and as personally distinct, as Bridegroom from Bride. It is then of the first importance clearly to distinguish between the Person of the Bridegroom, the person of his Bride, and their distinctly subsisting and therefore personal love, their nuptial union. Their substantial One Flesh is therefore intrinsically and freely triune: the Bridegroom, the Bride, and their independently subsisting Love. They constitute the New Covenant, the perfect Image and consequently the full revelation of the Triune God. The terminus of the Mission of Jesus Christ the Son is the full Gift of the Holy Spirit by the Bridegroom to the Bride, by which they constitute the New Creation in which each subsists, consubstantially with us.
Otherwise put, it is their nuptial perichōresis, their intercommunion, that is substantial, not their personally distinct subsistences in it, quite as it is the Trinitarian perichōresis that is substantial, not the Person of the Father, of the Son, or of the Holy Spirit, none of whom, as subsisting in it, each possessing uniquely, Personally, the fullness of divinity, can be identified with the substantial Trinity, the One God. Similarly, no person created in the divine image can be identified with the human substance in which he subsists and by which subsistence possesses the fullness of humanity by reason of his consubstantiality with his Creator, Jesus, the Christ, the Lord.
[717] Benedict XII published his Dogmatic Constitution, Benedictus Deus (1336) to clarify a matter which his immediate predecessor, John XXII, had left in doubt. The clarification asserts that those who die, not only without any sin upon their souls, but also with no residue of sin to be purged, are admitted immediately (mox) to the fullness of eternal life, i.e., to beatitude. This was the point at issue: our beatitude does not wait upon the end of the world, as John XXII had proposed in some of his utterances, i.e., in homilies and when writing as a private theologian.
However, the Constitution further stresses the immediacy of this beatitude in the quite distinct, i.e., non-temporal, sense of an immediate, i.e. unmediated and therefore intuitive vision of the divine essence. The doctrine of the intuitive vision of God is entirely consistent with the headship of Christ, the Mediator, apart from whom we have no access to the Father, but the emphasis on the immediacy of the beatific vision can be misunderstood to be independent of that nonetheless indispensable mediation. The pertinent text is as follows:
. . . .ac post Domini Jesu Christi passionem et mortem viderunt et videt divinam essentiam visione intuitive et etiam faciali, nulla mediante creatura in ratione objecti visi se habente, sed divina essentia immediate se nude, clare et aperte eis ostendente, quodque sic videntes eadem divina essentia perfruuntur―
DS *1000, at 297.
This excerpt may be translated as follows :
Since the passion and death of the Lord Jesus Christ, these souls have seen and see the divine essense with an intuitive vision and even face to face, without the mediation of any creature by way of object of vision; rather the divine essence immediately manifests itself to them, plainly, clearly and openly, and in this vision they enjoy the divine essence. Moreover, by this vision and enjoyment the souls of those who have already died are truly blessed and have eternal life and rest. Also the souls of those who will die in the future will see the same divine essence and will enjoy it before the general judgment. Emphasis added.
Strictly speaking, "an intuitive vision" of the divine essence, even a vision "face to face" can only be Personal. We have no access to the Trinity that is not Trinitarian, given us, mediated to us, by the Father's sending of the Son to give the Holy Spirit, by which Gift we may return, in Christ, to the Father. Our knowledge of Christ our Lord is personal and therefore intuitive, the product of our homoousion with him, the Head, the intus magister, in whom we are created and whom one day, gratia Christi, we shall know even as we are known.
This language is intended to distinguish the intuitive quality of the beatific vision from our discursive understanding of the world around us. However, our knowledge of persons is always intuitive. Even the reality of human persons cannot be addressed discursively, but only named, for we are created in the image of God, which is to say, created in Christ, the Mysterium fidei, the Head with whom we are consubstantial, whom we worship, but whom we do not comprehend, here or hereafter.